Drafting policies and procedures with AI

In most memberships, the rules and routines live in the owner's head. You know how to handle a refund request, what to do when a live session link fails and how to deal with a member who keeps posting sales pitches in the forum. Nobody else does. That is fine until you are ill, on holiday or bringing in help, and then every small decision waits for you.

Writing it all down feels like a huge job, which is why it rarely happens. AI makes it much smaller. It can interview you, turn rambling notes into tidy numbered steps and spot gaps you did not notice. It cannot know how your membership actually works, and it cannot tell you whether a policy is legally sound. This guide covers how to use it for the first part and protect yourself on the second.

Know which kind of document you are writing

Procedures are internal instructions: how to do a task, step by step. How to issue a refund in your payment system, how to publish a recording, how to remove a spam account. Mistakes in a procedure cost time.

Policies are commitments: what you promise members and what you expect from them. Refund terms, cancellation rules, community conduct, privacy. Mistakes in a policy can cost money, trust or worse, because members rely on them. AI can help you draft both, but policies need far more care. Anything with legal weight, such as terms of service, privacy policies, refund rights or rules for handling complaints, should be checked with a qualified professional before you publish it.

If you have never written procedures before, the non-AI groundwork is covered in write down how your membership runs.

Let the AI interview you

The hardest part of documenting a task is remembering all the steps you do without thinking. Instead of writing from scratch, ask the assistant to pull the knowledge out of you one question at a time:

I run [name of your membership], a [one-line description]. I want to write a procedure for [task, for example: handling a request to transfer a membership to another person] so that [who will use it, for example: my part-time assistant] can do it without asking me. Interview me one question at a time about how I do this today. Ask about the trigger, each step, the tools I use, decisions I make along the way, what can go wrong and when to escalate to me. When you have enough, write the procedure with these headings: Purpose, When to use it, Steps, Decisions and exceptions, Escalate to the owner when. Use numbered steps and plain language. Do not add steps I did not describe; if something seems missing, list it as a question at the end.

Harriet runs an online birdwatching club that books small field trips. When she ran this prompt for trip cancellations, the assistant asked what happens if a trip is cancelled because of weather rather than low numbers. She had never written that down, and it turned out her answer depended on how late the call was made. That question alone made the exercise worthwhile.

Another shortcut: record yourself doing the task while talking through it, get a transcript, and ask the assistant to turn the transcript into steps. You will need to tidy the result, but most of the detail is captured.

Turn drafts into procedures people can follow

A good procedure is short, starts each step with a verb and names the exact screen, button or file involved. Ask the assistant to rewrite your draft so that someone new could follow it without context, and to flag any step that relies on knowledge only you have. Then fill in those gaps yourself, since the AI has never seen your membership platform or your settings. Keep login details out of the document entirely; point to your password manager instead.

The same approach works for how you brief the AI in general. The more background you give, the better the draft, as briefing AI like a new assistant explains.

Drafting member-facing policies with care

Tomasz runs a coaching program for new managers and wanted a clear rescheduling policy for one-to-one sessions. He wrote his rules in bullet points and asked an assistant to turn them into friendly, plain-language wording, then to list situations the policy did not cover. It raised three: a member who reschedules repeatedly, a session Tomasz himself has to move, and sessions left unused at renewal. He decided each one and added it.

That is the right division of labor. You decide the rules; AI helps with clarity, consistency and gaps. Do not ask an assistant to write a policy from nothing, and do not copy another site's policy for it to adapt. It may produce terms that sound official but do not fit your business or your members' legal rights. Ask it instead to check your policies against each other, for example whether your refund policy and your cancellation page say the same thing. If you use AI in running your membership, telling members how is a separate document, covered in writing an AI use policy for your membership.

Test it on a real person

Before a procedure goes into your files, hand it to someone who has never done the task and watch them follow it. Where they hesitate, the procedure is unclear. For policies, ask the assistant to read the draft as a confused member and list the questions they would still have. Then make the fixes yourself and have a qualified professional review anything with legal weight.

Keep them alive

Documents go stale quietly. Add a “last reviewed” line to each one, and review whenever a task goes wrong, a tool changes or someone asks a question the document should have answered. When a mistake happens, check whether the procedure was followed; if it was, the procedure needs fixing.

First steps

• List the five tasks only you know how to do.
• Run the interview prompt on the one that causes the most delays.
• Fill any gaps, remove any invented steps and add screen names.
• Ask someone else to follow it and fix what confuses them.
• List your member-facing policies and flag which need professional review.