Latest / Nonprofit Launch Plan Podcast for Startup, Small, and Growing Nonprofits / 3 Things Nonprofit Leaders Should Use AI For and 3 Things They Shouldn’t (Ep. 58)
Transcript
- Matt Stockman (00:00) AI can probably help you become a better nonprofit leader, but it can also make you worse at some of the most important parts of your job. The difference may actually come down to one simple question. Are you using AI to increase your capacity, or are you using it to replace the things that require you to be human? Today I want to give you three things I think every nonprofit leader should lean into AI for, and three things you should be very careful not to outsource to it. Matt Stockman (00:32) Welcome to the nonprofit launch plan podcast for startups, small, and growing nonprofits. This podcast exists to help you build your nonprofit from the ground up on a strong, sustainable foundation. By providing clear frameworks and practical tools and the real-world guidance that you can actually put into practice. I'm Matt Stockman, I'm nonprofit growth coach. And here at Nonprofit Launch Plan, we believe that every successful nonprofit has to be operating at peak performance across six key areas to be successful. Those areas are leadership, fundraising, marketing, programs and services, operations, and finances. So On every episode of the podcast, we focus on one of these core areas to help you create lasting impact without unnecessary complexity. Now, before we dive into today's episode, if you like the kind of things that you're learning and picking up from listening to the podcast, there's more of that in my free weekly email called the Nonprofit Launch Briefing. Each week I send out one meaningful email about something different than the podcast: strategies, practical tools, fundraising insight. Real world guidance for startups, small, and growing nonprofits. So if you're serious about building a healthy nonprofit with real impact, I'd love to have you on the list. Just shoot me a quick email with a simple sign me up in the subject line. My email is Matt A T T at nonprofitlaunchplan.com. Sign me up in the subject line and Matt at nonprofitlaunchplan.com. That's my email. Okay, let's talk about AI. Obviously a hot topic lately. Over the last couple of years, I've watched a conversation around artificial intelligence swing between two extremes. On one side are people who seem convinced that AI is going to solve every problem that we have, will work fewer hours, accomplish 10 times as much, and apparently never have to write another email ourselves again. And on the other side are people who want nothing to do with it, they see AI as dangerous and personal. Or maybe just another technology trend that somehow they're hoping will eventually go away. And I don't think either response is particularly helpful. AI is a tool, and like any tool, the real question is not whether the tool is good or bad, but the better question is, what is the tool good for? A hammer is really useful if you're trying to drive a nail into a board, but it's considerably less useful if you're trying to cut the board in half. The tool didn't change, but the application of that tool did. And I think nonprofit leaders need to get a whole lot better at understanding the difference between the things we should lean into AI for and the things we should never outsource to it. Because here's what I believe: the best use of AI is actually not replacing you, it's increasing your capacity to do the work only you can do. I'll say that again. The best use of AI is not to replace you or for that matter, anybody on your team either. The best use of AI is to increase your capacity to do the work that only you can do. So I want to give you three things today. I think nonprofit leaders should absolutely be using AI for, And three things I think nonprofit leaders should be very careful not to outsource to AI. And I'll give you a little bit of a warning here. You may disagree with me on some of these, and that's okay. My goal is not actually to create the definitive rule book for artificial intelligence. You know I love frameworks. I just want to give you a framework that helps you think more intentionally about where AI belongs in your organization and where it doesn't. So let's start with three. Practical places I think nonprofit leaders should lean in. first one is this use AI to prepare for meetings. I know you're probably thinking that doesn't sound nearly as exciting as asking AI to build your entire strategic plan in 30 seconds, but stay with me. This is one of the w main ways that I use an AI platform each day. Think about how much of your week is spent in meetings, whether it's board meetings. Or staff meetings or donor meetings or one-on-ones with employees, planning meetings, meetings after meetings after meetings, partnership conversation. You get the idea. And think about how many of those meetings are less productive than they should be because nobody prepared particularly well. Somebody puts together an agenda based on what they remember five minutes before the meeting begins. We talk about the same issues that we talked about last month. Nobody actually remembers exactly what we decided. And then 60 minutes goes by. Everybody leaves with a vague sense that something happened, but nobody is quite sure what's supposed to happen next. This is an area where AI can be incredibly useful. Before a meeting, you can give your AI platform the appropriate non-confidential background and ask it to help you to build a focused agenda. You can ask things what decisions need to be made in this meeting? What questions should I be asking? What objections or concerns should I anticipate? What am I potentially overlooking? If this is a board discussion, for example, what information will board members need in order to be able to make a good decision? If it's a donor meeting, what questions could help me better understand why this person cares about what we do? If it's a coaching conversation with a staff member, what questions could help me listen before I jump into solving the problem? AI can be a bit of a rehearsal room for meetings. And then after the meeting, AI can help you organize what happens. If you have a transcript or good notes, AI can help summarize the key decisions, identify the action items, assign responsibilities, and even create sort of a follow-up document for everyone. I do want to be clear about something. I'm not suggesting that you dump confidential personnel information and private private donor details or sensitive organization information into whatever AI platform you happen to be using. You need to understand the privacy and the data policies. Of the tools your organization uses. But with appropriate information and the right safeguards, AI can help you prepare better, can help you maintain better record of meeting minutes, to-dos that came out of those meetings, and follow-ups that need to happen. Here's the takeaway and the principle: AI should not run your meetings, but it can help you stop wasting so much time before and after the meetings. It can help you make your meetings as streamlined, focused, brief, and productive. As possible. The second thing I think nonprofit leaders should be using AI for is analyzing information that you already have. I think this is one of the most underutilized opportunities for small nonprofits. Your organization is probably sitting on information that could help you make better decisions. The problem is that nobody has the time to go through it, or you're not really sure what to be looking for in any of it anyway. You might have donor surveys. Or program evaluations, event feedback forms, board meeting notes, staff meeting transcripts, fundraising reports, all of this data is all at your fingertips. It's all a part of information that you already have. You have that information everywhere, but information and insight are not the same thing. A spreadsheet full of data is not particularly helpful unless somebody can determine what the data is telling you. And this is where AI can be incredibly useful. Imagine taking the responses from your last donor survey and asking what themes appear most frequently? What language are donors repeatedly using when describing why they support us? What questions or concerns show up a lot? Are there any contradictions in the responses? And what do we make of those? What are three things that maybe we should investigate further or imagine reviewing transcripts from six months of staff meetings and asking what problems keep coming back in conversations? What issues are we discussing all the time but never actually resolving? What kind of decisions have been made that don't appear to have been implemented? It's All useful information. You probably have all that information already, but you're not leveraging it. And AI can help you to do that. Maybe you have feedback from the people who participate in one your programs. Instead of only asking AI to summarize the comments, ask it to compare them. Where do participants seem the most satisfied? Where are they more confused? What expectations are not being met? What questions should we be asking that we're not currently? Asking. This is an important distinction. one of the least interesting uses of AI is asking it to tell you things you could find with a simple search. And one of the most interesting uses of AI is asking it to help you find patterns and information that already belongs to your organization. Your organization has experiences that no other organization has. Your donors, your staff, and the people you serve have all told you things. And AI can help you listen more carefully. The third thing I think nonprofit leaders should lean into AI for is building repeatable systems and processes. There's a phrase I hear all the time when I'm working with nonprofit leaders. ⁓ Sarah is the one who knows how to do that. That sentence should make every nonprofit leader just a little bit nervous. Because what happens when Sarah is sick or Sarah takes another job? What happens when the organization grows and Sarah can no longer personally train every new employee? A lot of small nonprofits operate on what I call tribal knowledge. The process exists, but it's only in someone's head. And more often than not, if you're the executive director of the of the organization, the person that has all that in their head. is very likely you. That happens by accident, but it's still a problem that has gotta get solved. Somebody figured out how to do something and they kept doing it that way. And eventually everybody agreed that that was the way we do it, even though nobody ever actually wrote it down. AI can be very helpful in turning the things you already do into repeatable systems. You can describe your current process for onboarding a volunteer and ask AI to help you turn it into a checklist. You can provide your notes from planning last year's fundraising event and ask it to help build a timeline for this year. You can take the transcript of somebody explaining how they do a recurring task and use AI to create the first draft of a standard operating procedure. You can build onboarding documents and checklists and campaign timelines and meeting rhythms and follow-up processes. now AI should not decide how your organization operates. If you have a bad process and ask AI to document it, congratulations. You now have a beautifully organized bad process. The leader, you still have to evaluate the system, but AI can dramatically reduce the friction involved in documenting and organizing and improving the way that work gets done. When I look at these first three uses together, I see a really simple rhythm. Before the work, AI can help you prepare. After the work, AI can help you analyze and learn. For the next time, AI can help you build a repeatable process. Preparation, analysis, and systems. Those are the three areas where I think nonprofit leaders should be leaning into AI. And before I jump into the other side of the pool, I do want to recommend you check out episode 15 of the podcast. I spoke with a guy named David Waters, who is the CEO of a company called Simple and Engaging that helps nonprofits utilize AI in productive ways, no matter your size, your budget. AI can be overwhelming, and he really talks all of us through how to figure out some places in your organization that it can be beneficial and how to start using it in a way that is productive and valuable on both the short and long term for your organization. That's episode 15 of the podcast. Now, let's talk about the other side. Just because AI can do something doesn't mean you should let it. Here's three things I would encourage you not to outsource to AI. Number one, don't outsource donor, partner, and staff communication. This one might be a little bit controversial because writing emails is probably one of the most common ways people use AI. And I do need to make an important distinction. I'm not saying AI should never help you communicate. I use AI to help me edit. I use it to challenge my writing. I use it to help me find places where I'm maybe not as clear as I should be. I might ask it to shorten something or improve the structure or show me where the main point is getting lost. But there's a difference between using AI to help you communicate more clearly and then just completely outsourcing the relationship. If you're writing to 5,000 people on your email list, AI can certainly help you create and improve that communication. But if you're thanking a major donor, as an example, for a meaningful gift, that really should come from you. It should sound like you. It should be your words. It should be you writing it. If a partner has trusted your organization with a significant opportunity, that communication should sound like you. It should come from you. If a staff member is struggling, they need to hear from you. Really, you, not the AI enhanced version of you. And if somebody has experienced a tragedy or a loss, they need your presence, not just like really well, perfectly optimized language. Some communication is primarily about transferring information. Other communication is about strengthening a relationship. And I think nonprofit leaders need to know the difference. The danger. Is that AI makes communication so easy that we begin to measure communication by efficiency rather than how strong it is. How quickly can I answer these emails? How many thank you notes can I generate? How many personal messages can I create? Efficiency is not always the goal of the relationship. Sometimes the five minutes you spend thinking about a person before writing those three sort of imperfect sentences is more valuable than the flawless paragraph that you generated. In five seconds. Your donors, they don't just fund the mission, and your partners don't just provide resources. Your staff members, they're just not units of productivity. These are relationships that you are growing and that you are stewarding. Use AI to help you communicate clearly, but don't use it to avoid communicating personally. If you spend a lot of time in creative work, whether it's writing or reading other people's writing, it's getting easier and easier. To recognize the influence of AI in all of that work. People shouldn't be reading what is meant to be human communication from you. And in their mind, curious about whether or not you used AI to create this. So donor letters, write them from your heart. don't use AI to handle donor staff and partner communication. The second thing I would encourage you not to outsource to AI is original thinking. One of the dangers I see with AI is that it's incredibly easy to ask for an answer before we have done the work of thinking about the actual question. If you have a fundraising campaign coming up, you ask AI to create the theme. You you need a new program idea to present to a potential major donor. Then you ask AI for 10 ideas. You need to Grow your donor database. And so you ask for strategy or specific ideas. And again, AI can be useful in every one of those situations, but I think we actually need to pay attention to the order. Your first instinct should not always be to ask AI what it thinks. Sometimes you need to be thinking first: what are you seeing? What are you hearing from donors? What are your staff members telling you? What's changing in your community? What do the people you serve? actually need what if you tried what worked what didn't work What do you believe that other organizations in your space might not believe? Original thinking often comes from sitting with a problem long enough to see something that isn't obvious. And AI creates a temptation to eliminate that discomfort and save that time. We don't know the answer, so we just ask for one. But sometimes the actual discomfort of not knowing is where your actual best thinking begins. I love using AI as a thought partner. You give it an idea and ask it to challenge you. Ask it what assumptions you might be making, or ask it to argue the opposite side. Ask it to find the weaknesses in your plan. That's all different from saying, think for me. Use AI to challenge your thinking. Don't use it to replace the need to think. And there's another caution that belongs here. Don't use AI as your primary source of truth. AI can sound incredibly confident and still be 100% wrong. It can give you an answer that's clear and detailed and specific and completely inaccurate. So if you're dealing with legal requirements or finances or human resources, governance, statistics, research, grant requirements, Or any other consequential issue, AI should not be your final authority. Use it to help begin your research. Use it to identify the questions that you need to ask, but verify important information with authoritative sources, human sources, and when necessary, qualified professionals. Something polished is not the same thing as accurate. And confident language doesn't. mean it's evidence. AI can help you explore, but you're still responsible for verifying what is true. Which brings me to the final thing I don't think nonprofit leaders should be outsourcing to AI. That's leadership responsibility. This might be the most important one. AI can create a strategic plan, but AI can't be accountable for whether or not the plan works. AI can recommend that you eliminate a program, but it doesn't have to sit across the table from people who are affected by That decision. AI can help you analyze your staff's performance, but it doesn't know that employee the way you do. It doesn't understand every conversation that happened. It doesn't have to coach them tomorrow morning. AI can suggest ⁓ priorities, it can point out risks, it can even help you see something that you missed. But at the end of the day, Your leadership means taking responsibility for decisions. And that you can't outsource. So I think this is going to become increasingly important as AI becomes more integrated into the tools that we use every day, because it's going to be very easy to hide behind the technology and say, well, the data said this, or the system recommended this, or Chat GPT told me this analysis was the best And that might be true, but As a leader, you still have to lead. You have to use your best judgment. You have to exercise that in every decision. You gotta listen. You've got to ask the right questions. You have to understand the context. You have to be the one to make the actual decisions. And then you have to take responsibility for those decisions. AI can help you prepare for leadership. It can help you analyze information and create systems and things like that. It can help you see all the options, but it can't carry the weight of leadership you. Okay, so let me give you a lightning round recap. Lean into AI to prepare for meetings as a rehearsal room. Let it help you build better agendas, so on and so forth. Also lean into AI to analyze information that you already have. You are sitting on a wealth of information from donors and staff members and more. Use AI to help. Find the patterns, the questions, and the insights that may be hidden in there. Also use AI to build repeatable systems and processes. Turn what lives in somebody's head into a checklist. Now, on the other side, don't outsource donor, partner, and staff communication to AI. You can use AI to help you communicate more clearly, but don't let efficiency replace relationships. Also, don't outsource original thinking. You can use AI to challenge your ideas and expose some assumptions, but do your own thinking. And remember, AI is not your primary source of truth. And then finally, don't outsource your leadership responsibility. AI can give you information and options, but you are the leader, you make the decision, and you have to own the consequences. So maybe the simple way to remember all of this is. Use AI to increase your capacity, but don't use AI to outsource your humanity. don't think the nonprofit leaders who succeed in the next decade will be the ones who reject AI. And I don't think they'll the be the ones who turn everything over to it either. I think the best leaders who will learn to use AI aggressively for the things that technology does so well, so that they have more time and energy and attention for the things. That only a human leader can do. all for this episode. Thank you so much for listening to the Nonprofit Launch Plan podcast for startups, small and growing nonprofits. Remember, if you like what you're learning in the podcast, you can get more of it in your inbox each week. Sign up for my free weekly email, the Nonprofit Launch Briefing. Every week I send you one meaningful email with something you need to be considering, thinking about, or working on as a nonprofit leader. And it's something different from the podcast, never the same thing each week. It's designed to help you lead smarter, grow stronger, and avoid some common mistakes early on. So if you're serious about building your nonprofit, I'd love to have you on the list. All you do is shoot me an email with sign me up in the subject line. My email is matt at nonprofitlaunchplan.com. That's it for this episode of the Nonprofit Launch Plan podcast for startup small and growing nonprofits. If this podcast was helpful, would you consider sharing it with another nonprofit leader who's maybe just getting started and needs the clarity? Until next time, thank you so much for watching and listening. Keep building wisely and keep making a difference.