[Music] good afternoon or good afternoon depending on where you're joining us from today and thank you Beth and Allison particularly for joining us we're so happy to have you with us here today um Let me show my screen with some slides whilst we're waiting for everyone to join um so whilst we're waiting for everyone to uh start in the webinar um do please introduce yourself in the chat uh say which organization you're from and where in the world you are from today as uh I am dialing in from very
sunny Oxford in the UK um and I know we have people from many different countries joining us this morning or afternoon so do let us know where you are and um we will probably get cracking very soon um as we have such a lot of things we would like to cover today and um we uh have again two amazing guests who I want to make sure they have lots of time to speak and it's not me so um is 402 in my local time so I think we will um let me just share my screen probably with video um it looks like I mea
n it looks like a few folks are saying the chat's disabled so we should just use the Q a yes okay and good that's something we will check in on as well okay so um we will work on that and um I will do a very quick introduction um so hello everyone I'm Jonathan I'm the managing director of life for learning it's a real pleasure to be here today with our two very um special guests uh I um oversee are learning programs here at lightful and um have been a big fan of our two guests for many many year
s um and really what we're going to talk about today is three things we're gonna I'm gonna set a little bit of context give us an introduction to um what we're going to be talking about today and leave lots of time for us to have a chat with Beth and with Allison and for you to ask your uh questions um to them as well so I would just get cracking with our first hole just to get a sense of how everyone is um kind of well first are you a robot that's very important to ascertain at this point in ti
me as we're doing a session on AI but also get a sense of your use of AI tools and your confidence relative to using those tools which will help us kind of understand what good questions to ask um so as you're answering those um questions um it's important to start with some definitions so the first definition I'm using is from Beth and Allison's book which you'd see in the top left corner of Beth's screen the smart non-profit um so we're going to be talking about smart Tech which here is the un
iverse of technologies that includes artificial intelligence and its subsets and cousins such as machine learning and natural language process that make decisions for people so we've got smart Tech and then we'll also be talking about say generative AI specifically is the use of an AI tool to create content in different forms based on prompt so that can be text images audio video and obviously the first uh most of them kind of important thing we're talking about text generation is chat gbt which
was only launched in November so end that first poll and share the results so um oh six two percent of you are are robots so that's interesting you know um and most of you kind of over 80 have used chat gbt or other AI tools which is interesting and in terms of confidence here mostly twos out of five there very few people feeling extremely confident um and uh quite a lot of 100 a few normal percent so and you know that is um perhaps not um surprising and given that everything is um quite so new
here and um you know one of the data points that people use a lot about this is that chat gbt managed to be a hundred hundred million monthly users there's so many I haven't even said in just two months so this was a massive massive increase um from a standing start way bigger than some of the other like big social networks we all know very well and so this is like a significant technology shift and we should acknowledge this and Beth might might remember this this particular photo from present
ations 10 years ago on digital um and so this was an example of um when the new pope was announced in 2005 and 2013 you'll notice in 2005 no one had like there's one cell phone in 2013 everyone has phones and tablets so this was a kind of cliched image to demonstrate the big shift from like non-mobile to mobile and this is an equivalent shift and so we should acknowledge that this is really big deal um so I tried to predict what this shift means you know might mean in 2033 and for the equivalent
uh of like if there was a new pope now probably won't be like this in 2033 with an army of kind of Androids um taking photos but um this is the sort of uh I don't know do mongering or kind of Scare Tactics people are talking about AI so it's important to have this conversation with two experts who actually know what they're talking about and also it's important to recognize that AI is coming to a software near you so um Microsoft is integrating it into all of their you know Microsoft Word Excel
PowerPoint and Google will be adding it to Google Docs to Google slides and Microsoft is also adding it to Windows so air this sort of whole generative AI thing is not just limited to chat gbt and and using that in isolation it's coming across so many of the products and services we all use a non-profit sector kind of every day to do our jobs so to set some context uh again I do some quick demos and just to give you a sense of some of the things that we have been looking at at light bulbs so th
e first very quickly is to show you a new feature we have released in fact just on Monday um which helps use AI to give some feedback on some content you might create for your social platform so here I'm creating a post for uh lightforce Twitter account um this is the content if I wanted feedback I click this AI feedback button um and what we've done here is built a kind of prompt in the background that takes the content you have written into your prompt and runs that through gbt through a promp
t that we have tried um we have tested in lots of different ways to find the best prompt to give you some useful feedback on your post now it can take a little bit a few seconds because um there's a lot of Demand on the AI services but you can see here we have three suggestions that come back so the first one will give a user compelling call to action and then gives you a kind of an example and so all of these come back with some useful advice you could then use to make your post better and then
we we also give the opportunity to give some feedback um because we want to make sure that you know humans have an ability to tell us like whether these are actually good or not and help us refine our products but no what we're not doing is creating content from the fly from nothing we're trying to give feedback and help Empower people so the second thing I'm going to show you a quick video just um let me pass over to my AI assistant for a minute thanks Jonathan hello Beth Allison and everyone
else on the zoom I am an AI generated video can you tell how do you feel when you hear and see this do you think you would use a video like this in your own cons share your thoughts in the zoom chat don't worry about hurting my feelings if you don't like this I am not real so have no feelings to hurt thanks and goodbye so there's an example of some kind of AI generated content and the last thing is something quickly I only found um today um it is a kind of chat bot that um certainly I'm an AI la
nguage model designed to assist with various tasks such as answering questions generating text and providing information so this is a bot that's apparently been trained on my voice to sound like me now does it sound like me or let you be the judge it's kind of bit more kind of Mid-Atlantic than perhaps I I sound but I think I wanted to give you that sense of you know these are some of the things that you can do that are now possible that were not possible in the past um and so before I kind of j
ump to um go back to ask Alison and Beth as some questions I wanted to get this sort of sense of um you know how do you feel when you see those things and what are your thoughts around kind of AI in general and that will inform I think some of the questions that I will ask to um uh Beth and Alison so that is a very quick very quick uh kind of introduction and some context setting for what I would um for what we're going to talk about um this morning this afternoon depending on where you are so a
gain while I just leave that pod to um run um a little bit on our two palette so it was a real honor to have Alison and Beth here today um you can scan this AI generated QR code to download a cop or to get a link to buy their book which is the Smart non-profit staying human centered in an automated World um I have just read this and it's um really interesting very practical guide to all uh kind of aspects of the AI not just generative um and um you will also note that Alison and Beth wrote this
book it came out last year so it predates chat gbt so they were talking about these things before it became fashionable and cool for everyone to be an AI expert um and so that's why we have them on um or today so let's I will end that poll and then share the results and let's use that as some context for um talking to Beth and Alice and so we to the first question so 69 of people are unsure if it's right um so more that certainly kind of more than not and um 92 concerned about the ethical consid
erations of using it is a very very um uh kind of high there and then in terms of how AI makes you feel like it I will find some of those words um later and share them as well um so with that context in mind um Allison I will kind of come to you first um with a question so what does then is quite Broad and what does this all mean AI for the non-profit sector like first thing can we ignore it do we have to pay attention um we absolutely have to pay attention Jonathan because if nothing else has b
ecome clear this year with chat GPT it is how fast and how powerful um these tools are they are coming into your organization whether you like it or not they're going to be embedded in software products they're going to be part of any external Tech that you're using your staff are going to be using chat GPT whether you've put parameters around it whether you've talked about how to use it well uh it's in the ethos in the same way that social media was 12 years ago but and Jonathan this is the key
point for our conversation today this is not more of the same digital Tech that we've seen over the years what makes Ai and generative AI so different is that it is Bots doing tasks and functions that only people could do until now so that is both an existential crisis for us as human beings showing your Bot talking somewhat like you but more in my accent than yours um and an enormous leadership challenge for organizations to get their arms around this to use it ethically responsibly strategica
lly smartly and well and everybody who is feeling uncomfortable unsure scared is just right to feel all of those things right now Jonathan I would be worried about anybody who wasn't feeling all of those things and yet we still need to head first into this new chapter with AI thank you Allison would you would you agree Beth what's your take on that uh yes 100 um and Allison laid that out so well I think I would add to it um from my perspective of also working on workplace well-being that it's al
so a way that we can re-humanize work um you know we've you know it's been really bad over the last couple of years due to the pandemic um you know high levels of stress high levels of burnout um and and this technology offers us you know even though we're scared of it offers us this great opportunity to re-home humanize work because it can take over some of the grunt work but even become our assistants you know non-profits have always said we don't we can't you know we don't have enough um uh c
apacity to hire the administrative help to uh help us do our work so this kind of allow us a way to step out of this busyness trap um and allow us to really uh do the work that we came into the sector to do which will lead to more impact yes that's great I think the the phrase you use in in your book is the dividend of time right and you say the time that is freed up for people and organizations as smart Tech takes over hours of time consuming wrote tasks so um Allison like what what are some of
those tasks that you feel are going to be you know smart Tech can can automate that we we used to have to do before so just to be really clear the dividend of time which is what we think as the ultimate Roi for using AI will only be available to the organizations that change the way they work change the way they think about work Jonathan because if you just continue to try to do more and more as Beth was just saying right um you're just going to continue to burn out people you're just going to
be really transactional uh with donors so the dividend time is about um creating what we call The Sweet Spot of co-botting Right Where the tech does what it does really well and the peoples do what people do really well which is build relationships build communities problem solve so when AI is doing rote tasks it will do things like automi automatically reconcile your budget so no more panicked week before the board meeting trying to reconcile all of the finances all of that's going to be done i
n real time it's going to smooth out workflow and make it much easier to find information and intelligence within organizations where have we decided this before right what what what is our history of working on these kinds of of issues it's going to do the first cut of communications like Chachi BT is starting to do save people an enormous amount of time it's going to do donor prospecting and a nanosecond um it's going to answer questions wrote questions that people have uh Jonathan we talk we
like to talk about Exquisite pain points that organizations have right those really painful bottlenecks that stop other things from happening and if you're working in say a Social Service Agency I can guarantee one of your Exquisite pain points is getting asked the same question every day by email and by phone what time do you open is my contribution tax deductible what is the lineup of classes coming up chat Bots can do all of that work if they're programmed and tested carefully and well yeah a
nd that that is a big if yeah today Beth uh leading question can can you give an example of when that if has has not been done well and and what the results that uh sure and and there's let me say this that there's many many many many examples and when we were um researching uh for the book we found them where where Bots have gone wild and Bots have gone wrong and uh caused harm and also embarrassment to the company that was uh deploying them but the most recent one in the nonprofit sector was k
ind of uh you know uh Allison Emma's worst to nightmare scenario and here it is just a few months into uh chat GPT release and many of you may be familiar with this because it did get a lot of press um the national eating uh disorders Association Nita um it's the largest organization dedicated to supporting individuals and families who are impacted by eating disorders and its hotline has been around for about 20 years and has dispensed advice always connected to a human and it's helped hundreds
and thousands of people um but of course covid pandemic uh created The Perfect Storm for uh Eating Disorders because people were isolated alone and that includes a increase in in that problem so there are employees who were on the hotline I believe there were about four plus over 200 volunteers could barely keep up with the response and um and their leadership kind of said okay we're gonna uh put a chat bot Tessa it's uh AI driven chatbot we're going to put this on the um front line and it promp
tly handed out pink slips to hotline staff and in addition to this not only did they like not weren't human centered in this and um and kind of thought about the Technologies the cheap replacement for staff don't do that out there if you're listening um they did quite thoroughly test the bot and um and they didn't really understand what it could and couldn't do and um in a controlled environment with a lot of human feedback and supervision and and the chatbot was beginning to to dispense harmful
advice to people with eating disorders so so the Lessons Learned I think we can take some lessons from this first you know replacing people in this way is just really Dreadful it's awful on multiple levels again I'm going to say this over and over again it's not a cheap replacement for staff right I know we're all under budget constraints but robots aren't people yet okay they don't especially in this context um they can't replace counselors they don't have human empathy they can't act on their
own and um and rushing to implement without really considering the worst possible scenario and proper testing uh is going to get you into trouble real fast um so that's why um you know as Allison mentioned before you know in social media we're kind of saying go run in test the waters try it you know foul fast we really need to begin with our values and our ethics first and take a pledge to do no harm yep yeah I think so I will I'm sharing to your your blog that you wrote about now which was thi
s idea of starting with um Do no harm right and so Allison can you can you expand on that and that do you know I'm like how how do you how do you enact that when you're trying to do it from your non-profit so first don't be a dumbass um I'm from New York I have no patience with this Jonathan um the the Do no harm begins with actually um digging in and learning about the technology and Beth and I are very very adamant Jonathan that this is a leadership challenge not a technology challenge the c-s
uite has to get fully engaged in understanding what the technology is what it can do and that it is not an easy head count cutter right which is Beth and I have seen this over and again right we can see Ed's budgetary wheels turning in their heads as they think oh I can get rid of Staff now no you can't right um you so desperately need people doing people things so step one is you need to understand what this technology is what it does and how and where it could go off the rails step two you nee
d to be deeply human centered as you enter into this conversation Jonathan being human-centered means always ensuring that people are in charge that people are treated well internally and externally right so internally would be if you're grabbing tasks away from staff and and reshaping jobs without any engagement with staff it is not going to go well these are human beings externally when um people are used to talking to human beings and now you have them talking to a bot without any introductio
n without any easy way to get to a human right so people always need to be in charge of the Bots and always need to be accessible internally and externally um and then you need to make sure that the Bots do just butt things and right now as Beth mentioned a little while ago that's doing rote tasks the things that go on over and over again that are easily routinized um and that aren't expected to be empathetic or problem solving or relationship building um so those are the starting points for org
anizations um I think I'd add one more to Allison's really great points um I I think you know there's been a lot of mainstream attention um on the adoption of chat GPT and a lot of headlines about replacing all our jobs so this might be creating some anxiety um in your on your staff and I think the senior leadership's you know step right there is to really anticipate pain and mitigate those fears by being transparent about plans to use it and maybe even and taking a pledge um around not replacin
g people uh with Bots and being very you know um uh explicit about that um I think that's really important so right step really carefully Jonathan you're talking about people's lives their livelihoods on the inside people's lives on the outside um this isn't a toy right these are really really powerful tools that only places like NASA had access to um until exactly right now so um we need senior leadership to step smartly and very carefully right now and I'd also add to that that um you know thi
s is this technology as we've been saying is different and another way that it's different it's going to have a greater impact on organizational strategy um overall um fundraising marketing you know I'm starting to say a lot um come out about how shifts in strategy because of AI um but also internally um and knowing that many roles or jobs May are going to shift we have to be prepared to upskill people to take on more cognitively challenging tasks and um and to be able to prepare them to work in
tandem with the AI so it's not about Technical Training you know or right now prompt engineering you know how you ask chat GPT the right questions um but really focusing on what the you know what our human skills are right and encouraging development and um and also learning um and and being more agile a lot of these These are the skills that we're really going to need to really be successful and get more impact in our work as nonprofits yeah I think that those are really really great points an
d you know music's money is around learning I mean that's the whole reason we exist delightful is to help people learn these digital tools and you know generative AI is one of many digital tools so it's important and I think yeah again you talk you've talked about cobarting and the kind of human working with with an AI and again I think one of the quotes from your book that I liked was someone saying that AI won't replace Radiologists but Radiologists who use AI will replace Radiologists who don
't and I think you can kind of say that you know humans who use AI will be more effective than people who don't but the people need to be a kind of key part of that as you say so um and it's interesting how you say it's a leadership challenge um and to go back to one of those questions around ethics you know do you believe um so Alison ask you is this first so do you think non-profits need an AI policy you know if so what does that include and then how do they get their senior leadership brought
into what that policy would be so uh yes uh every organization is going to need ethical and responsible use policies for AI they're going to include um how to be transparent when you're using um a bot so for instance a person externally should know that they're talking to a bot and not a person um there have to be steps in places as Beth was talking about parameters in place about where and how we're using Ai and to ensure that it's always being overseen by a human um bias is a huge issue Jonat
han right that that these tools are being programmed by people who are generally white men and then tested on enormous data sets because that's what AI does is looking through library of congressized data sets to look for patterns those historic data sets are generally biased against people of color and women and that's how you end up grabbing off the shelf an HR tool to do the first pass at resumes that are going to leave out people of color and women right because it was programmed that way an
d untested that way so it's your responsibility as an organization to unders to ask the right questions about what bias is built into these systems how can you mitigate them and how will you continue to test um that that you're not being biased by using them right by bringing in bias into your organization which is just remarkable given how hard we're working on this issue so um we have a chapter in the book unethical uh use um and again we need everybody to understand that it is the time right
now to think deeply not only about the technology Jonathan but about your work itself not just continuing on the hamster wheel of being very task driven but to think about what exactly are we trying to do here in human terms who are we trying to affect how do we want staff to feel what kind of culture do we want to be and to make sure AI is supporting that work not destroying it yeah I think again that's that's an interesting point that it's it's like AI in lots of different areas there's not th
is like oh we'll just plug AI in as like it does not plug and play but you know it is not a word processing software people need to understand this is fundamentally different than anything we've seen in an organizational context before um and so that's why this first step of deep understanding is so important and that's a good point so Beth how how do you how did you get your deep understanding in this area how do people upskill themselves I mean apart from obviously coming to uh informative web
inars like this one today what else can we all be doing well I I talk a lot about um a generative AI literacy or AI literacy and it's putting your hands on it and I don't mean rushing to implement a an organizational project I mean your own kind of learning on it and you know and I'm not also suggesting that we all need to learn how to code but we need to understand what code is and be able to ask uh good questions around the technology because I think one of the greatest risks is going to be co
ming from third-party applications um because it is going to be embedded so we really need to understand it we don't need to learn how to code okay but we need to understand how it works and where bias may come in where there are privacy issues all of all of that stuff so I'm doing a lot of reading around that I'm um I'm taking classes I am also carving out time to test um chat jbt and Dolly Ai and and some of the others like you have to experiment and directly learn the value and the drawbacks
I'm a Hands-On learner learner but I'm not unleashing it on anybody right now and I think we all should be doing that so for example like I started some experiments with chat gbt in my own work um in writing and and also in analytical work and so just little tasks like um okay so can this help me reduce word count for an article or blog post or when I'm filling out an application I found it extremely helpful but I didn't just cut and paste the output in I always considered it a first draft and I
actually compared it to what I had written and maybe I'd pick and choose certain you know I used to it more as a brainstorming tool to help me figure out how to be how to cut it down because um because and that saved me an enormous amount of time it's also been really helpful to summarize open-ended comments from surveys and feedback forms although I did read through the the direct quotes and think about what themes I thought as a human brain were coming up and I compared it against the output
and I found a few things that were incorrect I did you know when we were writing the article for candid you know I went back to our book and we had written a number of descriptions of Bots gone wild as I'd like to call them but I was curious were there any others before this so I asked jpt chat and it gave me five examples and three of them were made up because I fact checked them so you really have to like fact check okay and then the other thing I learned too is that um that it's just not one
question you have to learn how to iterate and and like look at the responses and figure out the next question and you have to be really really um specific so I'll give you an example recently I was doing a training um and it's uh and and and the host is doing a language Justice piece so they it was a bilingual Workshop so I had live interpreters uh interpreting uh my presentation into Spanish simultaneously while I was presenting it and if any of you have worked in multiple languages you know wh
en you speak English it has to be very simple so I fed it my um my talking points and I asked it to condense them and and put them into simple English and it gave me back a lot of idiomatic phrases um that you don't use when you're because they don't translate so you really have to test it and understand um you know where the doubt you know where the where its failures are right and where you can mitigate those um and and on skill base if you're trying to encourage staff to use this let's say in
development for example that uh you know it's how you craft the prop how you iterate on the responses you get um you know the fact checking and whether or not you're being specific or whether it's biased and then I think there's a third thing um at least organizationally we then begin have to learn um to to begin to be uh have peer learning within to share what we're learning about it and not all working on it you know stealthily right um and and start to develop you know our playbooks um once
of course all the ethics have been discussed yeah yeah that's a great point I think to give an illustration of how we've done that alive or we've we've created our little AI Squad we have a team of people from different areas of the business designers engineers um digital coaches Who deliver our program and we've been exploring different areas of you know how AI could help with some of the um program delivery that we do and and also the so the first thing is yeah we came up with some guidelines
of you know we want to make sure we're there's always a human in the loop where we approach AI from a perspective of equity we want to you level the playing field and enable anyone to have these sort of superpowers um and so we've been kind of having these meetings day every day over the last four to five weeks with these people I'm working on ideas going off kind of testing prompts and coming back and we've provided an immense amount of learning we've managed to kind of share internally and you
know some of the things that have have come up that relate to your points around um the diversity and and and equity in particular we've been testing ways to kind of draft personas or um like Steve can you draft personas based on this information or that information trying Lots of varieties of information and it's amazing how many times Church EBT has come up and said here's a Persona called John or is a Persona called Sarah like given lots of different inputs it always comes out almost always
with the same two names um and so that and that's obviously not a very diverse collection of names and I think if you just do one kind of question and then you take the response and you think that's pretty good but if you tried that same question lots of different times with lots of slightly different information sometimes it comes back with the same sort of stuff so um I guess Alison question to you how like what what has been your experience of testing and learning we've heard that Beth has be
en trying out things like what are some did are there some very specific tasks you now use AI to do in your day-to-day role so I'm definitely using AI when I get stuck in writing Jonathan I write a lot right and um oh I'll give you a specific example I've had my own bio for years right and I've never really loved it and so I put it through chat GPT several iterations had to learn what to ask of it and now I think it's kind of awesome and I'll send it out to you afterwards but uh it's it's the ki
nd of writing that can be difficult for a person to do uh themselves so if you're stuck on something it's a great jump starter for that if you're having trouble integrating different kinds of content it can really help uh with that um but I think anybody who has tried it has seen how dreadfully wrong it can be you know when I first just asked it for a bio of me what I got was half me half Beth and if you've noticed but we're not actually the same person so um you know people who are going to try
it once Jonathan and find that it's off or it got something wrong and oh you know that's not worth my time it's it's um we we're going to need to be more resilient uh than that and we're at the very very beginning of integrating AI into our work and private lives this way and the tech isn't going to be perfect even though it's unbelievably powerful and we are all going to be developing at the same time uh together that's great um yeah so okay we've got some questions in from uh they're attendee
s so I have still loads to ask but I'll I'll switch to something so one from Tanya and Beth this is to you so uh Tanya asks what are the first steps for introducing AI at an organization and getting that leadership buy-in uh that's a really great question I think it's one that uh Alice and I have uh thought about uh deeply of you know around every technology that nonprofits have you know been you know presented over the last couple of uh years and decades and I again I think it goes back to what
we've sort of said before I think that um you need to begin talking about it reading become educated um maybe start sharing um you know what I just saw today for example it just posted on LinkedIn I'm seeing more and more non-profit associations issuing ethical and responsible use statements um I just saw one this morning from the grant professionals uh Community um we've seen neth hope issue a statement so maybe your Association is starting to uh generate a statement like that maybe bringing t
hat to the attention of your of your um uh senior leadership and maybe spending some time on the staff meetings that you have happening talking about it or maybe a staff Retreat or maybe doing a deep dive but starting that education um that you know this is something we need to pay attention to and it's something we need uh to learn about so it should be put on the learning agenda first um and maybe you know sharing some of the reasons that we've talked about um you know I love this quote if we
don't get our hands around AI it's going to get our it's going to get its hands around us so and and I don't usually like this kind of narrative but um those that are adopting it ethically and responsibly are going to have an advantage in the future because they're going to be able to adapt strategies they're going to be more agile um so we so we need to you know um begin to explore this right and really understand it and then as we've talked before um it's starting to calm the anxieties um you
know really thinking about what our organization's values are and how that applies to you know ethical and responsible use and then when we get to actually figuring out like what is that Exquisite pain point and where do we want to start you know and experiment with with a lot of guard rails and a lot of thought yeah yeah but Jonathan if I could um uh interject we should talk about fundraising a little bit because it's always on people's minds uh if you don't mind I'll ask myself a question so w
ell that there is also a question related to that like how we attribute to AI is it required enough fundraising letters newsletters so yes by all means aim fundraising over to you so I joined every.org as president late last year uh we're a non-profit we have an amazing uh platform for fundraising we accept any kind of payment method we're deaf we turn it into dollars and donors and send it to organizations um in addition though Jonathan the reason why I joined was to fix what Beth and I have be
en calling the Leaky bucket problem right and this is uh organizations for years the conventional wisdom is spend and lose a lot of money on acquisition right you get your hundred dollars in the bucket uh but don't worry that you lost money because you'll make up up in the out years when those donors continue to give and the reality is by the time you get to year two there are fewer than a quarter of those donors lost uh left to give right and in response and panic organizations do it over again
and this cycle of transactional fundraising is dreadful for organizations they're in a constant state of panic and as Beth mentioned early on the the burnout rate for development people is Sky High but on the other side of the equation Jonathan what we don't talk about enough is how Dreadful it feels to donors right to be treated like ATM machines just yesterday I saw an article saying the number of individual donors has dropped significantly we already knew it had dropped by 20 percent since t
he beginning of this Century 20 fewer people give to a cause than they did 23 years ago right so um a the reason why I came to every.org is let's use AI to Pivot from being transactionally focused to being relationally focused in fundraising and to do that one you got to take the steam out of the pot of the administrative overload uh in these organizations particularly the smaller ones right and that's we've talked so far about various ways that AI can reduce the burden on organizations in workf
low in finance and Communications and so on and then we can use AI to customize messages um to donors at every level right so it's not just the thousand dollar and above donor that's getting um a communication that feels personal to them it's everybody and not just personal in dear Jonathan but personal Jonathan in we know that you like these kinds of stories we know you've clicked on them before we know you've given to these kinds of things um and something I'm really really excited about let's
connect donors geographically in the same area who are passionate about the same issues right now we're talking about Community Building we're talking about Network building all sorts of interesting things the only way this is going to happen Jonathan is if organizations get themselves off the hamster wheel of transactional fundraising that is the huge challenge because all of the conventional wisdom and all of the pressure is to do more and more and more and more faster with fundraising right
and you can do that but you're going to have a new development director every 18 months right and you're going to have fewer and fewer people who want to give again to your organization so we could use this opportunity to create a new chapter in fundraising one that's deeply relational one that feels better to both staff and to donors one that is more human in so many ways that to me is the opportunity to create a 21st century model of fundraising that leaves behind all of that conventional wisd
om all of those bad habits from the previous Century that gets me really excited and everybody here today should take a look at every.org okay um thank you Allison that's very inspiring I think actually one of the questions was like what's the most radical use of AI I think entirely change how the nonprofits take the words which I think is that you know it's like Reinventing fundraising you're you're putting these um processes these tools in place to build like have their as in guardrails but al
so the the the journey for those people to have a great experience and then that for the time that's freed up is for those conversations that's where the dividend of time comes in right but you can't do it Jonathan if everybody is working 60 hours a week to generate those shitty um spammy fundraising emails right that don't work yeah yeah I'm working 60 hours a week doesn't work either you know yeah um and I said on the flip side of what Allison beautifully laid out for a vision for um fundraisi
ng um is you know you you know putting it within within the organization let's not burn people out let's not work these 60 hours 70 hour days oh and exhaust people and uh Force our staff to go cry in the closet because they're so overwhelmed and so exhausted I mean a AI can really help us um it can be a stepping stone to this right but as we've talked about helping with some tasks um taking over some of the grunt work but it's not going to work that the tool itself is not going to do it what's g
oing to do it is really empathetic and human leadership that is going to look at adoption of this tool really to reinvent and re-humanize the non-profit workplace and I think that would be the most radical out of the box application the best way to make use of artificial intelligence is to use human intelligence right it's it's our chance to really rethink what it means to be human I know I know that's I know that's not the answer people want people want the quick fix the Magic Bullet the magic
wand the spell books you know but this is our opportunity this is our Promethean moment if we will right that's not let's not lose it it's so brilliant and Jonathan think about that we have an opportunity writ large to do exactly what Beth is saying right now to be more human right and the challenge is up to people and organizations out there of you know do you have the courage to take a good hard look at everything that you're doing now and throw the crap away right throw it away and get to the
heart the essence of what we're trying to do and I can assure you I have never met a non-profit NGO uh whose work isn't deeply human that's what we're in the business of doing and yet we've spent the last several decades making the work less and less human-centered right yes yeah I'm going to build on that that's so great you know like do we have the carriage right also the courage to change okay if AI if AI can take away all those cut and pasting aerobics from spreadsheets you know and all thi
s grunt work do we have the courage to say okay let's stop doing that let's take get rid of all these Hollow processes that are just wasting our time that are just busy work and really move it to the to the heart and soul of what we do in the nonprofit sector and do best and what people got into the sector to do we didn't get into the sector to cut and paste or destroy you know to laboriously spend to try to write something when we're not good writers to give us a first draft or or to edit somet
hing down to 500 Words it's going to take us hours when chat GPT can do a few minutes but then okay what are we doing those few hours right can we repurpose those into you know improving well-being can we repurpose those into being you know having better relationships with donors um can we repurpose that into really caring and spending that more face time with the people we're serving that's where we need to go beautiful um I couldn't say but I'm loving the riffing this is very inspiring and um
and and I totally agree I think with everything you're saying about this this being this opportunity and you can rethink and it takes some and it takes some courage and it often takes this I hate to use the word paradigm shift but like a big seismic change in how things are for you to then look back and go actually is the way we're doing things the most effective way now we have a new you know new capabilities that allow us to do things and I think the the I guess the interesting point there is
with the new capabilities you need to think what are the problems we're already trying to solve and can those new capabilities help us rather than what can we do with the new capabilities there this needs to be there that's exactly right that's exactly right what are we trying to do here Jonathan and I would extend that to the board right always look at the board first what questions are boards asking so back to fundraising right boards are asking how much money has come in the door right now bo
ards are not asking how are we making donors feel more joyful and connected and what's our donor retention rate right which one do you want to be in this next phase and that is why this is so deeply a leadership challenge it gets really um yeah that's very true so we have I found another question uh in the chat around we've we've talked about Equity a lot and how um of the equity in the context of uh um the AI tools and whether their training data was truly diverse or representative of um underr
epresented kind of types of organizations and people so we have one question like how um I'll ask you Alison so how can AI work in uh the question here underdeveloped countries like Nigeria where I'm living particularly in rural areas and we've had the similar question some of our past um Bridge sessions I think in Venezuela chat gbt was banned in Italy chat gbt was banned for a while but has now been unbanned so and what happens if you can't even access or how do you get access to the technolog
y in those scenarios I have no idea Beth do you know um you know I was thinking about um when I saw that in the chat um it uh there are a couple of organizations that have been working on this net hope has done a lot of work in um uh and different countries in Africa and bringing this technology to to to to uh those that are are missing out or are being you know and doing it equitably they have been um mostly experimenting with responsibly developed chat Bots to provide information for example a
maternal Health um was one one of the models or to providing information to uh Farmers um on planting and so forth and I just saw actually The Gates Foundation is uh just issued a grand challenge um to do just this to bring AI into um countries that um are are you know don't have access to it so it's an equitable artificial intelligence AI use and um and I know the guidelines are kind of tense here but I I it's something that you don't have to necessarily have a whole concept thought out um but
maybe just an idea and maybe not even have the tech there um and maybe it's worth checking into I think actually let's see if it's closed it might have already closed but I would watch what comes out from this because there'll be a lot of learning on different use cases and now you know Jonathan why we're Partners the the other place I would also look at is uh Google uh did an AI challenge for non-profits back right before the pandemic um you'll have to Google it I I wrote it up on my blog uh a
nd the thing that was most interesting was not the ones that the ones that won the challenge were amazing yes but there were they asked for many ideas and they got several thousand and then they did an analysis of different potential use cases across and they related it to the uh development goals and it's a uh it's sort of basically a dictionary potential use cases in rural areas and in International Development so I would go track down that study and and take a look at that for some inspiratio
n foreign thank you Beth that is really really helpful um and I and I think again something we see in our in our program is that you know we work with we've worked with over 2 000 organizations from over 80 countries and the access to technology even fundraising Tech is not not always the same in different countries around the world um and so it's great to I and I think there's more of awareness of that now and I think actually there is a difference with this AI uh kind of rollout that was perha
ps different to social media is that we're more conscious of the harms it can do than when we were when social media became new and exciting we're all like you know jumping on the bambang but it seems this amazing opportunity to talk with supporters and owners um in conscious of time we have a few minutes left maybe if we can I would do a uh one last um hole um and um if I can find the right button here um no good having a board that kind of sounds like me and there's uh sounds a little bit Amer
ican but it's not as efficient as a real person um so uh I guess whilst we're waiting for people to say this like um Allison I'll come to you what what are some of the kind of uh key takeaways you would like people to take from this conversation and and act afterwards so we want people to lean in not lean out when it comes to Ai and we want people to be careful and thoughtful about it um and most of all I think Jonathan we want people to understand that this is not just a technology issue this i
s really a future of your organization issue um what do you want people to do in your organization how can you be more human how can you um help people to be more joyful in their work and more renewed not burned out and how can you engage with um uh outside constituencies um in ways that are meaningful and build strong relationships with them that's the opportunity that's here but only if you're not scared off by the tech only if you are planful and careful with it foreign thank you very much uh
Alison so same question to you Beth like what are some of those again key takeaways um people can go and enact after this um Allison what Allison said was so beautiful I was just listening to it and thinking and it made me happy but and it also made me think about um I was trained as a classical flutist um and the first time I played Beethoven's Third Symphony there is a beautiful flute solo at the beginning and um and when we were in rehearsal I missed Mr beat and came in a beat late and that
the con the conductor stopped right and of course I was sort of embarrassed and he pointed to me and he said carrajo which in Italian is Carriage so I'd say we need to have the courage to change um which means all the things that Allison said about adopting in a very human-centered way um uh understanding what the risks are not be scared of it don't hide you know don't hide don't you know don't be in denial about it and look to a a more joyful future but um but but but authentically knowing you
know that it's not just all going to be roses we know that from the past Wave of digital Tech and social media but um though there are some Thorns there but if we're thoughtful about it we can um we can mitigate the harm caused by those Thorns so carajo beautiful garage so we've learned some Italian as well as well so just sharing the results of that last poll at the end so 90 understand how they use Ai and their work which is great um again 90 think it will really help in their work and plan to
use AI in the work so I guess we've We've Ended up with a kind of quite a positive note of like these are the things we can do and we hopefully have addressed some of the um you know concerns from the second poll around um you know lots of people concerned about those ethics you know people were to recap there's like 70 were unsure if it was right for a non-profit to use Ai and 92 percent were concerned about the ethical consideration so if a big kind of concern and I think this has been consis
tent in kind of a lot of the webinars and sessions we've had um with various different groups of organizations around there's this big kind of concern and there's this big excitement and there's this big and acceptance that it's going to be really helpful and hopefully in a I think in a conversation today we've managed to round that Circle and give everyone on the call some insights I think we have I certainly have learned a lot myself from what are those things you can be doing as an organizati
on and staying human centered looking at this as a human problem looking this as a leadership challenge um thinking and being thoughtful about your use of AI and that that will then help them in so stand all these organizations in good stead and meet this amazing dream Allison that you have have kind of shared with us today so um Alison and Beth thank you so much for your time and wisdom and expertise and today I really look forward to the launch of the Alison Beth bot the half and half and I kn
ow that would be very useful for all of us to have as someone we could ask questions to in our day-to-day uh lives um thank you thank you thank you so much and thank you everyone for joining us today um I hope that was useful for you and look out for more webinars soon from the team at lightfall um on our socials and on our blog so um thank you everyone uh for joining us and we will see you all soon foreign thank you so much
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