Embracing AI to Revolutionize Nonprofit Fundraising with Nathan Ruby

Ever find yourself intrigued by the potential of artificial intelligence to transform the way we connect with donors and enhance our fundraising efforts? 

In this episode, Nathan discusses three ways that AI can help improve fundraising efforts:

1. Automate Everyday Tasks: AI is all about simplifying tasks, not complicating them. For instance, using the voice assistant on your phone (like Siri) to set reminders or send messages to donors can save you valuable time. This is a simple yet effective use of AI that doesn't cost anything extra.
   
   
2. Rough Draft Writing: AI can be used to create rough drafts of appeal letters, emails, and other correspondences. However, it's essential to remember that AI outputs should only be used as a starting point. Tone and voice differ greatly among individuals, so you need to review and adjust the drafts to ensure they align with your unique style.
   
   
3. Creating Presentations: AI can be a great help when creating presentations, especially for small teams. With AI, you can produce a basic layout and content for your presentation, saving you time and frustration. However, AI lacks the ability to introduce a personal touch or create a connection with your audience, so you will need to incorporate these elements yourself.
   
   

Remember, while AI can be a powerful tool, it's essential to use it wisely and factor in its limitations.

Transcript

Nathan Ruby: 0:20

AI cannot, at least for now, insert the single most important component, and that's you. It cannot tell your story using your voice and bring your passion. Only you can do that. Welcome to the practice of nonprofit leadership. I am Nathan Ruby. So is AI artificial intelligence? Is it going to help you be a better fundraiser and, as an executive director, drive more revenue to your organization? Well, let's find out.

Nathan Ruby: 0:54

So today we're talking about three key ways that I use AI to help me fundraise better. So, number one automate everyday tasks. Now, one thing about AI is you don't have to pick something complex or complicated. In fact, the whole concept of AI is to make things simpler, not harder. So let's not overcomplic, not overcomplicate things, at least right off the bat. So one thing that I'm doing that is very simple and I'm working on it and I'm getting better and better is using the voice function of my phone. Now you may be saying, okay, nathan, that's like super, super easy. Is that even worthy talking about? Well, yeah, I think it is, and one of the ways that I'm using it is to communicate with donors, and how I do that is when I've got some donor visits next week and I will be verifying or confirming that they're still good for those appointments. And there's nothing worse than getting off an airplane I mean turning your phone back on, because you know you're not supposed to have your phone on while you're flying and so you land, you get off the plane, you get into your next gate and your phone dings and it's the donor saying oh, I'm sorry, I messed up my schedule, I can't meet today. It's like oh man. So we try to avoid that, and so I avoid that by doing a very rigorous follow up process confirming that we're still good, and so I can use my voice activation on my phone phone, and so, basically, I just wake my phone up. I'm not going to do that because if I say that word, I'll have four different devices that'll be waking up. So I just say the word that wakes up my device and I say text donor, and that pops up and I just say, hey, looking forward to seeing you next week. I'll be rolling into town on Tuesday morning. Let me know if your schedule changes. I wait a second until it finishes and I hit send and it's gone. So 20 seconds, I have done the follow-up and I am back to whatever I was working on before, and so it's just a simple way to check off my to-do list. I got that done and now I'm able to go right back to whatever I was doing, and so I think, when it comes to AI and how it can help you fundraise better, don't pick great big, complicated projects. Just start out with something really simple, really easy. Master that, and then you could go on to other things that are maybe a little bit more complicated. So, all right, what's number two?

Nathan Ruby: 3:47

Another way that I'm using this is in creating rough drafts. Now I am using AI to write appeal letters, some emails, some board correspondence, and I will say, I'll reemphasize two words rough draft and some. So the rough draft. You know a lot of times when AI will write a rough draft for you, it's actually pretty close and it is the what is written. What AI writes is really dependent on the prompt that you give it, and so, if you've never used AI before, you go into the system, whichever one you're using, and you type in to it, or you could, you could do it verbally. I type it in because that's my preference, and also example would be right.

Nathan Ruby: 4:43

My organization that I lead is in Haiti, and so I will say write 500 words on the current political situation in Haiti All right, predefined, and it will write me. It'll go out automatically, grab newspaper articles and different things that have been written, whatever it can find on the Internet, and it will come back and it will write that into 500 words. If I want it to be 750 words, I just tell it write 750 words on the current political situation in Haiti, so it will tell you. It will give you back what you ask it to do. And so there's three things that you have to really check and be very careful of when you're doing rough drafts with AI. One is accuracy. You know it is going when you write the prompt. It is going out into the internet and grabbing information that it finds and then putting that into the 500 or 700 words. Well, the problem is it's going out to the internet to get that information, and so you know, we, we know how um, what's a nice word? Uh, convoluted, uh what is out on the internet. So you just have to double check, don't blindly just get it. It goes on the piece of paper and you send it. You've got to double check that content first. So that's one is double checking content.

Nathan Ruby: 6:11

Another one is tone and I think, well, I don't think I know, tone is really important, because we all are different. We all have a different voice when it comes to writing. We have different personalities, we come from different parts of the world, we all are in different nonprofit sectors, a social service organization. Your email to the board would be very different in a social service organization than if you were writing to a board of directors of the largest hospital network in your state. It's just different. It's a different tone, different words, different language and AI. I think it's getting better, but sometimes it will struggle to take that tone into account. I'm very direct and my board, if I wrote an email to my board that had floweryy, can't even pronounce that flower really, um, uh, flamboyant, let's say flamboyant language in it. Um, which ai might uh generate, uh, it would. They would say I didn't write this, uh, so anyway. So you just you got to be careful with tone, uh, so accuracy, tone.

Nathan Ruby: 7:34

And then third, um, if you are writing rough, you're going to use it to write for a fundraising, so draft of a fundraising direct mail piece, let's say, and I actually suggest that you do, but you have to be careful that you are using the right prompt because you're not writing your master's thesis. Your seventh grade English teacher is not going to grade this paper. And make sure that. Oh, you got checked because you should have used a semicolon instead of a colon and your sentence structure, your noun participle, whatever. I can't even remember conjugating verbs, not right, I mean, ok, it's got to be. Yes, you have to be grammatically correct. You know you don't want it to be horribly grammatically incorrect, but in in fundraising, uh, writing, you can use contractions. You could do things in in that is actually that you need to use in writing. A appeal letter that will increase your response rate and the total amount of money that you raise is and how you write the letter. And so the paper that you would turn in to your, to your physics professor or your English professor, is not the paper that you would write or the letter that you would write for direct mail piece. So you just got to make sure that you don't get over academic in this letter that you're writing if you're relying solely on AI, so accuracy, tone and then making sure that it's the right style for a fundraising letter. So those are three things you got to watch out with if you're using it for a rough draft, all right.

Nathan Ruby: 9:25

Third is presentations. And you know, if you're in a small shop or it's just a handful of people, well, maybe it's just you, or it's just you and a couple of volunteers or a couple of part timers. Creating presentations can be a real drag. It's time consuming, it's frustrating. Most of us are not PowerPoint experts, or what is a presentation, or I don't even know what Apple's. I don't use it. I use PowerPoint, but you know any of these other presentation software that you can use. You've got to figure out how to use it, and it's frustrating, it's time consuming, and so AI can save you a ton of time on your presentations. And so next week I'm going to be working with the board doing a board presentation, some board training. Jennifer, I know you're listening today, looking really looking forward to spending time with your team next week and getting them going in the right direction, for you know how to be a high performing board. You know, maybe we can kick up some fundraising support for you with that too. So looking forward to that.

Nathan Ruby: 10:37

But I have done over the last 30 years 25, 26 years, whatever it is hundreds, hundreds of board trainings, and I have a template that I start with, because there are some things that every board should have. Every organization, every board needs these three, four or five things. So it starts off with those general three, four or five things that every board needs to do, every board needs to have, but then from there it kind of is really dependent on the organization, because every organization is different, every executive director is different, every board makeup is different, you're in different sectors, you're in different towns, it's all different. And so each then, each then presentation, or each training, a good chunk of their training has to be, has to be individualized for the client. And so I'm working on that.

Nathan Ruby: 11:30

And I'm working on that, and I was ready to take a break and I thought you know what I wonder, I wonder what AI would be doing, I wonder how it would do this. So I went out and I found a couple of different AI sources that do presentations, because that's not all. Artificial intelligence companies are the same thing. They're not all the same, they specialize in different things. So I found a couple of sources that specialize in presentation, and so I wrote the prompt um and got it as close as I could for what I was, uh, for the organization I'm going to be working with and, holy smokes, I was shocked. It was pretty close to the presentation that I already had. It was, it was I. I was really surprised. And not only did they have the same topics, but they actually had it in the same order that I had it, because when you're, when you're doing training, and especially with board training, you you have to have it in a certain order, otherwise it doesn't make sense, it doesn't flow right, and so the AI actually had it in the right order. Uh, I was, I was really surprised.

Nathan Ruby: 12:40

Um, however, that said, there were a couple of things that stood out, um, that I noticed. Uh, and so one was I would. I would say it was probably 80% accurate. It had 80% of the right stuff in the right order, but the problem is that the 20% that it missed was really critical stuff, stuff. I would have done a significant disservice to my client if I had just relied on that as a presentation tool.

Nathan Ruby: 13:25

So, if you're using it, if you're using AI for creating a presentation for you, you've got to really make sure, kind of like we talked about with the rough draft, you've got to make sure that it's complete and, of course, you also got to make sure that it's accurate, so got to double check that it's accurate in the presentation. And then, second of all, you know AI. They can't bring in the personal connection that you have with your audience. And so let's say, for example, you're going to do an annual gala. Usually at the gala there's a 10 minute, 5 minute, 10 minute where the executive director stands in front and thanks everybody for coming, and sometimes there's a video that plays. Sometimes they have a PowerPoint that plays behind you on the big screen. There's a video that plays. Sometimes they have a PowerPoint that plays behind you on the big screen.

Nathan Ruby: 14:26

And if you're using AI for that, it's not going to bring in your personality, it's not going to bring in your stories, it's not going to bring in your humanity, and that's what the audience is looking for. And it doesn't make any difference. It could be your donors or your volunteers, your staff, your board members, even at home, even with your spouse, your kids Everybody is looking for a personal connection between you and them. That is critically important. And so, with AI, if you're using AI, you have to insert your humanity into that presentation and only you can do that.

Nathan Ruby: 15:02

So what's the verdict? Should you be investing time, energy and, yeah, ai, there's a cost there. It's not free. I mean some of it's free. But if you want to get into the good stuff, if you want to get into the really good, deep things to help you, there's some cost to it. It's not free. But should you be doing that? Should you be investing in that, in AI, as a tool to help you fundraise better?

Nathan Ruby: 15:30

My answer is absolutely. It will help you do ordinary tasks faster, it'll help you write faster, it'll help you create presentations faster and a whole lot of other things. It's going to help you do faster, better and, let's face it, when you're the executive director, speed is a good thing. Speed is a good thing and you know, I'm gonna even go as far to say, if you haven't embraced ai yet, you're probably a bit behind and falling more behind all the time. But let's not forget one extremely important thing ai cannot, but at least now insert the single most important component, and that's you.

Nathan Ruby: 16:21

It cannot tell your story using your voice and bring your passion. Only you can do that. Well, thanks for listening today. If you are benefiting from what's being shared on this podcast, could you do us a favor and just write a short review on the platform that you're listening to us on. That would help us immensely and we would much appreciate it. Just let us know how the podcast is benefiting you. If you would like to get in touch with us, our contact information can be found in the show notes. That's all for today. Until next time.