Macro shocks are not happening quite yet, but there are micro impacts. Do not change anything about your nonprofit. Don't do the pivot just for a funder. And this is again where AI can be very helpful if I find the right people who want to come along. Be courageous in that. All those nonprofits that are like, wait, should I chase these dollars because this is what's happening now? Don't do that. Like, remember why you exist and the donors will come.
SPEAKER_01Hi everyone, welcome back to Missions to Movements. I am your host, Dana Snyder, and I am coming to you from this beautiful studio at the Microsoft Global Nonprofit Leader Summit. And I am thrilled to have across from me Naria, our MC of the week of this event with 1,400 nonprofit leaders from 40 countries. Yes. Which is phenomenal. The conversation, the energy has just been so lovely to be with each other in connection learning. So as the MC, you've brought the energy. Thank you. You've got the fun and the joy. And we're gonna talk about skilling because that's very important in this age of AI and technology that's happening. So will you share a little bit with us about your role and what Elevate and Skilling is actually doing right now in the intersection with the nonprofit sector?
SPEAKER_02Yes, absolutely. And thank you so much for being here. And yeah, it's been really fun. I'm seeing. You know, I'm like, get the coffee, you know, get there on time, sit down. Bossy, you know, I'm I'm the I excel. I excel at that. I'm really
excited about, you know, kind of the direction that we're going with Microsoft Elevate. We're a newer organization within Microsoft. Of course, the company's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And we mean every. And I think Elevate is a big part of the every. So we're thinking about widening the circle of opportunity, who's potentially left behind. And one of the beliefs we have are that three systems that really play a big role are education, the workforce system, and of course, nonprofit organizations there, the safety net. So, what my team does is make sure that those systems, teachers, nonprofit leaders, job coaches in the workforce system that they have the AI skills needed so that they can leverage AI to really help students, beneficiary, workforce individuals.
SPEAKER_01So that's that's so valuable.
And I think there's been a shift. This was brought up today during the keynote on the difference of Cammy at LinkedIn of certification versus skills. Yes. What can you like elaborate on that a little bit? What have we historically always thought about doing and then where are we moving to?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yes. Well, and I think it continues to iterate and evolve, of course. One of the main things that we really, whenever there's a new kind of technology that comes on, especially if it's a general purpose technology, not just kind of a task-oriented technology. So think the internet, think personal computing. There is a level of new skills development that needs to go with that because it is just completely new on the scene. Yeah, uncharted territory. Exactly. And usually those kind of opportunities come to those that already have that ability. So, how can we really think about not only making sure all those skills are available, but then there's some way to signal to the rest of the world that yes, I have that skill. And that's why I think that certification,
it does not have to be like a degree or pedigree, but like those stackable things that you can say, oh, I learned this. You put it on your LinkedIn profile, then that attracts other kind of opportunities. And building out that pathway, especially when we have these new technologies, is super, super important. And that's what we're trying to do together with LinkedIn too.
SPEAKER_01I love Juan talked about how he teaches and gave a great example this morning of he works with, I think it was 10-year-olds who said with vibe coding. They were able to build something phenomenal with Braille in like an hour. Yeah. I think it was remarkable. And so having somebody who can come in with those skillings, which is part of your work. So your background, I just want to talk about for a moment, is incredible.
SPEAKER_02It doesn't make any sense.
SPEAKER_01But that's like the greatest part about careers, I think, is that they're a little bit roller coasters sometimes, but then they somehow all make sense into like where you end up. But it's been workforce transformation, capacity building, inclusive economic opportunity. What for you like in this moment now is the thread for you personally that like brings it all together?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I thought about that because I was like looking back, I'm like, what have I done with myself? But I do think it's actually very aligned to Microsoft's mission. And I did this exercise before I joined Microsoft, but I was like, how can I help people, you know, reach their full potential? I think that's always been what I've been really trying to achieve. You know, my family were immigrants, we're actually undocumented immigrants, and we were able to stay in this country because my father received the Reagan amnesty because he had his high-demand science degree. And so it's truly for me like, how can I make sure everybody has access to education, access to opportunity, access to that whole adage like opportunity or talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not. Then I moved into running a scholarship program,
another nonprofit organization, providing STEM scholarships to low and middle income students in STEM. And then it was from there actually because my board chair was Brad Smith.
SPEAKER_01Oh my God. That's how I ended up here at Microsoft. Relationships are everything. Yes.
SPEAKER_02And I actually, that's the other thread I wanted to say is like whenever I talk to young people now, I always say it's two things. Like you never know who's gonna be in that room, who will be that sponsor for you. Different than a mentor, right? You have a mentor too, but somebody is gonna can be a champion for you. So remember that, and then always do really great work.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02And those are the two things that I think are really critical. And you know, and how amazing that those doors have been opened for me to be here sitting across from and that's and I try to always think about all those other doors that I can open as well.
SPEAKER_01You literally never know. So on my flight here to Seattle, I happened to open up a friend of mine, Chirian, wrote a book recently on the neuroscience of giving.
SPEAKER_02Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_01And it's phenomenal. And so I had it in front of me. And the woman sitting next to me just happens to say, Oh, what a fascinating topic for a book. And I was like, Oh, are you in the nonprofit space? And she happens to be on a foundation for women's scholarships in the Washington State area. And so we it created this whole dynamic conversation. So just to go show you literally do not know who could be next to you exactly to open up doors and and pathways, which leads into my next question. You've been in the work in your prior career.
SPEAKER_02Yep.
SPEAKER_01If we want, and you recently wrote about this, if we want more people to really thrive in this what we want to be inclusive AI economy, you mentioned we need practical pathways that meet learners where they are. So for the fundraiser that might be listening right now, or the ED that's listening right now, what do pathways look like that they could start to take?
SPEAKER_02I love that. And if I could just talk about your first point with the book, I first of all I have to read that book. I'm super excited about it. That's fascinating. And I wanted to just make a call, because I was also a fundraiser and I missed, I missed one part of the story where I actually ran the legal aid campaign, fundraising campaign for two years in Washington State. And then, of course, as an executive director, you are the chief fundraising fundraiser, right? And I want to say, like, I always say this to anybody who's on a board or people are afraid to ask for money. It's all about that neuroscience of giving because I'm like, who are you? People are like, I'm not comfortable to ask. It's like, hey, you know what? People want to feel great. Yes. And what better way to feel great than if they can invest in something that they really believe in? Some people don't have time to be able to do that direct work, or you know, maybe they want to like lead a nonprofit, but they can't because they have other obligations. So I always say, don't ever take an opportunity for somebody to feel great about themselves. Just ask. The worst you could do is ask, and they say no. That's right. And that's okay. So anyway, I just wanted to address that point. And then on that practical, practical pathways, I've been thinking a lot about AI because I'm like, oh, when you see that hockey stick adoption curve,
you know, people, it was like a hundred million users in 18 months or 16 months or something like that, where it's taken like electricity decades to get there, and phones, decades.
SPEAKER_01That was a wild parallel that they put in place of talking about historically and how much transformation that had.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. But I've also been wondering if that was kind of not the best approach in this way, because everybody got it. My 75-year-old dad was using it right right from the beginning. My kids used it a lot as well. And I was like, um, are you supposed to be using that? This was in early days, right? And I think what happened was that people just kind of were playing around and it became just this like entertainment tool, like, write me a poem, do this. And it and people's use of it outpaced the
way that organizations and firms operate. You need to like think about really what's the use of the tool for the specific role. You need to re-engineer workflows in order to really bring the potential of the of AI to the forefront. So, what we are really trying to do is think about what are the specific roles, a teacher, a fundraiser, a volunteer management manager, a board member. And then what are the things that that person does in their daily lives? And then start with that problem and then think about the way that AI can kind of and you need then to build the pathways so that they're really relevant. I think that's the way that we're gonna have true adoption and diffusion.
SPEAKER_01I love how you're talking about this because it's also just to make it really common for the listener of what they go through, is they're trying to hyper-personalize pathways for their donors to give. You're trying to hyper-personalize the pathways for the nonprofit professionals to be able to use the tools. So it's in total alignment and how their learning needs to feel customized for you to use it so that you do adopt it. So you can see that the opportunities are there relative to the work that you do. Workforce transformation is something that's been a popular topic over the week. And for some that might sound very exciting. For others, they might be like, whoa, what are you talking about? Thinking like my role might disappear or change or evolve. I'm not even gonna ask, does that come up a lot for you? Because I'm sure it does. But how do you envision or how have you even seen AI evolving the workforce of it?
SPEAKER_02Mm-hmm. That's a great question. And I don't think, well, first of all, I think that right now, our friends at LinkedIn have this great stat, which I use all the time, which is I think by 2030, 75% of the skills kind of in like, even though we have the same role and title, are skills that we are really changing. When you look at software developers, for example, because of you can do vibe coding, right? So they may not be doing that hard coding anymore, but they're more like front-end engineers and thinking about how teams work together and and different, really different skills that are coming to play. And so I think we're still in the middle of that change. And if anybody's out there going, this is exactly how these kind of jobs will change, I mean, they're lying. Like I think that's we don't know. We don't know really how they're not telling the truth, right? And there's a lot of hype. There is a lot of hype where people are like, you know, oh
my gosh, this job is gonna go away. And and I think that there are other reasons why people want to create that hype cycle. But for us, when you look at the data, it's like macro shocks are not happening quite yet, but there are micro impacts. Like, for example, translators. That's 70% of the translator kind of gig economy roles have gone away. And that is a canary in the coal mine kind of thing that we should be watching because they may not have as many of the social protections. And so, what are we gonna do? Like, how let's make sure that we're aware of what these changes are happening and see how we can kind of test how they evolve. And then as a large language model producer, Microsoft, like we really do believe we have a responsibility because every single government, every single government leader asks that question, right? To us like, what's gonna happen to my people and their jobs? We don't know the answers, and we are thinking very deeply about how we can, you know, continue to assess what's going on, make sure, you know, we are identify who may potentially be left behind. Like it's we're already kind of seeing signs about maybe women and jobs that women have.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that was talked about during the keynote. Exactly. But it sounds like A, being on the forefront of doing the research, being open and ready to come over solutions, having the conversations. I think my favorite part about being here is having the conversations with the nonprofit orgs and how it's just opened their eyes to be far more curious about how it can help them remain closer in their work in the human connection that they do. Yes. And that's so powerful. So I think we might see it's interesting because I feel like we've been living in this very digital era where we're heads down, especially at airports. We can tell we're heads down all the time. Will AI, and I think it is, giving us the opportunity to not have to work on all those tasks more. Can we actually look up more? Right? Like, are we gonna see? We always, and in history to like go back, like the bell bottoms were in the 70s and then they came back, like style things change. But they always change a little bit. So don't you? Are we gonna like are we gonna come back to human connection more because we'll have more time to do it? Yeah. I think that's gonna be our we have to set that, right? Yes. And I think a lot of our listeners, a lot of the fundraisers, they're probably not IT specific in their role, but they're curious about AI. If you were back in your shoes like a decade ago, but you were living with the tech opportunities now, how would you have maybe approached using it? And what would you recommend to them?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's a great so first of all, great point. And I really do hope we go back, and I do hope AI is a way for us to open more time for ourselves. I think Gina Jorgensen said it today, right? Like, what will you do with that extra time? We should, what are we gonna spend it on?
If I like one of the main things as a fundraiser, like if you think about to me, like what made I think I was pretty good at it, you know, and why was I a good fundraiser for not because number one, like when I was interviewing for my last nonprofit role, they wanted like, they were like, Can you make a seven-figure gift? And I was like, sure. I can ask anybody for anything, that's fine. Yeah, but what is it that we're providing? Like, what how are we helping the world? It was a scholarship program, right? And they were just putting money into students' like accounts. They had no idea why the students, the students were just like, okay, what is this? And so what we ended up developing was developing an amazing program around that student. And we, you know, were like the real issue here is that Washington state is losing talent. And this was like during, you know, especially, you know, STEM talent. So, how can we make sure that companies across this state understand that if they invest in Washington students, they're gonna have that future engineer, they're gonna have that future nurse. And so we changed that narrative. And then for the students, we developed an amazing program. It wasn't just like you got a check, it was like you got a mentor, you had a peer leader, you had connections into a network for an in internship, you had sponsors. Well-rounded. Yes, and we had 96% of the students were employed within six months of graduating. Wow. So
then now we have that story to tell. And donors were like, I want to be a part of that winning cause. So, what would I have to do? So I say all that to say, and none of that was about AI. But if I think about every step in that process for me to have to develop the program to think about like, how do we sell that? Well, what kind of donors would be AI can help in every single one of those things. So I think I would not have done anything differently. I think I would have been able to do it faster and with more precision. And we got nos, but no's are also really good because it helps you like fine-tune and everything. Cherish the nose, cherish the nose, right? Exactly. I asked once for money for a scosh, but they're like, no, we only support dogs. I was like, that's great. I love my dog. And then turns out a few months later he came to our event and gave, you know, support. Right? You never I think I think long and short of it is is like I wouldn't have done anything differently. Yeah. I would have done it faster. And I think maybe we would have hit our goals even even faster. We would have been able to tell that story back to our donors even better.
SPEAKER_01That was that was one of the stories when I was leading the panel discussion yesterday with Team Rubicon that Larissa talked about was when the Texas flood hit, they had implemented Copilot just months before. And they were able to have clear, consistent communication put out within hours. She's like, that would have taken tremendously more time. We had media bullet points, we had press releases, we had social, we had email, like it all was able to come together so quickly. And they said it was transformative because she said, as a $40 million organization, that campaign raised $2 million.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_01And that was unparalleled for them. So I think it just speaks to the efficiency. And I think I asked her on stage, she's like, oh, we haven't actually really thought about it. It's like, what did the team feel in that moment? Because that must have been just such a powerful internal thing to like rally behind that we were able to create this generosity so quickly. So it's just a testament to exactly what you're referencing.
SPEAKER_02Very cool.
SPEAKER_01To wrap us. Yes. So Melinda French Gates joined us this morning.
SPEAKER_02Yes, she was great.
SPEAKER_01She was phenomenal. She made me cry.
SPEAKER_02I know, me too. I was like, good, backstage, like it was so powerful.
SPEAKER_01It was very unexpected. I was like, why am I crying right now? She said we need to take big swings. Yes. And I loved that. And I think she's profoundly done that. How do you think we can encourage? And the other thing she said was to encourage each other to support each other. In the reference, in the frame of we need to take big swings, how can we encourage each other to do that? And to have the courage to do that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that was great. I love that. And it's opening day today at the Mariners, our local baseball team. Hopefully we'll make it back to the world series. I will make it to the World Series. Yeah. No, I I I loved what she said. And I think a lot of people, like I was reflecting on it, just felt like this sense from the audience of like, oh my gosh, I didn't even know how much I needed that.
SPEAKER_01There was an energy in the room.
SPEAKER_02Man, it's been rough, you know, past couple years for the for the nonprofit sector. And I one of the things is like, when did it become like not a cool thing to like support your community and give back? And anyway, she like really brought that to the fore for me. So on the big swings, like one of the things that I think you get asked a lot, especially if you're kind of in the corporate social responsibility and like corporate giving space, is like, you know, what can I do? How can I change? And I'm like, do not change anything about your nonprofit. You know, you are there because you are serving a critical need. Don't do the pivot just for a funder. Because if your idea is amazing and if you are helping people, people will come. Yeah. If you can tell the story in the right way, if you can, and this is again where AI can be very helpful is like find the right people who want to come along. There will be people who come along. So stay true to what you're doing, be courageous in that, like lean in. I think I think another reason why we were all like, oh, is like she spoke a lot about funding women and girls. And I feel like for a while there, we've been like hiding that and trying to make everything like gender neutral. She said 10 years.
SPEAKER_01It took her 10 years to have the courage to make the internal changes. And if she felt that way, like exactly.
SPEAKER_02Think about that. Right, but you have to stay, we have to stay the course. We have to name like different communities that are struggling and like do directed support for those communities. So I would say to all those nonprofits that are like, wait, should I chase these dollars because this is what's happening now? Don't do that. Like, remember why you exist and the donors will come. And then you can use AI to do that.
SPEAKER_01I love it. It's a beautiful way to wrap. We're gonna have courage.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_01We're gonna take big swings and find the pathways to get there. Wonderful. Naria, thank you so much for being here and putting on this fabulous event.
SPEAKER_02Oh my gosh, thank you so much for being here. We got to meet up like informally. We should go to each other.
SPEAKER_01Fun story. So this will just tell you about relationships. So I saw Naria yesterday during one of the receptions, and I walked up, they're like, I'm so excited to interview you for this podcast. And she goes, Oh, a podcast.
SPEAKER_02Now you're outing me. Now you're outing me. And then I'm like, okay, well, well, and then I would love to do a podcast, Lisa. That's awesome. I love it. And then and then I was like, Oh yeah, what's what's your jam? And it's like monthly giving. And then we just went down a rabbit hole. And then we're standing there, and wouldn't you know it, like 20 people came and knew you or knew me. Yeah. It was like we It was perfect. It's it was a beautiful harmonious. Very hard.
SPEAKER_01Harmonious. It was so lovely having you here. So thank you again.
SPEAKER_02Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode of Missions to Movement. If you enjoyed our conversation and found it helpful, I would love for you to take a moment to leave a review wherever you're listening. Your feedback helps us reach more change makers like you and continue bringing impactful stories and strategies
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