How do we become multipliers of our knowledge, our skills to multiply our impact? Look for the pain point. Don't start with AI. Start with somewhere in the process that causes friction. Put AI to work there. Have a small group, test things out, learn from it, grow it. Those little successes turn into bigger successes and it balloons. We're seeing about 5,000 hours per month every four weeks in return, which is huge.
SPEAKER_01Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Missions to Movements. I am your host, Dana Snyder, and I am here in beautiful Seattle at the Global Nonprofit Leaders Summit. I am so thrilled to have sitting across from me Tim Bakta, VP of Global Technology at Children International. Thank you very much for being here.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_01I love it. I want to kick off with something that we were just talking about before we hit record. And that is you have a very interesting background coming into the role that you've been in now for five and a half years. And how has your life changed since you went from, we were talking about you was in the for-profit sector, now working nonprofit? What have you brought with you that you think has really made a powerful impact? And what really has the sector brought to your life and your career?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So start with what I brought with and really the mindset of it's still business. We're we're about connecting the revenue with the mission instead of the revenue with the investors. And so how do we drive more value from that revenue coming in to our mission, to the families,
to the children that we serve? How do we provide more services? How do we provide services to more children, more families out there? We have a big goal that we talked about earlier, going from currently about 220,000 kids we work with over the next three years. We want to get to 275,000 or more. So big goal. And through technology, we're looking at doing that, leveraging it to be more efficient, more effective. From what it's done to me, really, it's every day I have the opportunity to kind of think and look back. And you wake up in the morning, you're like, okay, I'm going to do something that's going to add value. And you go to bed at night and know you've helped somebody, some child somewhere, had the
opportunity many times to go out to the field and see our teams in action and see the families and youth they they work with. And uh my best story I have down in Guatemala last about two years ago, meeting a family, going through our letter collection process, and the kid comes up with a chicken and he's like, Here, this is for you. I'm like, I can't. And it he's just and the mom was just like, Well, we're just so appreciative for what we do for the opportunities that that we have through Chill International.
SPEAKER_01Giving to you like the most meaningful thing too from him, probably. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02It's like he had he wanted to give me one of his pet chickens. Like, thank you very much. What I can't tell.
SPEAKER_01This won't do well on the airplane back home.
SPEAKER_02No, I think that would not make it through customs.
SPEAKER_01No, probably not. Oh, that's amazing. You have said something that stuck with me in an earlier piece, and that was too much of our human capacity is spent on tasks that don't require human empathy. What has this looked like and the transformation that you've led in integrating Copilot? Specifically, I'll just name. And can you talk about maybe a before and after?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, think about processes and tasks you do. We did in the past, but most people do currently. A lot of time you're doing these mundane tasks or repeatable tasks, things that have been doing the same thing over and over again for the past umpteen years. Being able to leverage systems, tools like Copilot, where you can teach it to automate those things, teach it to do those things for you, and be your assistant to get those done. Not you're not letting them run, run rampant. It's helping you get that work done. So now you're able to take those hours that you used to spend there and put them into something more, more powerful. I heard the story before about the letter translation, how it went from something it would take eight hours to translate a letter down to less than a few minutes to translate
a letter.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Which is huge. And so they're able to put that time back into the families and youth that they work with.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02You know, really make more of an impact than what we did before.
SPEAKER_01Yes. And I want to dive into that. So there was a video that they shared this morning during the keynote for the listeners and viewers right now that shared this beautiful story about how you've really created the skills training on the field level. So something that you mentioned was that 80% of those using Copilot are not in the home office. Can you walk us through prioritizing training the field staff and walk us through like that story? What and that came from them specifically this. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So again, this is it's all about impact. It's all about what we do, our mission. Our mission isn't doing the paperwork and stuff we're doing at home office. It's delivering those services to the youth, to the families, to the children we work with. And so you look at our how we're structured too, a lot of our staff as a staff in the field. How do we get them the tools? How do we work with them on the training? And that's where we focused on quickly. You know, yes, it was a home office-led implementation, IT-led, but it was a we see the value in this tool in the hands of the users. And it was getting them the training, getting that feedback loop coming through, using that champions network, which is huge. We've used it in a couple of different rollouts with Microsoft Technologies. And it works great because you have those local champions, those local people that know the local problems, they know the local context, and they're able to share the wins as well as some of the failures and learn from them and grow with them and create this culture of innovation learning, not just in the ANC or the community center, but throughout.
SPEAKER_01So cool. One of the things that the field worker, the gentleman mentioned in the video was that the translation from receiving the letters from sponsors, donors, used to take eight hours, like a day sometimes.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it used to take the old DHL process, I call it, was we'd get a letter from a sponsor, family, into home office, look through it, make sure everything was kosher with it. And if everything was good, we'd stack them up and stack them up and you know take a month or so. Okay, we got enough to send, ship it through. And so that process could be a month, could be two months before we hit that limit. Ship it out, it'd reach them in a week via DHL. They get them in the agency and have to separate them out by community center. Take another week to get them to the community center, get to the community center. Okay, now we gotta figure out what this goes to. So it was this real long process bringing on back. Same process going through. And so it was a very labor-intensive process, a very long process. And really part of what we're trying
to do is bring the sponsors and these children closer together to have that support system, that that person that's you know, being their champion, being then being there for them.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Somebody that they can communicate with, somebody they can build a relationship with. And it's really hard to do that when you're not getting a reply for six months. You probably forgot that you sent it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And so now we're on a fully digital process. It's a matter of days, less than a week between receipt and acknowledgement and letters happening. So I sponsor a child, Christopher, in Mexico. We probably write every month, every other month, and and wow. You know, I send him pictures and he sees the most current things and he sends me back drawings and pictures. So it's it's he understands my family, I I understand his family, and it's there's a bond there.
SPEAKER_01That's beautiful. And something you had said, I mean, an early goal was there was a demand for change. Yeah. I think listeners, viewers, everyone probably has a demand for change right now. What actually made your team leadership take the initiative? Because a lot of times in our sector, a lot of things don't move quickly historically. How did everyone come to the agreement to say, yes, like we are improving this? We are taking the action to actually make change.
SPEAKER_02Top down, we saw that we weren't going to be able to scale. We weren't going to be able to deliver on the mission we wanted to unless we changed the way we utilize technology, unless we utilize technology to empower and enable us. At the time it was a it was a drag. It was a boat anchor. It would take days, weeks, months, years to get changes put in. Wow. And now it's minutes, hours. Had a session earlier, we talked to John, one of our directors of AppDev. I had some examples of where even him, they over a weekend, we have a need for a tracking application for contracts. He's like, I can do that. He's not a coder. He asked copilot what to do, and over a weekend they had something kicked out in in the hands of the users. Our teams had the need for the uh tracking app for participation tracking. Like, we need to get something out there quick. Had GitHub Copilot, create it within a weekend, out within a week, getting feedback, getting that you know, real live touch points back quickly. And now it's utilized by all of our global staff and all of our programs.
SPEAKER_01Fabulous. For something that I've heard a lot is we're just doing the same old thing. We keep doing the same thing and we sometimes expect somehow different results from those things. For the smaller organizations that don't have the massive teams or tech infrastructure, what would be your recommendations for them to still be able to make massive? I think there's a huge potential actually in the small organizations to do this because you don't have a massive bureaucracy around you. But what would be your thoughts for them?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think it it's they're the ones that have the most access, I think, to this and can provide the most impact because you have these tools that can multiply what you're able to put in there and scale it so much. And again, really it's it's diving in, using them.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. It's looking for that use case where you're not spending your time efficiently in applying co-pilot, applying AI to that and and learning from it. And just you'd be amazed at how much little investment you put in has such big results. I just seriously. Dr. about we have 500 users out there. We're seeing about 5,000 hours per month or every four weeks in return, which is huge.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's amazing. And I so
six, maybe it was seven months ago now, I started using Vibe AI. And I've had a four-month my niche is in monthly giving and building out monthly giving programs. And I took everything I've done over the past five, six years with my IP and my book and built out through Replit this framework tool, this like monthly giving companion. And I'm not a coder. I'm definitely not a coder. But as long as you knew what prompts and what outputs you wanted to receive, you're able to train it and work with it. And I did hire an AI and Replit expert to help me and guide me through the process. But still, as primarily a solopreneur, like there's so much potential for how you can scale what you're doing and you're seeing that firsthand, especially in the field teams. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02If you can, if you can talk through the problem and and query and have that conversation, you can figure things out and it'll it'll help you, it'll help you build those out. And then it's about just trying it. Yeah. It you know, so what if you make a mistake? I joke with my the team sometimes like when you were a baby, you didn't come out running, did you? You crawled, you fell, you hurt yourself.
SPEAKER_01We don't give each other enough grace. Yeah. Or ourselves enough grace.
SPEAKER_02Give the grace to learn, give the grace to make mistakes and share those mistakes as well as the success. Yeah. I think that's the biggest thing is if you not share it within your organization, share it with within your community, within the group. And that's what you know, Microsoft does a great job of is giving us nonprofits that that community to share those experiences with.
SPEAKER_01That's huge. I definitely believe and have taught the mastermind concept of finding those. Uh if there's more than two of us in a room, we have a mastermind and can have knowledge sharing and you want to be supportive for each other. That's a great point. When you first started to debut what you were doing, were you learning from anyone else, or were you just building that as you went?
SPEAKER_02I I I am never the smartest person in the room. So I am always learning. I I don't want to ever be the smartest person in the room because then we're in trouble.
SPEAKER_01Agreed.
SPEAKER_02But yeah, it's you know learning from especially the field, because I don't have that experience that they have. I don't see what they see. Learning how they're utilizing these tools, and that helps me too, of how do I work with our partners to provide better tools, better opportunities.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And so that loop back, that feedback is huge. Having that collaboration, having that understanding. Talking with our other nonprofit groups was huge too. Like CRS, I've talked to a lot. It's working together. We all have very similar problems. And that's one thing I love about absolutely love about nonprofits is we're not competitors, we're peers. That's right. And we share these and learn from each other and help out each other. So it's I can't emphasize enough that if you're trying to do it alone, don't do it alone.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Reach out, ask people, find others dealing with similar things that are working on solutions together. Exactly. I just had a whole conversation earlier with ALS, and they were talking about now the research that's shared amongst everyone around the world, ALS, to be able to advance something together. It's just extraordinary what technology and AI together has made possible. And speaking of, so your goal you talked about is to increase direct child interventions by 25% in four years without hopefully going crazy on polluting up a budget.
SPEAKER_02We all know fundraising is hard.
SPEAKER_01So you're like, we're gonna try and keep a lean machine. Yep. Where do you actually see AI in helping to move that number? And what would you deem successful in like a year or in two years' time?
SPEAKER_02AI and technology in general, it's gonna be a key enabler to it. Being able to offload the repetitive things that we do, the manual processes we have, streamlining those to give back that time. We're already seeing it. We talked about the translation pieces. We talked about a session I had earlier about our registration process. That's like 50-something steps. How do we condense that? How do we look at areas to automate that so we can quickly register children and youth as they come in? Yeah. So we have registration sessions in communities where we look to make sure we qualify them to make sure that they're in need, and then try to get a commitment with the families of here's what our programs look like. It involves we want you to be here for a couple hours a week participating in these in these programs, learning here's the path. And being able to get that done quicker, we can register more children, register more families, get them in and work with them quicker. So it's we've called it out from the top, but it really it was organic, even where technology is going to be the the thing that we utilize to get there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, bravo. It's amazing. And you have said we're letting technology, as you've said, do the things computers can do so that we can do the things only humans can do. Yeah. So as we mentioned a little bit before, for a smaller nonprofit that might be on the other side of the world or they're in the States with not many of the resources, but yet so many of them can be free. Yeah. What's like the first step that you think they should take to really start living in this new reality truly that we're in?
SPEAKER_02Identify the problem. Look for the pain point. Don't start with AI. Don't I said this before, don't start with the solution. Start with where is there a part uh somewhere in the process that causes friction, causes us to do more work and less mission focused. Put AI to work there. Have a small group test things out, share their experiences, learn from it, grow it. You'll be amazed at how quickly that builds and those little successes turn into bigger successes and it balloons. That's right. And you learn along the way and you learn for the next step and the next step.
SPEAKER_01And something that you mentioned also in the keynote this morning was finding your champions. So can you explain how did you create that community feeling of champions inside the organization?
SPEAKER_02It definitely wasn't a directive. It wasn't, nope, you're gonna be a champion. That doesn't work. No. We started small. We had groups of individual individuals that kind of asked their staff, their their managers, who's somebody that's playing around in AI already? And we reached out to them. Here's what we're looking at doing. Would you be willing to spend extra time? Because it it took time away from their job to learn about this and to be a proponent of it and to teach. And we started with just a handful, and now we have I want to say almost 50, 50 plus champions out there, at least one to two in each agency. Most agencies have a handful.
SPEAKER_01Wow. So yeah. Do they collaborate together? Do they okay? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So it's a two-way street. And actually, more information flows up than it does down. Oh, I'm they're the ones alerting me that, hey, this new tool
came out here in Komala. Can we get this publicized on the uh on the webpage so that everybody knows about it? That's okay.
SPEAKER_01That's fascinating. Is the goal with that to continue expanding it, or do you keep it tight? Do people switch in and out like or to be determined?
SPEAKER_02It's it's very fluid. What I'm finding is more and more of the staff, they're engaging more and more. They're learning more and more, and they want to learn more and more. Just did a survey about three weeks ago. General, just how's how do you feel? Co-pilot AI is performing. Are you comfortable with it? Results were great. 90 plus percent people liked it, they feel like they are empowered more. But the areas where we're a little bit lower, still are like 70, 80 percent, was around learning. People want to know where they can find more resources, they want to learn more. Is there can we get certified in things? It's it's the passion of the hunger. Yeah. They see it and they see the the benefits and they see what it's driving. And talk about the results. That that to me that's where it is. If people want to learn, especially from a nonprofit that historically, you know, five, six years ago, we weren't changing things very much. We weren't very technology focused. To now, uh it's when I go to the field, I'm asked about these things. People are, you know, they're in keynotes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is great. Microsoft's keynote event talking about technology.
SPEAKER_02I mean, we've we've come a long way, and other nonprofits are the same way. It's yeah, you know, the technology is there and it's easily accessible for all nonprofits. You don't have to be 1,100 people like us. You can be 11 people.
SPEAKER_01Right. So good. Five and a half years in. Let's just say the next, I'm not even gonna say five and a half, the next like three. How do you envision your role and anybody in the nonprofit space that has your role evolving?
SPEAKER_02Grand teacher. I I I think that's really the role of leadership is to teach and to multiply. How do we become multipliers of our knowledge, our skills to multiply our impact overall? It's less and less and less about still set direction, still set strategy, but part of it's teaching people why we're going that direction so that they they have that sense of ownership, sense of empowerment around it. Yeah. And it helps with change management too when they understand and you and know how to use tools and why to use tools.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And I wonder if this is also, we've been a sector with usually horrific retention rates in our own staff and the excitement that they have for learning, and if the organization is providing them with the resources to really feel empowered and supported as a staff member, if that will overall change traditionally for decades and decades what's been happening. I know, right?
SPEAKER_02Knock on wood, we have a very good retention rate at CI.
SPEAKER_01Amazing.
SPEAKER_02And I think part of that is because we do and we have over the past empowered our teams to utilize tools that make their lives better. I got a story uh around that too, is and I use this, and I didn't say it here yet, but just heard it here. I had a staff member reach out to me about a year ago and she's like, Tim, I just want to thank you for giving us co-pilot and let us use it. I had a really tough meeting with my manager on the schedule, and I had uh you know, I was really nervous about it. And my watch even said, you know, you need to take a break if you're stressed out. Well, I decided I heard you talk about ask co-pilot, and so they plugged in the questions they had in a copilot, and co-pilot came up with answers for them and a script and and helped him through it. Wow. And she told me, she's like, within 30 seconds, the watch was off.
SPEAKER_01Calm.
SPEAKER_02My heart rate was down, I felt calm, went into that meeting, and and it was great. It it things flowed well. Uh I had a coach there. I had someone to help me. And that's what I was like, okay, now we're when you do it's not just work, it's the personal aspect of work, and it's having the tools at your disposal at your work to help you do more and really feel good about what you're doing.
SPEAKER_01I think it's so amazing. Well, you should definitely feel very good about what you're doing. So, Ted, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for the work that you do and for continuing to push and raise the bar higher. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode of Missions to Movements. 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 to the show. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button too, so you'll never miss an episode. And until next time, keep turning your mission into a movement.