Missions to Movements
This isn't just another nonprofit podcast - it's your weekly invitation to think bigger, take bold risks, and create lasting change in an ever-evolving social impact landscape. Meet Dana Snyder, your guide through the evolving landscape of nonprofit innovation. She's on a mission to help change-makers like you push the boundaries of what's possible in nonprofit marketing and fundraising. Each week, Missions to Movements serves as your personal mastermind session, delivering actionable insights and bold strategies that challenge traditional nonprofit thinking. Dive into revolutionary approaches to digital fundraising, discover how to build magnetic monthly giving programs that create lasting donor relationships, and learn to amplify your voice as a thought leader in the social good space. Whether you're reimagining your organization's impact or forging game-changing partnerships, you'll find the ideas, insights, and inspiration to take your mission further than you've ever imagined. Ready to turn your mission into a movement?
Missions to Movements
Storytelling, Strategy, and the Smart Use of AI in Nonprofits with Amy Neumann
Did you know that brainstorming with AI can increase your number of creative ideas by up to 60%? In this episode, I’m joined by social impact entrepreneur and AI thought leader Amy Neumann to talk about how AI can make nonprofit work more efficient, creative, and impactful.
Amy shares SO MANY tactical examples of how nonprofits can integrate AI responsibly, whether it’s for content creation, donor communications, research, or internal efficiencies. Using tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to spark strategic planning and storytelling, and leveraging meta AI glasses for event documentation, Amy paints a clear picture of what’s possible today (and how to protect donor data in the process).
You’ll also hear how I use AI in my own business (hint: it’s not just for podcast intros!) and why building an internal AI strategy is mission critical for long-term success.
Whether you’re curious, cautious, or already experimenting, this episode will help you use AI with more intention and confidence.
Resources & Links
Learn more about Amy on her website, Empower Your Nonprofit and check out her book.
Check out Mallory Erickson’s AI tool, Practivated, to practice donor conversations.
This show is brought to you by iDonate. Your donation page is leaking donors, and iDonate's new pop-up donation form is here to fix that. See it in action. Launch the interactive demo here and experience how a well-timed form captures donors in the moment they care most.
Let's Connect!
- Send a DM on Instagram or LinkedIn and let us know what you think of the show!
- My book, The Monthly Giving Mastermind, is here! Grab a copy here and learn my framework to build, grow, and sustain subscriptions for good.
- Want to book Dana as a speaker for your event? Click here!
Today's guest is the kind of person who makes you feel excited, and not overwhelmed, about the future of AI for nonprofits. I am joined by the one and the only Amy Newman social impact entrepreneur, keynote speaker, author of Empower your Nonprofit Simple Ways to Co-Create with AI for Profound Impact, and the founder of Resourceful Nonprofit. She's also an interdisciplinary PhD researcher exploring how AI is shaping human connection and creativity. Oh, and, during the conversation, she just casually rocked her meta AI glasses during our chat, which I was very excited to ask her all about. She brings decades of experience at the intersection of tech and nonprofit leadership.
Speaker 1:All about what we want to do is use AI to do more good, ethically, creatively and intentionally. So today, in this episode, we dig into just that what AI looks like in the nonprofit space, talking about donor engagement, how to really make your internal systems more efficient, building strategies for your team, how it can really spark human creativity and collaboration. So lots of examples. If you're already experimenting or just want to do it with more thought and heart, this episode is packed with smart and grounded advice. Let's welcome Amy to the show.
Speaker 2:I have found because I do a lot of keynote speaking in workshops and training courses and teaching about this, so I always pull people in the audience who's using AI maybe more than once a week, and it's the vast majority of people these days. But there are always a couple of holdouts throughout and what normally works well is to help people have their own mini epiphany and breakthrough by giving them, asking them, a couple of pain points that they might have in their day-to-day roles, and then, if you are familiar with AI for nonprofits or other applications, you can say, oh, let's real quick, try this one little thing over here. And as soon as they see one thing that makes their life easier, that's where they get hooked.
Speaker 1:Okay, Amy, you are really a longtime advocate for using tech for good, which I love. You are also a fellow author Congratulations. That is a very big feat. What really got you started and inspired your focus on responsible AI for nonprofits, and how did that really shape the need and the desire for writing your book? Empower your Nonprofit.
Speaker 2:Sure, that's a great question and I think I kind of lucked out and got in the tech space in the mid-90s straight out of the gates and half the time I lived in Los Angeles and half the time in Ohio. But it's been really interesting to watch the progression of technology, obviously since that time when, at the time, I had to convince people that email would catch on right and it did it turns out that it did.
Speaker 2:And so every time new technology comes out, there's breakthroughs in what it can do, problems it can solve from a social impact perspective that it couldn't solve before. But on the other side of that double-edged sword is that humans have a history that's a little biased, so all that data and information is captured everywhere online that is used for training. So there's some different things that you want to consider, and as I watched this path start running faster and faster maybe around 2017, I got really interested in a lot more work with diversity, equity, inclusion and thinking about bias, because I didn't want a couple billion people to get coded out of the future. So that's my aim is to try to keep it equitable and keep people included, and so it's just a fast moving, absolutely fascinating area. Artificial intelligence there's so much good happening that you want to make sure that there's a lot of conversations, but you want to push it in the right direction as much as possible to change the world.
Speaker 1:Yes, love that. Looking back on what you just stated about, you were pushing people to try email, email marketing. Back then, what is that like breakthrough thing now that you're like urging people to do or to try and maybe getting some resistance against?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have found because I do a lot of keynote speaking and workshops and training courses and teaching about this. So I always pull people in the audience who's using AI maybe more than once a week, and it's vast majority of people these days. But there are always a couple of holdouts throughout, and what normally works well is to help people have their own mini epiphany and breakthrough by giving them, asking them, a couple of pain points that they might have in their day-to-day roles. And then, if you are familiar with AI for nonprofits or other applications, you can say, oh, let's real quick, try this one little thing over here. And as soon as they see one thing that makes their life easier whatever that is that applies, that's where they get hooked.
Speaker 2:So I think that is a general statement. It's not a particular tool, I guess, but just how easy it is is a novelty that people haven't experienced if they haven't actually used it. And as soon as they see it, they think, oh, that's, that's all it is. That's amazing, it could do that I. They used to take me this long and then now I can do something more fun, right? So that's the beauty of it.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, and I am a big proponent and helped kind of moderate fundraising AI for the past two years with Nathan Chappelle and Mallory Erickson, who you probably know really well, and there's so many teachings around it and conversations happening in our space and really making sure that we are because we have that that responsible, ethical, for good hats on all the time is how can we be leaders in what's happening with AI when it does come down to the day-to-day operations? Where have you seen maybe in those conversations or with clients responsibly integrated AI really bring the most value to organizations? And I mean it can run the gamut whether that's the programming side of things data, internal efficiencies, fundraising Are there a couple examples that you could share with listeners?
Speaker 2:Sure, I think one that helps people in almost any role and helps the organization is probably content creation, because now there's so many image and video creation tools and help with writing, and I think for people who maybe aren't in the marketing role or communications but want to maybe do an even better job with storytelling, there's a lot of guidance that you can get from any of your favorite bots Microsoft Copilot, gemini, from Google ChatTPT there's so many good ones to choose from. But I think it's a good brainstorming partner or also a good checker of the tone afterwards and all things that you're still putting the human thought and ideas and stories into it. I don't think you can just set it and forget it anytime soon and have it sound like it is from a real person. You can kind of tell the difference if it's just unedited, but I think right now is a great opportunity to start trying content creation or brainstorming.
Speaker 2:I was just reading some research, just in general, that if you use it as sort of an idea generator in a brainstorming session, your in real life colleagues are virtual. The number of creative ideas was something like 60% higher. It was a recent study, I'm forgetting the name of it, but it's. I think it's because it's a good brainstorming partner, because it's like having a bunch of additional partners. Whatever you ask it or whatever you want it roles to play, you can get a lot of insights, yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, I totally agree. I mean, one example is so I host the monthly giving summit. It happened in February this year. It's annual and at the end we have a survey and we ask people to say, like, what was your favorite thing, what are the things that you'd like us to work on? And then in the registration we also ask questions about, like, what are your biggest challenges when it comes to monthly giving? And I put the answers into ChatGPT and I was like, based on these answers, what is a product, a service, like something I could create that would help as a solution to these challenges, and that would be like scalable, like affordable, like fit the match of this group of people. And so it's been like a bunch of ideas, to your point. Obviously, some of them I'm like no, no, like that wouldn't work. But I was like Ooh, okay, that could actually work. So that was one way.
Speaker 1:Another is literally this podcast. So, pre every podcast guest, as you know, this gets a questions doc and I take either what's been provided to me from the form that you put in your bio, put that into chat, gpt, a little bit about the topic, and then I ask it to draft for me what are about five to six questions that I could ask this person and then tweak them, obviously, and then those are the questions I use. And then on the back end, oh my gosh, there's so many facets that we use for it but one, literally. So the intro, listener, that you heard at the beginning of this episode was based on us recording this conversation that I'm going to take, took, and I'm talking so many tenses. This conversation plugged in the questions to chat GPT and was like write me an intro and like synopsis introducing this conversation, and it creates the intro and obviously I judge it because I want it to be in my own voice.
Speaker 1:But those are some quick fire examples of just the amount of time that that saves me. And before we jumped on this, I told you I was like I have five podcast interviews today, so they're pretty like back to back and so in between I'm able to very quickly create those intros, record those intros, get. So in between I'm able to very quickly create those intros, record those intros, get those sent to my team. But that's just like one example Do you have? I know content creation is one Do you have any that's really made a difference on the programming aspect of nonprofit work and efficiencies yes, One that I think could be really useful for a lot of things is Google's.
Speaker 2:I think they just call it Gemini Advance, now the pro version, but it has a deep research tool, and so I think, if you're trying to figure out, it's like doing a literature review in academia or just asking for a bunch of well-cited sources with summaries, and it'll even give you a research plan.
Speaker 2:So if you're looking for whatever your program is or whatever you're trying to do, yes, you give it sort of you say you know a prompt. You say, hey, we're trying to work on this program or trying to get funding for this or whatever you're trying to research. You give it an outline, you say I would like you to report back these types of things and these types of stories and these types of examples. I would like you to cite well-researched white papers, like from UNICEF and the United Nations and the AI Institute or whatever it is. And it'll come back and say, okay, here's what type of research we're going to do. Have I missed anything?
Speaker 2:Say, oh, yeah actually I would also like you to deliver this or to add this I'll make sure you check this author or this podcast or whatever it is, and within maybe 10 or 15 minutes it will go out and find I mean, I do a lot of in-depth AI research for my PhD, so I don't know that it works as well for every single use case, but I almost use it like a customized TED Talk debriefing tool for any topic where I need to just do something different, right? So then you say you do all that. It comes back with 30 or 40 website articles. Not all of them go correctly to the page it says, but it's getting much better with that and now you have a summary. You have all these articles you can look at in more details, but it gives you the summary and you just almost become like this is the type of thing that would have taken a graduate assistant.
Speaker 2:10, 15, 20 hours to do in the past, and so it's almost like having your own personal graduate research assistant. So you could see how that could be helpful in any number of areas, and I think perplexity has similar tools, and now ChatGPT, I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was going to say perplexity, yeah.
Speaker 2:A couple of my friends who speak about AI and other tech states. It gets good when it gets boring, and I think it's getting baked into so many things now that it's almost like everyone's using it without realizing it. And once they get that breakthrough application whatever it is that they like now they're off and running and thinking like probably our experience when we first started using it for different things is you think, oh well, if we could do that, could it do this. You think, oh well, if I could do that, could I do this? You come to realize I can do almost anything that you ask it. But there's new tools coming out and nuances like the deep research I think is a really great way to brush up on a potential donor or a potential grant partner or whatever you need to do before you're meeting with someone. And yeah, you're getting all these podcasts done.
Speaker 1:And before AI you couldn't have talked to so many people, right, you would have been doing all the backend stuff yourself Less fun part Correct, correct, or a lot more time on all the preparation for sure, yeah, and my friend so we spoke about Mallory Erickson on the board of her new product called Practivated, and it's just that there's like an internal, like it's all AI backed Tivi yeah, great name, right, and Tivi is like your little AI assistant that you can talk to, and the whole point about Practivated is it allows you to be able to practice a conversation you're going to have with an upcoming donor or board member or corporate sponsor.
Speaker 1:You can plug in all those details and it basically takes on the role of that person based upon a bunch of triggers you've put into place, so it's getting very, very, very good. So, leaning into that, though and very important in our space is, data privacy and donor trust are critical. So, when we're thinking about implementing safely implementing AI tools and really protecting very sensitive information and I know you've talked about this in depth what are best practices for that? How much information are the tools saving or using of what we put in? How does that like? When you're thinking about guidelines for nonprofits, any practices that you'd recommend?
Speaker 2:I think the main one to think about is the one that you would think about launching Anything that's different. Is you want to have a strategy first or just be mindful or thoughtful about what approach you're going to take or not take? I think I've seen a lot of changes in companies embracing openly using AI where it because if they don't, everyone's just still using it on their phone or their iPad or their own computer and different things like that Cause it's all the shadow use of it. I think people have figured out that it's so helpful for so many things. Why not have everybody use it and embrace it and share the success stories, because that's a really good way to build confidence and get people using it. There's just so many possibilities right now. My mind is always spinning with when you say that the practicing talking to a donor it's great for practicing all sorts of things interviews or hiring practice it's great to practice lots of different things but I hadn't heard specifically of the practicing for talking to fundraisers.
Speaker 1:That's a great idea yeah, look it up, practivatedcom. It's really cool.
Speaker 2:I think you'd be really going to add that to my my vault of tools on thrive and aiai I love that.
Speaker 1:Yes, that would be awesome. On the sensitive information side, is there anything that, when you're talking to clients or that they're asking you questions about just about anything coming across as privacy tools? Is there anything that you hear coming up a lot, and how do you mediate that discussion?
Speaker 2:I think, as people realize that it's a great idea to embrace AI openly for the reasons of security and safety and a little bit better up-to-date knowledge and knowledge updates and things is you do have to be mindful of a lot of things in data and security and the reason that you want a strategy is you want to not be scared or nervous about it, but you do want to consider things like. You want to make sure everybody is aware not to put any personally identifiable donor information or otherwise into anything with AI unless you know for sure that it's closed off for you, like if you had a paid licenses to some extent usually do that and it's different with every organization. So you want to check and verify that nothing would be used for training. But you just want to think it through and you want to make sure that people know how to ask questions that aren't going to prompt an accurate but biased response based on including or excluding right or wrong information or leaving things out.
Speaker 2:A lot of times, if you don't specifically ask for examples of maybe non-dominant people in a field, you're probably going to get whatever is stereotypical, for example, and if you're not used to thinking about it, you might not notice and as soon as you have some good training and you realize not to put any private information up, and you have sort of a policy. So if people aren't sure, is this okay to use it for? Is this not? It's just talking it through, just like anytime you're doing something that could be pretty fundamental change to your organization in hopefully a positive way, you want to think through where are we now, assess the situation, see what people want and keep people involved too. I think it's important for not just for data security, but just for in general. It's a big difference sometimes between what you think somebody would like or use and what they actually do, and the best way to find out is ask. Usually.
Speaker 1:I love this. Okay, so what I'm hearing is come up with a strategy of how your organization will use AI Could be the tools, the platforms, what for what services they might have. Love that. And then also to train your AI tools on your organization so that it's actually giving you back the information, materials, content, ideas, brand voice, examples and everything that actually fits yeah, what it is that your organization embodies and represents.
Speaker 2:Yes, and I think also you want to think about stuff like what's our policy as far as low risk or high risk uses of AI. Right now Is there a time that humans are always 100% of whatever's happening there. Are there times that we could say that anything like this is fine to use it, but we need you to at least edit it and proofread it and add your tone in or just some guidelines. It doesn't need to proofread it and add your tone in, or just some guidelines. It doesn't need to be. It can't be set in stone too much how fast everything is changing. But you just want to say, hey, we're embracing this, but here's a few things to think about. Here's some suggested uses. Probably don't want to use it for this yet until we know more or have different tools or whatever it is, and then it just gives people more comfort and confidence and that increases their finding out all these great ways to use it too.
Speaker 1:Awesome you mentioned something this is alongside your book that it can strengthen human creativity and collaboration. Has there been an example when you've been out speaking or clients you've worked with where AI has really been used to deepen partnerships and elevate story in that responsible manner?
Speaker 2:Yes, something as simple as just being able to transcribe meetings where people agree to have it transcribed and summarized, and have tasks created automatically and you can draft an email and send it out to everybody and schedule follow-ups and all sorts of stuff. Some of the best use cases aren't maybe the most creative and imaginative, like some of the ones that you hear about. I'm wearing my AI glasses right now, my meta AI glasses.
Speaker 1:You are.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and so see, I can take a picture just by holding the button down and I can ask it to translate things. It's pretty slow now, but I can read anything in a different language and tell me what it says. It can translate languages. Now you're getting into the zesty fun things, right, and I use it a lot to capture moments when I'm out and about. I'm doing AI research and I want to start asking people what they think about it live and just I can record video on here and different things like that.
Speaker 2:So now you're getting into some interesting, maybe, ways to communicate with some of your clients that you work with if you had something like this and you wanna make sure people know about it and are comfortable and all that. But I think there's a lot of cool, zesty fun things, but at the same time, there's some really basic time-saving things. That frees up time to do any zesty fun things that you want, not just using AI, right? So if you'd save 10 hours a week, then you can meet with more donors and have lunch with them and sit down and get to know them as a person and do the human things that AI is not capable of doing right now I just want to use the sweet spot of where humans get at. What does AI get at? How do we partner up so we're getting even better results in shorter time, better job at fundraising, storytelling, keeping track of things I mean useful in so many things and it's getting so baked in.
Speaker 1:So many things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's going to not even be a word that people talk about in that use AI pretty soon. It's just going to be go do this task or have your AI agent go perform all these things and complete the task for you on your behalf, right? So?
Speaker 1:That's right. That's right. Okay. Now, since you mentioned that you're wearing them now, I have so many questions about these glasses. Sure. That happens a lot. So let's just say, a nonprofit organization gets a pair of these glasses. Organization gets a pair of these glasses. What would be some like creative ways that they could use them? I'm thinking about like events, like what's some like practical ways that this could be like a benefit to an organization.
Speaker 2:It's very non-intrusive. So, for example, in some of my workshops I will tell people that I'm going to be taking pictures with my glasses. But walking around without a camera in your hand, people are just a lot more comfortable and natural and I think you can capture things instantly. If you're driving somewhere or you're let's say, you're walking around in an event, you just kind of can casually snap some pictures or even a 60-second video, and it's just even more natural and real because people aren't stopping what they're doing and posing and stuff like that. I think just that alone is kind of cool. And to translate languages, translate documents I could see a lot of really powerful uses for it and you know these are relatively new, so they keep adding enhancements. But you can even have it, take a picture and then upload it to Instagram right away, which I would use some caution.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, make sure you're doing the right picture. Yes, how good is the translation? Is it actually? Can you see the translation through the glasses?
Speaker 2:That is a great question that people ask often and doesn't have any visual display yet. So basically, they're prescription glasses that I have, and then they also have the AI, so they have speakers that go around your ears. It's really handy because if you, let's say, you're somebody who works with people out and about in public, if there's a quick question, you just ask it. You say, hey, meta, it's good, I do it right now. But and they just ask it like you would ask Siri but you're just out and about with you know with somebody, and there's a question or you need to translate a couple words you don't know. You can just do all of that without changing anything. You know, what I like best about it is it breaks phone hypnosis because you don't have a phone out so you can't do anything else. But take a picture of someone's event instead of getting you know phone hypnosis. Let me just go ahead, check this one thing check, oh, oh, oh.
Speaker 2:And you know, you don't even people realize you're down the rabbit hole yeah, so this prevents phone hypnosis, like if you're out and about and it's very interesting, I'm glad you'd be more present more present.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's great for being more present and grabbing irreplaceable moments. I took a funny video of my little niece. I was part of the dance party too to row, row, row your boat in a round and the dogs came through everyone's dancing and I was like I have my glasses on. I caught a couple seconds of the funniest video you've ever seen, right, but you can use it for all sorts of creative things. I'm sort of exploring now, so if anyone has good ideas, please share things.
Speaker 1:I'm sort of exploring now, so if anyone has good ideas please share, because I'm trying to learn all about them so cool. Okay, I'm gonna have to dive in and do some research on this. If somebody is on the fence hasn't really gotten started yet, what would be your like low risk, high impact way for them to get started literally today, right after this episode?
Speaker 2:If you're not already using Canva, I think it's magic right as their AI tool. I would definitely start using that because it's well worth it to get a pro account.
Speaker 1:I believe they it's free for nonprofits 501c3.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a free pro account, right, and it just does so many things. Like, you can set your brand colors and do all of your social media posts. Just make it in the colors. You can resize it from Instagram to whatever other platform.
Speaker 2:Yeah, canva is incredible, or whatever you want to use, yeah, and that one is so simple, but to do all the little tasks that it does in seconds, you know, just a couple years ago it would be hours and hours. So that's another time saver, if you get good at it. And again, you don't want to add more in your day, more tasks, because you're using AI, necessarily, but you want to add more creativity, more human touch, things that you brainstorming with your colleagues, things that you wish you had more time for, free it up into something as simple as Canva, or doing research or first drafts.
Speaker 1:If you first drafts can be hard for anything you know as an author, sometimes the first draft you're just like what's another way to say this?
Speaker 2:Or how can I think about that? It just gets you thinking on a different path sometimes, or remembering things that you learned or forgot about, or it's those little gems along the trail whenever you're researching, or, yeah, and it saves so much time and it does a beautiful job with a lot of different things. So amazing.
Speaker 1:Well, amy, thank you so much for your time and your work. What's the best way for people to reach out to you and where can they find your book?
Speaker 2:sure, so my book is pretty easy to find. It's's from Riley Empower your Nonprofit Simple Ways to Co-Create with AI for Profound Impact. It's on Amazon and my website, empoweryournonprofitorg also has it. And yeah, I think people really like meeting in person to learn about AI hands-on with somebody that knows about it. In Ohio we have a program called TechCred that covers the cost of a lot of tech training. We're creating some AI-specific tech training so in-person stuff too that you can get reimbursed, and so I think once people have the confidence, they're off and running. You can't stop them. They're super fans. What does it?
Speaker 2:say oh, I don't like it, they try it and then they're telling everybody. They come back with reports on how well it works. But I would love to hear any comments and feedback about it too on that site. That'd be great.
Speaker 1:Amazing. I love that you brought up in-person events. I get asked a lot about like, what conferences should I go to? And sometimes I don't think it's a conference. I think it's something really specific like this Like, go to the things that you nichely want to get better at, and sometimes the conferences can be lovely, but it's lots of sessions, usually very quick, but if you want to deep dive into something like where can you actually spend a better use of your time? So I will wrap on that note. I am somebody who is very excited about using it, getting better at it. So thank you so much for being here and for sharing your knowledge and wisdom with us today. Sure, thank you so much.
Speaker 3:Great to be on. Thank 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.
