How Vibe AI Is Changing What's Possible for Nonprofits - And How I Built the Monthly Giving Builder to Prove It

Can you believe the tools that once required a full development team and a 6-figure budget can now be built in a matter of MONTHS with “vibe AI” for a fraction of the cost?

In this solo episode, I’m sharing a behind-the-scenes look into my business, and how I took my $12K-$18K Monthly Giving Mastermind and turned it into a $499/year AI-powered tool that helps nonprofits build and grow their recurring revenue.

I’m walking through what’s actually possible for nonprofits right now, from automating intake and donor communications to volunteer matching and grant research, and how to start identifying what your organization could build next.

Resources & Links

Bloomerang is the proud presenter of Missions to Movements. 

See how one team surpassed a $1M match and raised $2.25M for their mission with Penny, Bloomerang’s AI-powered fundraising strategist. Learn more at bloomerang.com.

The Monthly Giving Builder: Generate your comprehensive monthly giving plan and build your program step by step - with a guided companion working alongside you from start to finish. 

Let's Connect!

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• 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!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

What if I could take everything I know from the five-step framework that's in my book for monthly giving, all the IP of years of doing this work, every resource, every template strategy, and build it into a tool? One that could guide any organization through the process of building their monthly giving program at their own pace without needing me in the room. Are you using it to write emails, to draft social posts, maybe to brainstorm ideas or clean up a grant narrative you're working on? And if so, like

From AI Writing To Building

SPEAKER_01 0:55

you're definitely not alone. And honestly, all of that is very, very genuinely useful. It saves us a ton of time. It reduces friction, it gets words on a page faster, especially when you or me or anybody is dealing with some struggle on brainstorming or creative. But I want to let you in on something today in this episode, a little bit of like behind the scenes of my business that I think can dramatically change things for you too. Something that's completely changed about how I look at what's possible. And most of us, or I know at least I had been, I've been working with AI. It's like you have access to a full professional grade kitchen, but we're only ever just like using the microwave. It's like the analogy I have for us right now, especially because I'm going through a kitchen renovation. So the tools that exist today, like right now, are available to anyone really with a computer, a laptop, and curiosity, and are making it possible to do insanely cool things, building actual softwares, real functioning custom products, the kind of things that used to take and require a development team, a six-figure plus budget, six to 12 plus months of time. And I know that might sound like an exaggeration, but earlier in my career, I used to work for a digital agency. And we built the websites and the apps for a PGA tour and NASCAR and sporting news and et cetera. So I want to tell you exactly what I mean by this. And I want to tell you what I built because if I can do it, I promise you can think bigger about what your organization could do too. So, welcome back to Missions to Movements. It's a little bit different of an episode. If we haven't met before, I'm your host, Dana Snyder, and I want to talk about the monthly giving builder. It's a tool that I built using Vibe AI. So we're gonna talk about what is it, how does it work, why did I build it, but we're also gonna zoom out and we're gonna talk about the larger moment we are in right now, what's possible for nonprofits willing to get curious about vibe AI, because I think the opportunities are genuinely endless. And I just want you to start to see them. So, first of all, let me explain what I mean when I say vibe AI, because I think it's a term that's still pretty new and not everyone has bumped into it yet. So, traditionally, if you wanted to build a piece of software, whether it's an app, a tool, a custom platform, you needed developers, people who write code. And that meant either hiring a team, which is expensive and slow,

What Vibe AI Actually Means

SPEAKER_01 3:35

or if you knew how to code yourself, which most of us, including myself, do not. Vibe AI changes that equation. These are platforms. There's many of them that I'll talk about in just a second, but they let you describe what you want to build in plain language, and then they build it. You're having a conversation with the tool. So you'll say something like, I want an app or a product that does this, this, this, this, right? And you explain it. The better the prompt, obviously, the better the output. And it generates the code, the structure, the design, and you refine it by telling it what to change. Now, you don't really need to know what's happening under the hood. I have hired further people who are experts in these tools to make sure that everything under the hood is good. And the tools that I've spent the most time in are lovable and replit. So I started in lovable, which is incredibly intuitive for someone just getting started. And then I transitioned to Replit, which gave me more flexibility for some complex integrations that I needed. And then I had my AI coach, Tim Lockheed, some of you heard him speak at the Monthly Giving Summit. And he did a full session on talking about this, like guiding me through the process, but he's also just a whiz at so many AI things. And then I'm just kind of breaking down my team for you here, but I also, as I mentioned, eventually hired a replit expert to get me over the finish line on a few specific integrations. And here's what I really want you to hear. Even with that support, the cost and time involved was a fraction of what traditional development would have been. I mean, we're talking about something that, again, would have required six figures, a full dev team. And I built it in about six months at a fraction of the cost while still being the one with the primary, well, not the primary, with the vision and expertise behind it. So you do not, I am not a developer. You do not need to become one. You just need to be someone who knows what problem you want to solve. That's big. Have to know that. And then stays curious about the tools that can help you solve it. So let's talk about like what could your nonprofit actually build? And then I'll go into more in-depth about what I did. So I want to make this real because I think the gap sometimes is just our imaginations. We're so busy in the day-to-day like realities of what we're doing. But and we've been so trained to think about AI as a writing assistant that maybe we can't quite picture it as a builder. So I'm gonna give you some examples and listen to these not as things that other organizations are doing, but sparks for what your organization could do. So think about intake and triage. So if your organization does case management, social services, housing, mental health support, workforce development, how much staff goes into initial intake, sorting information, routing people to the right program, asking the same qualifying questions over and over. So let's just say you could build a custom intake tool that does that

Nonprofit Use Cases Worth Automating

SPEAKER_01 6:39

intake conversationally. It collects the right information and it routes people appropriately. That's buildable right now. Or think about your donor communications at scale, but being very hyper-personalized. Most organizations we send the same thank you email, give or take, to every new donor, right? But what if you had a tool that could pull from your database and it generated a personalized message based on how someone gave, what program they gave to, what their history, what your organization was like. And that level of hyper-personalization used to require either massive staff time or a very, very expensive CRM integration. That is now could be a vibe AI project for you. Or volunteer matching. And this is actually a real life one, volunteer matching. So Big Brothers, Big Sisters has done this. They created their own like proprietary with AI volunteer matching tool. So let's say you have volunteers with specific skills, availability windows, and interests. And you have programs with specific needs at specific times. So matching those two things manually, I can only imagine, is a spreadsheet nightmare that someone on your team probably does not like. But an AI-powered matching tool could do this automatically, surface the best matches, and send the outreach. And that is time back in someone's week every single week. Okay, another example. Think about grant research, prospecting. This is probably a more common one, but I know organizations that spend significant time just identifying potential funders, reading through foundations' websites, matching grant iteria to program descriptions, building prospect lists. Like you could build a custom tool that could automate the research layer of that, surfacing specifically for you the most promising matches, and even draft the initial language for your letters of inquiry or your outreach, specifically again for you. Okay. So one of them that I just mentioned also was the Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Puget Sound. They did their mentor to mentee matching manually before. And I mean, again, imagination. Just think about what this process looks like, right? There's intake forms, interviews, personalities, interests, logistics, availability, geography, right? Staff is reading through the files. It's time intensive, it's inherently probably imperfect. So they now have an AI-powered matching tool that does the work. And that is a fundamental change in how the program operates. It means more matches are happening faster, less staff time on logistics and relationship building, and the mission's more scalable. And I think about I started my career at Take Sock and Children of Sarasota County, and that's what ours was. We were matching, we were reading through a ton of applications, then matching mentees with mentors. And that takes a lot, a lot of time. The shift I want you to feel, and hopefully this is starting to embody for you, is that AI is not meant to be a shortcut, but it's like this systematic change in what's possible for your organization. Okay. Think about what your organization does that currently requires manual human time that is not actually about human connection. The sorting, the routing, the matching, the data entry, the first draft, the research. Every single one of those is a candidate for a vibe AI project. Okay. The human connection part, definitely stick with us doing that. But what's not the human element part of it? And I want to pause here real quick and say something to you, listener, who maybe you're already mentally checked out on me because you're thinking, Dana, this is not for me. I'm not technical. I don't have a tech person on my team that sounds amazing, but this is not my reality. And I hear you. And I just want to offer you a reframe. Six months ago, I was not a developer. I am still definitely not a developer. I cannot write code. I have never built a software product in my life. I have a background in nonprofit development, in marketing, social media. But what I had was a deep, specific knowledge of monthly giving, the framework that I've been teaching over the past five, six years, the strategy behind it, my knowledge, my IP, the questions that needed to be asked, the outputs that I knew mattered. And I just had the curiosity to try. And it's cheap to start, it's completely affordable. And actually, Lovable had a it was free, I think, on International Women's Day just recently. But there's always like specials that they have going on. So you do not need to know how to build something before you start. You just need to know what problem you want to solve, and you need to be willing to play, to try something, to see what it produces, tell the tool what to change and iterate. Like Tim's whole philosophy, and it was such a valuable message at the summit, is that new literacy is not coding, it's prompting. It's learning how to describe what you want with just enough specificity and clarity that the tool can build it. And that is a very learnable skill. And you're probably much better at it than you think because you, nonprofits that I know that I've worked with are full of people that are excellent at articulating problems and imagining solutions. So again, the barrier is not a technical skill. It's just giving yourself permission to get curious. So, with all that said, I want to give you kind of like the behind the scenes to tell you about what I built because I think this story is just as important as the product. So for years, I have been running the Monthly Giving Mastermind for context. It's a four-month high-touch program working with five organizations at a time. We had a full team. I had a designer, a website designer, so like a graphic

Reframing The Nontechnical Barrier

SPEAKER_01 12:44

designer and a website designer, a copywriter, a video editor, me doing the project management and coaching. And the investment was anywhere over the years from 12 to I think $18,000. And yes, the results were transformational, but that was not scalable. And it's inaccessible, really. Like the organizations that needed it most, the ones with smaller budgets, smaller teams, smaller programs, many couldn't afford it. And that always bothered me over the years. But I didn't know back then, well, one, the technology wasn't here yet. And I didn't know what to really do about that problem. So when I started coming back and playing with Vibe AI, once

Building The Monthly Giving Builder

SPEAKER_01 13:24

I heard about it, the question I kept coming back to was what if I could take everything I know from the five-step framework that's in my book for monthly giving, all the IP of years of doing this work, every resource, every template strategy, and build it into a tool. One that could guide any organization through the process of building their monthly giving program at their own pace without needing me in the room. And I started in lovable. I described what I wanted. I think it said something around like, I want a guided, AI-powered tool that walks nonprofits through the five steps of my framework to build their monthly giving program. It needs to generate customized outputs at each step and produce downloadable deliverables. And it started building. Now, was it perfect on the first try? Heck no. Absolutely not. Building anything requires iteration. There were integrations that required more technical help. And that's when I A, I brought in Tim nearly from the very beginning as my coach to help me because I knew I was a novice at this. I switched to Replit. But the core of the product, the structure, the logic, the user experience, I built that through conversation with the tool by describing what I wanted, by testing it, giving feedback, refining, letting other people look at it. So what came out on the other side after about six months is the monthly giving builder. And it is that a step-by-step AI-powered tool built on my IP, my five-step framework. It's $499 a year, so roughly $42 a month. And it does what my $12 to $18,000 program did. Now, differently, of course, because we're not the ones actually building it for you and executing, but it puts serious, strategic, customized deliverables and monthly giving support in the hands of any organization willing to use it. So let me walk you through it because I want you to feel how different this is and what's possible for you. This is so different from a course or a workbook or even a coaching program. So again, I said it's my five-step framework. So step one, and actually it's kind of like pre to step one, but it's all about knowing your numbers. There's a full forecasting tool. This is one of my favorite features, honestly, because it's where you enter where you are now and where you want to go. So your current monthly donor count, average gift, retention rate, and the tool builds out projections, showing you exactly what's possible. So you'll put in like, what's your goal monthly giving revenue amount? And based upon where you're at, what is it going to take to get there? So strategy without data is just guessing. And this really makes it informative and real. So that's kind of pre to step one is the forecasting tool. Then step one is all about the why of your monthly giving program. So helping you articulate that and helping you create the name

Five Steps Inside The Tool

SPEAKER_01 16:29

for your monthly giving program. So you input information and then you click a button and it will go in the background using my IP and it will give you three monthly giving name examples. And then you have your foundation from step one. Step number two is gonna be your online donation audit. So there's a quiz that evaluates your current giving experience and it helps you think through the right monthly giving dollar amounts, so impact amounts. And this alone has changed tremendously for organizations and how they think about their ask. Step three is my call on the believers. So you put in kind of your story, you put in your core believers, who you're really trying to attract and reach. And the builder writes copy for you, the landing page copy for your monthly giving landing page. Also, in this step is it helps you build out some dream partnerships. So again, you'll put a little bit of input in around your current partners you work with, who you would ideally like to work with. This can be like thematic, it doesn't have to be a specific name. And it will spit out for you podcasts to be on, content creators to partner with, media outlets to pursue. And the quality, again, remember, of all these outputs is directly tied to the quality of what you put in. And it is remarkable at how amazing it is. And it also gives you the why of why it thinks that that would be a good partnership. Step number four is all about the ask strategy. So it's your full year broken into quarters with a comprehensive plan to help you brainstorm how and where to ask for monthly support at every touch point. And lastly, step number five is retention. So it's gonna help you build out again an annual plan to keep the donors you just worked so hard to get. It's a full retention strategy based on your current channels. So if you're like, yes, I have direct mail, you could slide that over and then you can brainstorm about it. Yes, I do social advertising. Yes, I do emails, and then you can, it will give you prompts. Plus, there's a four-part email welcome series written for your organization, ready to download and use. So again, the monthly giving builder is not a it's not a one and done. It is truly meant to be a companion. Your organization changes, your calendar changes, your goals are going to evolve. So you can always go back into any step and adjust. You should update your forecasting as you grow, rinse, repeat, refine. There's also a full resource section with downloadable guides on how to get the most out of each prompt. I have uploaded an onboarding video. There's an upcoming webinar calendar. So I'm going to be popping in and doing live trainings in there. And new features are in development right now. So this just launched the end of February, and it's already going to be evolving based upon what users are telling us they need. So the original monthly giving mastermind was $12,000 to $18,000. And that was the right price for what it was, but it was out of reach for most organizations. So the monthly giving builder, it's $499 for the year. So roughly $42 a month to invest in your monthly giving program. And what used to take, again, speaking to like just the power of Vibe AI, what used to take a team of specialists and four months of work is now truly accessible for less than $42 a month. That's less than most gym memberships. Okay. And that was the point. I wanted to make it accessible and I wanted to make sure that the size of your budget and what you can do like doesn't determine the quality of your monthly giving program or the education that you can have to build it. So I want to close here with a little practical note. Maybe if you have listened to this episode and you felt like a little spark of inspiration, is figure out your problem. Start with a problem you have, not necessarily the tool. So, like, what is something that your organization does manually right now that is repetitive, time consuming, and it's not really about human connection. So write that down because that's a really good starting point. Go look at if the Monthly Giving Builder is for you, you can go to monthlygivingbuilder.com. And then I invite you to get curious. Go look at Lovable, go look at Replit. I'll put this information in the show notes. If you're a VIP ticket holder, you can watch Tim Lockheed's session from the Monthly Giving Summit. Find someone else who's playing in this space and ask them about what they've built and just stay open. Like we are in a moment that is moving so fast. And the organizations that will thrive, I've said this before, but I will say it again, is the ones that remain curious. That's

Pricing Accessibility And Next Steps

SPEAKER_01 21:06

it. I don't know exactly how I'm gonna do that, but I am willing to find out. And that is how the monthly giving builder got built. And it is how your next big thing will get built too. So the link to the monthly giving builder is in the show notes. And if your episode, if this episode got your wheels turning about what you might build, come find me, message me on LinkedIn or Instagram. I would love to hear about it. See you next week.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

Thank 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 to the show. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button too so you'll never miss an episode. Until next time, keep turning your mission. Into a movement.