Navigating the Maize
A weekly, 15-minute podcast on nonprofits and AI — real workflows, no hype, hosted by a 30-year nonprofit development veteran.
Episodes
12 episodes
What AI Can’t Replace: Why Personal Stories Still Win
A LinkedIn post about Sean's daughter's solo trip through Europe reached over 4,000 people and pulled in nearly 5,700 impressions, almost 80% from outside his existing network. Meanwhile, carefully crafted professional content, including posts ...
The Algorithm Is Reading Your Pitch Deck: AI and the New Corporate Giving Gatekeepers
Somewhere right now, a corporate giving team is deciding whether your organization is even worth a meeting, and increasingly, an AI tool is making that first cut before a human ever reads your name. This episode digs into how corporate social r...
The Candidate Who Wasn’t There: AI, Fake Qualifications, and the New Hiring Crisis
A nonprofit hired a grant writer who aced the interview, and couldn’t do the job. This episode digs into a hiring crisis moving faster than most nonprofit leaders realize: candidates using AI to fabricate qualifications, feed live answers durin...
Untitled EpisodeThe Pitch Is Always Exciting: A Framework for Evaluating a New AI Tool
If you're a development director or ED, you've had this meeting: a consultant or vendor pitches an AI tool that "changed everything" for an organization just like yours. This episode gives you the actual framework Sean uses — sitting on both si...
“Your Gala and Golf Tournament Isn’t the Problem: What Happens After the Last Guest Leaves”
Sean breaks down what actually happens in a room full of 150 donors, prospects, and corporate partners — and where AI can help make sure it doesn’t evaporate the Monday after: capturing what actually happened (not just who attended),...
A $100 Million Bet on Nonprofits: What OpenAI's New Program Actually Means.
OpenAI's nonprofit arm just committed $100 million to the Common Health Coalition, going after a decade-old problem: a hepatitis C cure exists, yet roughly two-thirds of Americans living with the disease remain untreated. This episode breaks do...
Your Newsletter Nobody Reads: Use AI to turn your donor communications to audio
How many of your own donors actually read your newsletter, start to finish? Open rates are declining, and meanwhile podcast and audio consumption keeps climbing. This episode is about meeting donors where their attention actually is, turning co...
Why Your Nonprofit Needs an AI Governance Policy (Even a One-Pager)
Back in episode two, Sean cited a stat and moved past it fast: 47% of nonprofits have no AI governance policy at all. This episode unpacks why that’s riskier than it feels, not one dramatic AI failure, but a slow buildup of small, ungoverned de...
AI Hiring - From Start to Finish
Every episode so far has been about donors. This one turns to your own team. Sean walks through a real search he ran for a client — filling a Development and Donor Relations Coordinator role — covering exactly where AI helped, where he delibera...
Episode 3 Navigating the mAIZe: Donor Segmentation
Building a Donor Segmentation Model, Step by Step.A few episodes back I mentioned a segmentation model I built for a crisis campaign — 1,100+ donors, five tiers, different outreach for each. This episode walks through exactly how, in...
Episode 2 — “The AI Adoption Paradox, Unpacked“
92% of nonprofits use AI. Only 7% say it’s moved the needle. This episode unpacks why — with three real case studies from my own client work: a donor segmentation model that changed a crisis campaign’s outreach, a development health diagnostic ...
Episode 1: Why Nonprofits and AI, Why Me, Why Now
In this first episode of Navigating the mAIze, I introduce myself and lay out exactly what this weekly show is going to be.I’m Sean, founder and principal of Magnolia Philanthropic Services, a boutique senior philanthropic advisory firm ...
