#11 - The Data Advantage: Using AI to Make Better Decisions, Faster (AI Series Part 3)

Unlock the transformative power of AI for nonprofit growth with the wit and wisdom of Vers CEO Justin Price. We're slicing through the complexities of artificial intelligence, showing you how it can streamline your operations, reallocate your human resources effectively, and slash unnecessary expenses. Overcome the trepidation of adopting this potent technology, as we impart on leaders the courage to guide their nonprofits with data-driven decisions and embrace the risks that come with a rapidly changing digital world.

Delving into the heart of effective leadership, we don't hold back on the crucial role that data management plays in the destiny of your organization. Say goodbye to the surface metrics that comfort you and be prepared to confront the harder truths revealed by the numbers. With a mix of candor and insight, we discuss how leveraging clean data analysis and embracing AI and connectivity tools can track engagement, guide strategic planning, and potentially catalyze exponential year-over-year growth.

We're not just talking growth and innovation; we're fostering hope and community support, reminding everyone of the importance of civic engagement. Take this episode as your call to action, inspiring you to reshape your journey and magnify the impact of your work.

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Transcript

Heredes: 0:08

Hey, welcome back. Non-profit Renaissance podcast, our AI series. Let's go Listen. No jokes here. Straight to the juice. We're going to keep going Straight to the juice. What are we talking about today, Juicy Justin.

Collin: 0:20

We're talking about. We're talking about Juicy.

Collin: 0:22

Justin, juicy, justin, see, you had to crack a joke, but let's get to the juice. Sorry, it's who I am, but no, we do want to do that because we, today, we're going to start with the thing Today we're going to, we want to go right to. How do we, how do you grow your org as quickly as possible, as cheaply as possible? We're talking about how to get the value with the least amount of investment, and so how how can we leverage AI to do this, to get the best value? How do we do that?

Justin: 0:43

You wear shorts one time, you know. One time that says juicy on the butt and and then people want you know they.

Heredes: 0:51

they want to call you juice forever. Make sure you look at the YouTube version of this, for the thumbnail will be a featuring photo Juicy J, juicy J, juicy J. It is, and you'll decide if it's AI generated or not. So, though it looks very photorealistic to me. Did you take that photo, colin?

Collin: 1:05

I'm not. I'm not answering that question One time, I plead the fifth.

Justin: 1:10

I had to get the jokes out of the way, cause this is a heavy topic, you know. I mean we talk about what AI means for a lot of nonprofits. It's scary. You know we were talking about machine learning taking over full time employee roles for a lot of things and you can either free that time up and utilize those people for being more effective, for being more human, for making your nonprofit better, for making your organization or your company better, or you can cut your. You know you can cut some of your expenses and increase your, your revenue for programming, increase your revenue for other things, and so people oftentimes hate change. People are also scared of something that is this powerful and it's easy to go like I got to kind of know about this stuff but maybe like let's try to just keep pushing it off and it's a. It's a. It's a heavy conversation as we get into this.

Justin: 2:04

But for leaders who want to grow their organization we know 70% we talked in the last episode Ericsson Young's stat that 70% of CEOs are investing into machine learning or AI for next year. It's obviously going to play a big impact in our culture and it's a heavy topic because there's so much at stake. There's a lot of mistakes to be made still ahead of us that we don't even know yet. Why it's so heavy to me is is this is missional for us as an agency. We want to help organizations stop wasting time and resources on things that aren't actually helping them grow. We want to help them reallocate it into things that are going to actually move them forward and help them reach their full potential. And so, to me, we've we've, in a way, we've bet the farm in the sense of saying like we're not willing to just fall back on our skills sets of you know, creative services. We're not willing to just fall back on our marketing services. We've been successful in both of those, we've won awards in both of those.

Justin: 3:12

But the reality is is that what organizations need today is even more. They need more value. They need leaders who are willing to have these heavy conversations, to get into this deeper and more meaningful conversation, to solve a more complex problem. And the one thing that we hit a really big wall in with almost every single organization that we started working with in the last 10 years is data. The database for most organizations are not managed. You can pay a management fee to keep your database clean. Those are still not that good and there are databases that you know. The expectation for somebody who buys data from a database is that 60% of it is good. That's a failing grade, that's horrible and everywhere and every other thing.

Collin: 4:01

But that's like, but we're like, that's a great deal.

Justin: 4:03

But that's where we're at with data, right, and so we go I'll take, I'll take 60% of something rather than 0% of nothing, and so we do it, we move forward and we and we, we have a lot of waste, we have a lot of bad, we have a lot of skewed data. I'm a big believer that leaders who Make fast decisions make the right decisions fast.

Heredes: 4:23

Specifically let's go say that again.

Justin: 4:25

I'm a big believer that leaders who make the right decisions fast are the most successful.

Heredes: 4:32

That's good now and that's controversial a little bit too, because there isn't their wisdom in Waiting and counsel of many. And let's think it through and let's run it through the boards and the committees and the deacons and Collins dad, no, isn't no.

Justin: 4:47

I love accountability, accountability good for decisions that we make, and I think we can make the wrong decisions and we can correct them fast. That's the right decision fast again right.

Justin: 4:56

But not acting usually causes. Ask anybody who had the opportunity to invest in web one Making, not making, decision as an event, if your, if your job was it or your leadership was investment and you didn't invest in web one and you missed that boat, you, you, you don't get another chance at that, right. Well, maybe they got into the social, the web too. Maybe they didn't. Maybe they got into some of the web three boom With crypto. Maybe they didn't. Maybe they they made bad decisions that had to correct fast. But the point is is the risk, right, the risk.

Heredes: 5:27

There's a risk, but by the time someone's waiting, you've learned your own, you've made mistakes, you swank the bag and you got the home run, and that's where we're at today. Yeah, I love that like we.

Justin: 5:37

We don't have the. The option we and the reality is is our culture will change around us and we will become irrelevant. Our missions will become Irrelevant.

Collin: 5:48

We're trying to solve a problem that will no longer even exist the same way at a quicker pace than ever too, and so you have less time now to make the right decision, because things are changing so much. It's okay so. So how do we do that? How does an org get the right data to be able to do that? Because we can pay for 60%, correct, or?

Justin: 6:10

Yeah, I mean, the reality is no, almost no, see, no, nobody running an organization today has the bandwidth or the peep, the staffing to manage their database. Well, and one of the things, one of the greatest opportunities for us today that maybe wasn't even there six months ago is Finally starting to get into data management. And so when you say, well, what is AI doing in machine learning, we get into the, the whole future of it and this idea of creating our own God and all of the negativity that can come with it. And there are massive ethical Conversations for us to have, and we are having those. We will have them. But rather than then focusing on the grand thing, what we have to do today is quickly apply what is good and we can. We have opportunity, and if we want to turn our heads from that opportunity when we know about it, when we hear about it, I think that that's kind of a failure. You know on us and what we've been given and entrusted with as leaders within nonprofits, and so I think the reality is our responsibility Would be to embrace the things that are clearly good and that can make a big impact today with a high ROI. So Today, most organizations and good leaders were able to become leaders of organizations in a smaller setting. They were able to make quick decisions because they had connectivity to the data they needed.

Justin: 7:35

Think about a small church 150, 200 people. You know every person's name for the most part. If somebody new walks in, you are a simulations department, right, you stand at the back door and you make sure they don't they come back the next week. You know the idea of like I mean now we're working with churches with 25,000 people a Sunday across eight, 10, 12 campuses. You can't be that one guy. You are not everywhere at once and so you've got to rely on your data. If your data is bad, how are you making that same decision? Well, now it's the subjective group. Think of all eight campus pastors coming together. Or, if you're a franchise, it's the subjective thoughts of all of your franchise owners that are coming in and bringing their individual unique ideas.

Justin: 8:24

And the reality is is that every single organization, in one form or another, has the potential to have clear data and analyze that data and make really good decisions, meaning this big problem we've been having, which is we don't have databases that have any kind of good reporting. If we are reporting, it's things like it's top line numbers, like how much did we bring in? We have that. We've made sure we got our money right In a lot of ways. We've got our budgets. They're clear, and that's good. That's not a bad thing. But what about the effectiveness of your organization? How much of that money is really going to the thing that you say is most important from your organization? How much of your time and effort is actually going to the thing that you say is most important? And I think we don't want to know the answers to that report in many cases.

Heredes: 9:23

That's a big truth. By the way, to face the facts, to look in the data mirror, is a challenge, because I think that's overcoming that step that a lot of leaders don't want and they rather ignore it to the point of implosion and explosion, and it's too late at that point.

Justin: 9:39

Yeah, or claiming I didn't know.

Heredes: 9:41

Correct Ignorance.

Justin: 9:42

I'm innocent and I'm ignorant, but by omission, by omission, right, but the reality is you guys, we have to. Well, okay, as an agency, we've already set out to say like we're going to be brave enough to tackle the things. We spend most of our time as an agency with the leaders that are willing to look in the mirror. They want the good data, they want to make that impact For those people. We're able to do incredible things In just a short year. Applying a clean up, applying good data analysis can change you from going hey, we actually spent 20, 30% in the wrong areas last year. This year, as we look at planning for next year, we're going to start putting our attention into this, because this is what actually achieved the mission. This is where we saw the most growth. This is where we see the most opportunity. We have things like analysis that we can start to utilize as we apply good data and especially, as we start to apply even connectivity.

Justin: 10:53

In one of the previous episodes, we were talking about connecting to our audience, our people, how to use the chat knowledge basis. Now we can start connecting people directly from there to clean data. We can start to connect that clean data to our leadership decisions so we can start to understand hey, we connected with. In some cases it's like oh, people came in through Google Chat, people came in through our website, people came in through here. They were chatting with our AI-driven, but we connected those IP addresses to their first digital step within our organization. We got all of that data. We can now track all of that back and we can make more decisions on if we liked that, that those people fit our ideal type of donor for us.

Justin: 11:43

How did we cultivate that? How do we red flag and go oh, there's actually a great, really, really powerful donor within that. Right now it's literally you might have a great donor walking in the doors of your organization and walk right out the back. There was no way for you to even track that or trigger that. Most of the good donors wouldn't even want to be seen.

Justin: 12:05

But with what's possible, as we develop tools to be able to utilize your data, there is so much opportunity for any organization to grow 10, 20% year over year, especially as you become a large organization. Growing 10 or 20% is massive. 2.5, 3, and 4 in 500s are very happy, usually for a percent or two. The biggest organizations, biggest companies in the world, for our $20 million, $30 million nonprofits I mean, those are fairly the larger nonprofits To be able to do 20, 30% more of your mission. That's crazy To be able to spend a super small amount of money to do that. To take a bunch of your full-time employees and redeploy them into your mission because they don't have to do things that they were doing before Starting to build those tools in for data. Each one of the things that we've been doing we were able to immediately do. Today it's available to us.

Heredes: 13:38

Some of the things happening now are continuing to improve because AI it's daily, it's every second as we're talking. We're currently teaching AI. By the way, with this episode, we're just feeding into the machine. It's our own thing. Here we're talking about predictive analytics. That's continuing to be more sophisticated, but you can forecast trends, the needs, outcomes, with greater accuracy. One thing is we forecasted things, but inaccurate, from weather. The accuracy of AI weather forecasting now is insane, but that's one For your organization to enhance personalization. Yes, we've been replacing the names deer, fill in the blank. That's good. Step one, step one. We've been doing that for decades now. Now we're talking even deeper custom.

Justin: 14:20

We talk to organizations every day that they're massive. We're expecting that they're already further along in personalization. If you've been thinking I don't know what to do, what's the next step with my communications department? Personalization is massive. Until your data's right, you can't really do personalization right, Absolutely.

Heredes: 14:43

This is a huge thing.

Heredes: 14:44

We've only been able to really do this in the last year and a half now right, yes, what we've seen is this One is naming the email with their name. Baby steps. What if we know what time they're going to open that email? We're going to send it. Then, if they prefer mobile over desktop, we're going to send it in that format, sending a photo or acknowledging their engagement on social or on their visit on your site. We're talking deep personalization. That's gonna do what. It's gonna engage. It's gonna feel like you created one custom item for that. You know user that donor.

Justin: 15:16

Or as simple as like just giving them the information that's only relevant to them. Absolutely right. So that's that's probably the biggest one is there's so many segmentations we can start to deliver so that when we do communicate with somebody, it's very valuable. We're not trying to talk to a grandparent about a kids program when that, when that grandparents, kids are actually estranged and far away and we're just triggering a negative emotional response. That email like I wish you wouldn't keep telling me how great the kids program is because I can't get my kids here, because my, my daughter or son won't let me get my kids here. You know, like that's a real thing happening all the time.

Heredes: 15:58

Or they keep selling me the ticket to the event where I already bought it three months ago, yeah. So now I'm fatigued. Now I'm actually tired by the time of the event. So it's like you can eliminate that, yeah, and position them on engaging and getting ready, or even volunteering for the event or whatever.

Justin: 16:11

The next step is and these tools haven't been accessible. Like we're not saying that if you're a nonprofit, it's not got this. The fortune five, fortune 500, has had access to these tools that have been building personalization over the last five years, but it's not really been accessible to most people, and and mainly because the data is not that reliable. So even if you're sending out an email to somebody with the wrong name, to the wrong address, with the wrong information, then why would we even invest in the tool that can do personalization? But the reality is is we're on the cusp here of creating much better human experiences because of it.

Heredes: 16:44

Yeah, another thing we've seen is just voice and language technologies right, and then in with the ability To multiply your reach, whether it's just the language it's created, in the content that it's created with it, and we've seen this. This has been done for years, but not with the accuracy and not with the speed it's being done now currently, everything from your content that already exists and duplicating that to a broader audience in a different region, a different part of the world. So I think you're the same way. The internet brought globalization To us, so we had access to peek in and to look. Now you're able actually to contribute and and position yourself into a global space with your mission, with your value, and truly, truly Change the world.

Justin: 17:28

I could be wrong. This is going to date this podcast, when we were keeping these like fairly short and punchy Because they will be heavily outdated within a year. We're not going to overproduce these things into you know long, long things for you, as this information updates, will keep updating and getting out new information. But I was told that in Q1 of 2024, youtube will have the ability to output eight different languages, so you'll be able to take the voice Of any voiced piece of YouTube, and not just in subtitles, but the actual audio of the voice will come out in eight different eight of the major languages. Spotify also has that same technology contract. So there's just like two things that connects the world and crazy, we're talking like we're about a year from Tower of Babel situation right, one thousand percent.

Heredes: 18:23

And not not only that in, in, in the span of two years, all the content you'll be ingesting will be already majority AI generated in two years. Think about this for a second. What we the internet for the last 40 I'm gonna date it back to military days here We've been consuming. It's been in the next two years, not me age.

Justin: 18:43

I'm only going to, I'm only gonna consume things in person. Is that what you're gonna do in person?

Heredes: 18:50

So how are you listening to this?

Justin: 18:52

I'm not going to somebody's reading a transcript of it.

Heredes: 18:53

That was manually transcribed by, but they got that. How scary that is a little bit.

Justin: 18:58

I'm gonna pay for you to give me your thoughts on this AI content.

Heredes: 19:03

And there will be an app already generating that as well, right, so yeah, but it you're right, and I think that the cool thing is this one of it is Engaging the tools that are out there, the agencies, you know, engaging with folks in our team, for example. That's already in it, so you're not having to create it from scratch because it's a lot of folks trying to. Still, I'll create or be original in A space that in some ways, could be too late. So don't try to be original, but engage, jump, jump in to get your feet wet. If not, you'll get drowned, right, if now you get drunk. So start learn. I'm gonna have to learn how to swim, put the floaties on, and that may be engaged. Engage a team and agency, engage someone who engage your nephew, for now, who's you know? Who knows how to do something. But don't miss it. Don't miss the opportunity to to Engage AI. We could talk, keep going on for for hours here. But donor analysis we talked about this operational efficiency In AI. This is specifically for nonprofits and how we've seen it benefit it measurement, demographic and socioeconomic analysis of your people and very specific things that have been done but just not accessible in the past. Then now, due to the nature and the speed of AI, is available, is available to us, at our fingertips and can truly help your organization go further and grow faster. And we'll end on this and wrap it up. Any final thoughts.

Heredes: 20:21

Justin, we were talking to one of our partners. They were dipping their toe into this goes into a little fundraising and donor engagement and giving. They were talking about how they're like they didn't understand crypto at the time when it was rolling out and it's hype. But they were like you know what, we're just dip our toe and offer it and engage with it. And Then I asked them so how, what's been the? You know they were just offering, you know, on their website, offering the ability for people to give in crypto. It's like, well, it wasn't great and this and that, but they said that this past year there was one donor who just wanted to let go of a few Bitcoin and Because they found it on their website, yeah, he was able to release five literal full bitcoins into there.

Heredes: 21:02

So we're talking about a quarter million dollar decision. Okay, it's close to $250,000. Because they were like, willing to dip their toe into you know what. Let's make an offer. We don't get it. We don't totally understand it yet let's make it. We don't know. And he says it was the only person that engaged with that giving that year, mm-hmm, but it was a quarter million dollar, right get. So I think it's you. We miss out. We could have been fair. You know they could have been afraid, they could have been, and I love hearing that story because now they're able to even continue to share that More and more this is definitely not an endorsement for crypto.

Justin: 21:31

No sir or we're not financial.

Outro: 21:33

We're not. We're not yes.

Justin: 21:37

Correct and this really most you know, we're talking about AI right now. We're not talking about currency, digital currency yet we're not talking about all of that that side of things.

Heredes: 21:48

We've got some great partners who work with fundraising side of things, but this would be all the donor development work that you would then be doing before hand and you know, and everything that's necessary for knowing I share that just because of the courage to risk, to take to take the chance to not even fully understand it. But you know what? Let's see. Let's see what it can do and now to turn that for good, that those, that crypto, that those funds would have gone elsewhere. It would have gone to the next organization offering the opportunity. So, I think, don't miss out on opportunities to engage your, your member, your audience and the people you're trying to. Yeah, justin, thank you, thanks for the insights, thanks for the thoughts. Any final thoughts?

Justin: 22:29

No, appreciate you guys. It's been good. We'll keep the conversation going.

Heredes: 22:32

Yeah, I got a farewell here from special guests. We started out strong, we'll do. We started out strong and we're gonna keep going so quick. Before you go, quick message this one. He's, he was flying, so pardon the background here, Did you?

Collin: 22:46

we got a lot of money for this.

Heredes: 22:47

We did, we did so before you go, justin, before you take off on your jet.

Speaker 5: 22:51

Hello H, hello Colin, it's me Obama. What a great episode. Thanks for all the insight today, justin, and thanks for what you do. It's great. It brings me hope. Keep helping others, go further and grow faster, and don't forget to rock your vote in 2024. See you soon.

Heredes: 23:16

That's it Wow.

Justin: 23:17

I didn't think we pulled up the.

Heredes: 23:19

AI pulled up the voting records so we.

Outro: 23:26

Thanks again for listening to the nonprofit Renaissance. We hope it ignites a Renaissance in you and helps you go further and grow faster. Be sure to share, rate and subscribe and if you'd like to recommend or be a guest on our show, send us an email. At podcast at first, creative comm.