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Nonprofit Hub Radio
Whether starting a nonprofit or taking an existing cause to the next level, The Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast is about breaking down how nonprofits can grow. Each episode features an interview with a sector star with insight, stories, or ideas that can take your nonprofit from good to excellence. Join host Meghan Speer every week to make your good go further!
Nonprofit Hub Radio
Revolutionizing Nonprofit Fundraising: The AI Advantage and Ethical Considerations
Could AI be the game-changer nonprofits have been waiting for in the realm of fundraising? Join us as Meghan Speer sits with Griff Bohm, the co-founder of Give Momentum, shares his unique insights into the revolutionary role of AI in nonprofit operations. From his journey transitioning from academia to spearheading AI solutions, Griff challenges the status quo, suggesting that AI can go far beyond simple tasks like copywriting to fundamentally enhance strategies for major gifts. This episode promises to shed light on how traditional fundraising roles are evolving, providing a fresh perspective on the opportunities and misconceptions surrounding AI in creating effective donor engagement strategies.
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Speaker 2:Welcome back to the Nonprofit Hub Podcast. I'm your host, megan Spear, and I'm joined today by Griff Boom, who's the co-founder of Give Momentum, super excited to dig into kind of maybe a different angle than we've talked about before on AI for nonprofits and AI and fundraising and what that actually can do to make your life a little easier and be a little helpful to your strategy. So, griff, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much for having me Megan, Really excited.
Speaker 2:Nice. So tell us a little bit about you and your journey into how you got into the nonprofit space. And, having had conversations with you, yours is a little unconventional in the path that you took to get here, so share a little bit about that with our audience.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure, my background. I was a behavioral psychologist at the University of Colorado and Nick, who's our CEO and my co-founder, was at Duke doing a lot of the same work, and you know we were focused on lots of things. I ended up a little bit more focused on finances and stuff like that, but we both spent a decent amount of our work looking at what makes people philanthropic, what makes people charitable how does you know all of the psychology that goes into that? And then we also basically ended up getting interested in what makes nonprofits effective, how you, as a nonprofit, can be really good and steward your donors' dollars well, but also like achieve your goals and achieve your mission.
Speaker 3:We ran lots of studies, we did lots of stuff. We loved it. It was super, super fun. But at some point we both, I think, kind of just realized that we maybe weren't going to be great academics, or maybe just didn't want to be, and so we sort of spun out Momentum was founded in 2019. So we're about five years old now, going on six, and we've been really just working on trying to actually solve the problems. We haven't published papers about them ever since.
Speaker 2:I love it. So to that end, right now that you are solving the problems, I want to talk today two things specifically, because I do think you know there's a lot of conversation in the space around AI right now. What are we doing with it? To your point, you and I were talking before the show everybody wants to talk about what it can do and I almost feel like we're trying to keep it in a box. We can let it write our copy, we can let it write our social media posts, right? Instead of actually thinking through how it works and how to make that work for us.
Speaker 2:And one of the things I think is so interesting about Momentum is that it is applying AI to a major gifts approach as well, which I feel like can be a little scary for folks. It's one thing to let AI into that copywriting element, but we're talking about the folks who are like the major gift supporters. How do we make sure that that experience is the best possible? I think people get a little nervous from that front. So let's start at kind of a level set what is AI and what should it and what is it not in terms of support in fundraising.
Speaker 3:Yeah, super, super great question what is AI? I mean, I think even just listening to the name, you know artificial intelligence, like, what is intelligence? Is a really just interesting question that people have been asking themselves for hundreds of years. Like, is an ant intelligent? Is a colony of ants intelligent? Right, Like they can work? You know, they're sort of famously they work together Honeybees like are they intelligent? They don't really have brains like we have, but they're like they're acting together in concert and all of that.
Speaker 3:And so I think when we talk about artificial intelligence, there's a question of just like is it what is intelligent at all? Right, like Tesla has their self driving cars. I consider that intelligence, because to drive a car and stop and start and turn and all of these things, you need to be intelligent enough. Even if, like in Tesla's case, we really understand it really well because it's like, okay, they have all these cameras, it has all these sensors, like we kind of know what it does. I think, like with ChatGPT and stuff like that, that's like the most anthropomorphized version of AI that you really have. It like is presented, it talks to you like a human, it acts like a human, if you like, ask it about its consciousness, it will at least sort of respond. And so I think, yeah, like the question of just like, what is it? It can be anything right.
Speaker 3:But I think, like when we talk about ChatGPT and sort of like the AI revolution over the last couple of years, of just like how it's gone to market and how everybody wants it's been so hot and, in my opinion, largely overhyped. You know, I think one of the main things is just like we're still learning how to use it and what it is and what it can do and what it can't. You know, it's sometimes worth just saying like there's no thinking thing in there. One of the funniest things about ChatGPT if anybody's listening, what you should do, you should do it right now.
Speaker 3:Go on to chat and ask it how many W's are in the word strawberry. There's one W in the word strawberry. It will tell you there's two W's and it's because it's not thinking, like it's not actually a thinking agent in there, it's just predicting like the next little syllable in a sentence, Right, and so it gets super whacked out. And so I think, like when you look at most of the use cases that people have figured out today in terms of like products or things that you can use to help your nonprofit. It's mostly around copywriting.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I have this like analogy that I sometimes use. That like AI is basically it's like it's like water, in that water is only valuable if it's in the right container, right? So if you told me hey, griff, you're thirsty, I need water delivered to me in a glass or a bottle or something that I can drink it out of, if you said I need to mow my lawn, I need water to be in my pipes and my sprinklers. Water spilled all over the ground is like totally worthless, right, like that's not valuable.
Speaker 3:And I feel like a lot of times, like with AI, that's been what a lot of people have done. They've just sort of like spilled AI onto the ground of their products and they haven't thought about like, okay, what is the right container to put this in? How do we put this? How do we build some sort of infrastructure around, maybe the AI, to make sure that it's useful for our customers and nonprofits? And you know, that's really what we've tried to do. We've tried to make sure that we everything that we build is really like, has sort of like enough boundaries around it or enough infrastructure, so that where you use AI is in a really narrow use case and a tight application. You mentioned it. We use it mostly for major gifts and we end up doing it a lot more around sort of like planning and targeting asks and some of those sorts of things. It does copywriting for us just like anybody else. But there's a lot of other applications that we've sort of come up with that can go well beyond that as well.
Speaker 2:I have a good friend of mine who makes liberal use of chat GPT to plan out the rotation for his daughter's soccer team. He has input the data about who does well in what position, because he has an odd number of girls on this team. They're all like seven. It's not like massive stakes, right, but each girl needs to get sufficient playing time and we want to make sure it's fair, and so he uses it each week to fill out based on who's going to be there, what that roster is going to look like and when they need to sub, and it's worked very well in that particular context. But tell me some of those other things that maybe people haven't thought about for ways to engage chat GPT or a similar AI tool that aren't copywriting or soccer team scheduling.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely so. One thing that I'll just quickly plug here if you go to give momentumcom slash GPT, we published a publicly available like nonprofit specific version of chat GPT that anybody can access. It's totally free. You know you need to give us your email, but it's readily available.
Speaker 2:Tell me that address again.
Speaker 3:Givemomentumcom slash GPT.
Speaker 2:Perfect, and we'll make sure to link that in the episode description as well.
Speaker 3:And a lot of what you can do is like, I mean, I think for major gift officers, one of the most important things is engagement and stewardship planning, right, how are you going to talk to your donors, when's a good time? All of that sort of thing. It's super, super valuable to just have a plan that is actually adaptive and it can update and it can sort of react to real things in the world, right. And when you look at like hey, you're a major gift officer, you have a portfolio of 100, 150, 200 donors that you're in charge of, building an individualized plan for every one of them can be incredibly tedious, and so you know, that's, I mean, one of the best, one of the top things we do. Our algorithm is really really great at that and you know it syncs with your CRM and all sorts of other good stuff. But you can just ask chat hey, can you help me with this? I think asking it a lot of sort of stuff about, like, identifying donors.
Speaker 3:It's always sort of said you shouldn't identify like a donor's name or something like that into ChatGPT, but you can say here is a donor and here is all their giving history, here is all their action history. How much would you expect this person to give again this year? And it will come up with a pretty good forecast. It's pretty accurate, right? You can run a lot of complicated statistics and a lot of complicated models in general, and we do this. If you ask ChatGPT in five seconds, hey, what's your prediction on this? Versus just do all of the actual math? Chat is usually only off by 10% or 15%, and it's a fraction of the time and effort. It's pretty good Doing all that. I think you should go ahead like paste stuff in there, like don't put identifiable information, but like, hey, yeah, this person gave on this date at this amount. Here's their whole history. None of that is ID right. Like you can share all that you know.
Speaker 3:I think there's a really good tool that we've published that people can email me to access. It's still free, but it helps you basically identify who should receive a message. So one of the biggest things that our users, our gift officers, struggle with is like hey, okay, our organization just published their impact report or they just published a blog post about some outcome that we've achieved. I want to send this to my donors, but I can never remember. There's always like 20 people and I can never remember who needs what, and so you can just paste a link in and say who are the type of people who need to get this Right and it'll tell you here are the donors who should receive this.
Speaker 3:It's such a beautiful touch point to just be like. Even if it's a New York Times story, it doesn't have to be something from your nonprofit. Hey, I read this this morning and thought of you. Right, Like it's just like beautiful stewardship, high impact, incredibly easy to do with AI, super, super, super easy. You can, of course, then have AI, like write the email, but, frankly, like I read this this morning I thought of you as kind of enough, right, let me see what else.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think automating a lot of the research work that our funders do, right, like trying to go through and pick out from like a LinkedIn profile or anything like that. You can just sort of like dump this huge text blob in there and just say like here's everything I know about Megan from her LinkedIn, from you know, like our CRM, all of this write me a one pager, right, and in that case it's still copywriting for you, but it's not copied, seen by a donor or going to be published on your social media. It's more just like hey, take all of this unstructured big blob of information and collate it for me, and that, I think, is also just a really good use case that we've seen a lot of people do, and there are, of course, many, many others. I think my personal favorite actually is people don't realize this, but if you have it on your phone, the ChatGPT app, you can go in there and when you open it up, there's a little pair of headphones right to the right of the like text box where you type in and you can have it role play with you and it will talk like a human to you, and so we're on a podcast so it's a little tough for me to show you, but you can.
Speaker 3:Yeah, let's just try it. Hold on, I'm going to do this. It's going to like load here and then I can say hey, chat, I'd like to role play with you as if I was a major gift officer at a nonprofit org, and then it'll run. Let's see how this does. Got it. Whenever you're ready to role play as a major gift officer, just let me know and I'll and I'll jump in. Feel free to set the scene or provide any context and we can take it from there.
Speaker 1:And so you can just literally have a conversation with it Like people don't know that you can do that.
Speaker 3:It's only available on mobile right you need, you can't use the website, but like if you're a new gift officer, if you feel a little nervous about approaching a donor, anything like that, like just play dress up with it. It's super fun. Actually, it's really good.
Speaker 2:It's, frankly, really just like a nice way to use it. That's so interesting. I did not know that that was an option. So I want to go back to something that you had said about how this plays into the touch points around major gifts. Right, because we know, obviously, major gift programs like that are 100 relationship building. Right, those officers are in there. They're wanting to make sure that they are taken care of and connected to their people, and I think it's interesting to say, like, hey, this article made me think of you. Or I read this this morning.
Speaker 2:Or have you seen this impact report? Have you all seen, kind of, when it comes to how that then comes back? Right, so the gift officer sends it out. Have you seen anything on the back end of what that's done in terms of building those relationships? Are there some like, hey, people think this was creepy, leave me alone. What's the what's? Is there like, maybe a downside that we want to consider? Or like, hey, here's where the line is of. Like, like you, you've stepped into knowing me too well almost what does that line look like right now?
Speaker 3:so we go to great lengths to make sure that our product and and stuff like is calibrated well to sort of not come across as creepy or anything like that. Yeah, what we have seen is like it will remember things from years ago that know that the gift officers themselves have forgotten, and it will sort of make reference to something and they'll say, like, oh man, like I forgot that happened. Wow, I can't believe it. We would never send an email without a human clicking send and reviewing a draft. Right, like we're not automating it. But if you're not careful and you don't review your emails and you're sort of careless, you could send something that an AI has drafted that you haven't fixed up, and it could come to a donor.
Speaker 3:We've had some donors come back to us and say this was really unexpected. I didn't expect this at all, but this is an organization in Virginia that we work with and they basically said look, our donors have said to us are you using AI to talk to me? Like I want you to be like in order for you to be sort of like using my dollars? Well, I want you to be investing in this technology. And they basically said like, hey, if you're not using it, you're falling behind, and I don't want to support organizations that are falling behind, right? And then they had this beautiful response where they were like, actually, you've been interacting with our gift officers for the last six months through an AI tool. You know like that's awesome. You know like that's great, and I think most of our customers I don't. I would be surprised if most of them are like being that sort of frontal about it with their donors. Yeah, but I think if you actually had the conversation with donors, it would bother them less than you think.
Speaker 2:And is there kind of an industry standard to when those disclosures happen? Right, right, like at one point do we say hey, just so you know, this is all coming from AI or that we did use AI for you know this report, this copy, this social post? At what point do we disclose that or does it not matter anymore? So we just assume that a lot of this is coming from AI.
Speaker 3:So the ethics around this are really, really interesting and we really take it very, very seriously. As far as the nonprofit industry goes, you have fundraisingai, which Nick and I sit on the board of. That's Nathan Chappelle's project. He's been a fabulous leader for the sector. I can't speak highly enough of it. Fundraisingai has published a framework of how to responsibly adopt AI and it is intended and written to apply to both vendors and organizations in the space right, so us as a vendor selling to nonprofits as well as to our customers, who are the nonprofits themselves and it does institute certain rules and expectations and stuff like that about how to do it responsibly.
Speaker 3:At Momentum, we take AI safety much more seriously than I think, most people in the world. And to get back to the question you were asking, there's this concept called human in the loop, which is that there should never be anything that an AI publishes that is sort of sent, or basically, people have the right to know when they are interacting with an AI, to know when they are interacting with an AI, and if we write a draft, a human reviews that draft and then sends it. The current consensus is that that is not considered interacting with an AI. There's a human who's reviewed it. They've made changes to the draft, they've updated it, and so that person is in the loop. Right, there's a human in the loop. Our system we don't allow you to send automated AI drafts without reviewing them first.
Speaker 3:There are some out there who feel differently. I disagree with that view, but it's still the very early days, you know. I mean, I don't want to say anybody's wrong here. I think we're still learning a ton and it's evolving quickly, and so I think for me it's really important. It's really important for our organization to make sure that we are like being leaders on the ethical side of things. But you're going to run into people who have different opinions, who feel differently. We publish, actually on our site, we've published, a set of questions that any nonprofit should ask any AI vendor, sort of like a series of questions that you should ask, because if you're shopping for a new tool or something like that, you can ask all the. You can ask the same set of questions of each vendor and their answers will be really revealing, and you should just make sure that they align with your organization and your own ethical sort of compass.
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Speaker 2:So I want to circle back, actually, to something that you had said about that group out of Virginia where it's important to donors that we are going to staying ahead.
Speaker 2:George Wiener and I actually were just having this conversation on the podcast not too long ago when he was on from Whole Whale talking about the tendency of nonprofits to be behind when it comes to tech, right. I think we all can see the use cases of that. We were just talking to somebody the other day who is just launching their Instagram account in 2024, right, there are certain pieces that just take a little longer in the nonprofit space for everybody to embrace, and I do feel like, in general, nonprofits were late to the game on social, late to the game in establishing some of those general trends outside of the for-profit industry. Look like, from your perspective, your seat on the bus where should an org be at this point? At what point would you look and say like, nope, you're behind or falling behind, or where, at this point? You know, q4 of 2024, where is a good benchmark for an organization in their use of AI at this point?
Speaker 3:I would say every organization, everybody, every person who works sort of in the professional world today. You should at least have tried it. Like you should go to catchbtcom and play with it and just have some fun and like see what you can get out of it. I actually am a little less bullish than many. It's certainly not right now at the point where it's like you absolutely must have this right. It is not as essential as like the internet today, right?
Speaker 2:Having a good website. Yeah, yeah exactly Like.
Speaker 3:Or your CRM, right, like you should have a CRM before you have AI in your team period, yeah Right. That said, you do want to be playing with it and feeling it out, because there is a ton of use case for it. I think one of the most confusing parts of AI is that it can be anything and so it's kind of nothing, unless you go in with it knowing what you're trying to get out of it. It's just this like blank screen chat bot, you know, and so you want to try to have. I would. I would say, like for everybody, spend 10 minutes messing with it.
Speaker 3:Ask your kid, ask your little niece or nephew, ask a cousin like yo, what do you do with this? Like, show me how you play with this. If you feel like that level of consternation about it, you will learn something. It will be really an interesting experience. And if what you learn is like is you're just kind of shrug and you're like I don't know how I would use this, you're not behind, like that's actually okay. There's tons of great tools out there that can help you use the technology, but it's the job of those tools to be useful to you. It's not your job to find the thing that that like. Does it for you.
Speaker 2:That's a great point. My favorite use case is actually for podcast prep. There's a great feature built in where I you know here's who I'm talking to, here's the topic of the day. It gives me the background on them and their company and any news articles that they've put out lately or interesting facts readily available on the interwebs. So what used to take me an hour and a half to two hours to do podcast prep for each episode is down to maybe 15 minutes.
Speaker 3:And that's exactly I mean, that's almost exactly how we do it for donor meetings for our users, right Like. We have to do a lot of the same stuff where it's like here's what this person's about, here's their history with your org, here's whatever any news or anything about this person that might be relevant, right Like. That's a great use case. I completely agree.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it has saved me countless hours this year.
Speaker 3:You'll have to send me whatever you did to prep for me. I would love to see. I'm just like toxically curious.
Speaker 2:Absolutely that's. I think it's become the new Googling. Yeah, it used to be like have you ever Googled yourself and seen? Now it's like have you ever looked at your chat GPT profile and what it would say if you?
Speaker 3:Okay, so go to perplexityai P-E-R-P-L-E-X-I-T-Y and this. You can ask it the same sort of research questions. It's meant to be specifically a research tool. Okay, the YouTube video that you should watch, here's all this. So it's a little closer to actually literal Google, where it will be an AI, it will write it all up for you, it will do all that, but then it will also say, like, here's where you can go, here's where I got this from all of that sort of stuff. Um, so next time, maybe next next podcast prep, you do, you can, uh, you can try.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's interesting, um, but yes, I will send you what it said about that. So tell us a little bit more about Momentum and kind of the platform that you all have built out.
Speaker 3:Sure, yeah. So we're a major gift software. We basically try to answer the question every day for a major gift officer who do I need to get in touch with, what do I need to say to them and when do I need to say it? Right, because on any given day, if you're fundraising be it you're like a major gift officer at a large university or you're just like a director of development at a small local nonprofit and knowing what donor is the highest priority donor and who you need to be engaging with is always the most important question. So we have models and algorithms built that are trying to make sure that you're always prioritizing the most important set of donors at any given time. We make sure nobody falls through the cracks like it's all automated so that you know oh, there's this like this constant thing where somebody is like I had this donor and they were really engaged and I kind of forgot about them and now it's been six months, 12 months, 18 months since I last talked to them. We completely resolve that right. We're going to make sure that you're always engaging with donors in a high quality way.
Speaker 3:We make it really easy to sort of do the outreach right, like make the call, set up the meeting, all of that sort of stuff. Parts of that we use AI, for sure. And then there's a whole other part of our product and our business which is like automation and integration, where and I think this is sort of like the beauty of AI right now is marrying it with some of these other tools where we connect to your CRM or your database and we basically use all the data from there to inform the AI and then anything you do through our system is synced back into your CRM automatically so that it's always up to date, it's always good data, it's always clean. If you've ever copied and pasted an email from your Outlook into your CRM, no more. That is just like a result, a solved problem.
Speaker 3:And that's not AI or anything, but it's one of those things that we have tried to solve for our customers.
Speaker 2:I love that. I, having seen a demo of your product, one of the best pieces that I saw in it was this idea of like hey, I am a major gift officer and I'm going to be in Chicago next week being able to tailor not only just tailor the message to these 25 people who live in Chicago, but also tailor the message specifically to other things you've talked to them about, what things you know about them all in a very one-click kind of piece. I've been very impressed with the tool, as I've seen it.
Speaker 3:And even since you've done that, we've gone further, where now you can book your trip to Chicago, where you can find who are the donors, who you should reach out to, who's based in Chicago, who do you want to reach out to write the message.
Speaker 3:But then it'll help you set up your calendar so that it's like, oh, if this person's in Lincoln Park and this person's in Wrigleyville and this person's in LaGrange right person is in the Grange right, it'll line your meetings up so that you can travel in the same direction and it's all kind of cohesive for you. And then we also have the ability to log contact reports, mobily and all of that sort of stuff so that it's just really clean and easy for you to use the. Our whole goal. Like my like, if we had a perfect tool, you would be able to spend like seven hours and 50 minutes a day talking to donors, like actually interacting with your donors, and then you have to do like 10 minutes, just a total of admin work through our system and it's all seamless and integrated for you. We're not there yet, but we're getting pretty close.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of folks listening right now who just got really excited about being able to actually focus on the work at hand instead of getting bogged down in all of the admin pieces. So, yes, I'm sure you just made some days.
Speaker 3:Love it.
Speaker 2:Okay. So, Griff, if anyone wanted to find out more about Momentum or connect with you or check out some of the resources that you've talked about so far, what's the best way for them to do that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mentioned the GPT. I would encourage everybody to go to givemomentumcom slash GPT Our blog. We have tons and tons of resources. A lot of them are about how to be ready for AI, how to prepare to use AI, how you can play with AI all that sort of stuff. I always love hearing from folks. If you want to email me, I'm griff at G-R-I-F-F at givemomentumcom.
Speaker 2:I'm always happy to sort of just chat, answer questions, like it can be really just casual, and I think those would be probably the best places. I love it, griff. Thank you so much. This has been super helpful, I think, shed a new light on AI and some of the ways that it can be helpful, instead of just being something that maybe we should be a little afraid of.
Speaker 3:Happy to do it, Megan. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2:My pleasure, this has been another episode of the Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast. I'm your host, megan Spear, and we'll see you next time.