AI Without The Hype

In this episode, Sal Salpietro, Chief Growth Officer at Daytaro, unpacks what AI really means for nonprofits—where 82% use AI but only 10% have a policy. He offers a simple filter for evaluating tools (does it still work with the AI turned off?) and distinguishes AI-enabled "helpers" from AI-native "doers."

He also shows how to scale AI without losing the human side of fundraising, sharing real examples of predictive modeling that reorders donor outreach and slashes list-building time. Plus, why nonprofits can't afford to stand still—and two book picks to close.

Transcript

Donor Report And Show Welcome

SPEAKER_00 0:00

In 2025, donor behavior broke the assumptions most teams still used to plan. FundraiseUp's Pulse of the Donor 2026 gives you benchmark data on what changed and what to do next. Download the free report today at fundraiseup.com. Welcome back to the Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Spear, joined today by my friend Sal. Sal Sal Pietro is the Chief Growth Officer at Daytaro, and we're going to be digging into one of, I would say one of our most requested topics lately is anything having to do with AI. And so I'm very excited to have Sal on to dig into this and tap into his expertise. Sal, welcome in.

SPEAKER_02 0:42

Hey Megan, how are you?

SPEAKER_00 0:44

So good. So glad to have you here, my friend.

SPEAKER_02 0:46

Likewise.

Sal’s Path Into Nonprofit Tech

SPEAKER_00 0:47

So tell our audience a little bit about yourself and your background that brought us to the conversation today.

SPEAKER_02 0:53

Yeah, um, I'll warp speed through my background to where I am now. Worked at a university, then worked in tech startups, e-commerce platforms, where I think my university work kind of gave me like some of the nonprofit. It's like a cousin to nonprofits, right? Universities. And, you know, um, they have some of the mindset, but they operate differently. Um then the e-commerce and tech startup world really shaped my view of what good and effective technology needs to be. Then I moved into the nonprofit space in as leading a team for a large nonprofit in digital fundraising, where I learned quickly that the tech was not where it should be or not where I expected it to be based on my prior experiences.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:39

And then from there, and that kind of got a bit of a fire kind of raging inside of me at that point. Like, what do you mean it's not mobile responsive? What do you mean this isn't possible with this software? Uh, et cetera. And then from there, I moved through a spam email, replied to it from the fundraise up founders. And I said, Yeah, I'll give it a shot. Let me try your software. And I said, This is amazing. If you ever want to do anything together, let me know. And now they're off and running. And just recently I joined the team at Daytaro as chief growth officer to try to apply some of those learnings to a different part of the donor journey and applying AI to that, the other end of the conversion side. So the growth and retention side. So that's ever that's all of it, pretty much.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Very cool. Very good. Well, that AI side is definitely what we're gonna tap into because I um I saw a LinkedIn post from you not too long ago that admittedly the first line of it stopped me in my tracks.

AI Use Without Guardrails

SPEAKER_00 2:35

So good on you, because anybody who's anybody who manages to like stop my my general scrolling, I feel like is someone I need to talk to. But the stat that you opened with was that 82% of nonprofits use AI, but only 10% have a policy for it. Right. Which is super unregulated. I didn't I guess I didn't realize it was quite that dramatic. But then you go on to explain in that post the kind of the difference between how we think about AI and how people experience it. So let's dive in there because I would I'm gonna venture a guess to say that most people who given the stat that I just read, most people who are listening are probably not in that 10%. Most have probably have no guardrails around the idea of AI within their organizations. So let's start there. If somebody, let's base level assume we're fine to dip our toe into the world of AI, we might have people that are using it one-off here and there, but we have no policy around it whatsoever. How do leaders need to start thinking about some of those guide rails?

SPEAKER_02 3:50

So that stat is a very macro stat. And then when you zoom into obviously the larger organizations, that number gets higher. Yeah. But even then you're at like 40%, uh, where the majority don't have one. AI policy. I've got conflicting often kind of ideas about AI policy. When someone says, Well, I can't use that tech because we don't have an AI policy. My next question is, well, why don't we just duplicate your cloud storage policy and use that? Because all your data is on a cloud storage anyway. And they go, well, we don't have one of those either. Okay, so what's like what's stopping any of those tech companies for just saying, oh, there's your CRM data and you've uploaded it to the cloud and it's ours, and we'll do whatever we want, right? So, okay, yes, there's nuances. People will say, well, AI and it could learn and manipulate and hallucinate and all that. Yes, fine. But I don't know if not having the policy is the reason to not use tech that that is enabled with AI or is is AI uh focused. The policy, the word policy, I think scares a lot of people from taking action.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:00

I think about government policy, if I think about a university policy, like those are heavy things to push through. I think an AI policy can start with six bullet points that you put on you print out and put on the fridge with and hold it up with a magnet. It can just be like, don't be stupid, don't use anybody's face, don't upload personal information to tools that are free, et cetera, et cetera. That can be the policy. Yeah. To start and go from there. So there's a lot I think in in both sides of that uh conversation to to dive into if we wanted to. We could also spend the entire you know 30 minutes on that.

SPEAKER_00 5:39

So I uh the way that you go through this post, then we talk about you talk about AI either being a helper or a doer.

unknown 5:46

Yep.

AI Enabled Versus AI Native

SPEAKER_00 5:47

And then also the people who are using it and their experience with it as enabled versus native. So help us define a little bit about that when or walk us through maybe your thought process in how we look at those tools.

SPEAKER_02 6:03

So the native is the doer, and the enabled is a helper. And this really comes down to if you remove AI from the tool, is it still a valuable tool? AI enabled, yes, right? Um Bloomerang, fantastic platform. They rolled out Penny, the AI assistant, etc. Bloomerang was a perfectly great CRM before Penny rolled out. So that is that's enabled now. It's been enabled with AI. And then when you look at the native side, we are looking at tools that if you take the AI out, it doesn't work anymore. Yeah. Um the the filter question in your head is and if you're if you're evaluating new software or new platforms, you go, if you ask the sales rep, you say, if I turn off the AI, does this still work for me? And if the answer is no, then that is an AI native platform, right? Um so when we look at helper and doer, the helper is going to accelerate and kind of take care of some of the grunt work for us. And doer is more a more central part of your workflow as an organization. It becomes the part that builds the list for you. It automatically alerts you when things, you know, when it finds a mid-level donor prospect, whereas a helper is more around help me write the right email for this person and so on. So I don't know if that helps a little bit frame up the helper versus doer, but that's kind of that.

SPEAKER_00 7:41

So, okay, so if I am, I'm let's put myself into the seat. If I am an

Cutting Through AI Buzzwords

SPEAKER_00 7:46

executive director of a of a nonprofit, obviously AI is the buzzword. Everybody, every tool, every platform, every feature that everyone wants to talk about is AI right now. What is that the question then that I need to start asking to cut through the noise of what of how to evaluate these things? Because I I think the pushback that I get from a lot of folks is as we have AI discussions in general. I was just at the digital ministry summit at NRB last week and it was all about AI. And the pushback seems to be I mean, we're doing fine without it. I don't understand what it would do. I don't understand how our organization just helps feed the homeless, right? I don't know why we would need AI support for that. So when you when we're talking about these tools, and this is the feature everybody wants to push, the pushback seems to be, I don't even understand what I would do with it. I don't understand the point. So, how do we bridge that? How do we help leaders to see what it can do and also cut through the noise to evaluate what they actually need within their organizations versus what's just fluff and buzzword and you know the shiny.

SPEAKER_02 8:58

So the best, yeah, the best AI implementations are, and this is this falls under the enabled bucket, are those that don't disrupt your daily workflow and they just make it better. Example. I don't know if you have updated your iPhone, but now it'll it can summarize your text messages for you. And it'll just show you a like say your friend writes you, or my mom, a three-paragraph text message, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 9:25

And it'll just summarize for me. It'll say, mom asking about you know, June family trip and how you're doing, right? It'll summarize it. So that doesn't change my workflow, it just makes it better. Netflix uses AI to recommend things, it doesn't change how I look for things, it just makes it easier, etc. So that's the best implementation, is when it doesn't disrupt you. Now, to go to your point about we're doing fine without it.

Why Nonprofits Cannot Sit Still

SPEAKER_01 9:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:53

The homeless and the homelessness crisis, as a stand-in for insert any mission here or any cause, is created by inequalities in society. And the those inequalities typically stem from for-profit motives. We're gonna get a little philosophical here for a second.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 10:17

Those for-profit motives and industries and whatever it might be that is exacerbating or causing homelessness or food poverty or deforestation or oil drilling or polar bears disappearing, they're all using AI to advance their own missions, to increase shareholder value. If we don't, I feel like we have a moral predicament in allowing that gap to grow because they're going to move faster while we stay put, because quote unquote, we're doing fine without it.

SPEAKER_00 10:58

Ooh.

SPEAKER_02 11:00

So I I really get a bit like I get goosebumps just saying kind of that kind of thing because I'm like, what are we here to do? Now, if we're trying to solve this issue or just maintain status quo and feed a hundred homeless people a day, great. But that number of them is going to grow because the big machine is moving forward with this technology. So that's one part. Now we have to think about are we looking to make small improvements or step change as an organization? We could talk about that a little bit more as we progress, but I think that depends on the organization where they are.

SPEAKER_00 11:34

Okay. So I think right now where I see the biggest pieces play like the biggest push is on the donor side. Right. And so because there's not the robot is not coming to feed the homeless the homeless, right? That is still a human function. We're not necessarily replacing or not necessarily using those tools on the programmatic side of the house, right? It's on that back office side. And so donor definitely, and I and I see it every day, all you have to do is open LinkedIn, right? And some new product is launching their AI feature. Um when it comes to, and I I would tend to put myself in a little bit of an old school mindset of on the fundraising side, right?

Keeping Fundraising Human With Predictions

SPEAKER_00 12:20

That fundraising is ultimately about relationships.

SPEAKER_02 12:24

Yes, I love where you're going. I don't know where, but exactly, but let's go.

SPEAKER_00 12:32

Right. So what it talk to us then from the perspective of that of how do we not lose the human connection? I am all for taking advantage of AI tools. I listen, Aaron Daltman, Powered by Text, shout out to Aaron, introduced me to the thing that has helped save my email inbox and helped has made my whole life so much more manageable. Love the tools. But how do we use it for an how do we make sure in a donor perspective that we're not losing that human element? The element that says, I am a part of something because I support this mission and I I participate in that giving and not make it just transactional and kind of lose that connection piece. What does that balance look like for you?

SPEAKER_02 13:19

Uh let me see where to even start on this. Mid-level donor.

SPEAKER_00 13:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 13:23

Someone gives $500 to your organization. That probably triggers them getting added to a mid-level prospect list.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 13:31

Right?

SPEAKER_00 13:31

In most orgs, yeah, I would think.

SPEAKER_02 13:33

In most orcs. Now, let's say that gift came from a Dollar Tree manager that his entire bonus was $500 that year. He said, I want to give it away. And a week later he gets a phone call saying, Can you give us $5,000? And $5,000 feels like a number that they've never seen in their bank account fully before for many of us. What does that human interaction do to that person? Okay. It's a little disheartening. A little disheartening. Yeah. I thought I was doing something amazing. They just really made me feel like I didn't mean anything. Now, what am I getting at? I'm getting at it's not about replacing human interaction, it's about efficiently applying human interaction. So I'm talking from the perspective and why I get excited about what I do now here at Daytaro. For example, we can use AI predictive modeling to say, I know he gave 500, but all the signals that you can't put on a spreadsheet tell me that that person is not the person that should be at the top of your list to call.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:47

However, this $50 donor, and this is a true story, you should call them. Turned out this donor was the fourth wealthiest person in Canada because AI picked up a recommendation, a signal mix that said, call him. Don't call $500 donor, because that's all they got. $500, when you say as an organization, arbitrary threshold, $500, put them on the mid-level prospect list. Wildly inefficient. That's all we had before. But now I've got my mid-level gift officer that's going to be demoralized because half the phone calls she makes or she makes are going to, or he is going to fall on deaf ears. And I'm going to make a lot of people feel bad. And half of them will result in a proper fig. But if I can use technology to say, hey, let me reorder these, let me cut this 25% out of your list because the signals don't tell us that's where you should put your effort. Take your human connection and human relationship, put it on these ones, regardless of the single attribute there. Does that help frame it a bit? So I'm looking at to help create efficiency, not replace humans. I did a session yesterday with the BCSPCA at the For the Pause conference they do. And she said, before we applied AI to create our list, it would take me a day and a half to create my RFM list for my direct mail campaigns. Now it takes us about two and a half hours, and they're more effective. I'm saving about 20% in costs, higher ROI, and I've got more time to build other campaigns. That's what it's about.

SPEAKER_00 16:53

Your donation form is now your most valuable asset. Donors who trusted their experience gave more, gave again, and told others. Stop guessing what will work in 2026 and start using real data. Download FundraiseUp's free Pulse of the Donor report today at fundraiseup.com so something that I think is interesting to think about within that is the experience of the human as a fundraiser. Right.

What AI Changes For Fundraising Careers

SPEAKER_00 17:35

Because I think that a lot of times and I came up through that line, right? I came up through the fundraising line and had to kind of cut my chops and figure those things out for myself.

SPEAKER_01 17:46

Right.

SPEAKER_00 17:47

And I think that I it has given me the experience to do my current job well of having to go through those pieces. So I'm curious then where the impact is that you see for folks who are maybe just starting out in a fundraising career. If this is where they get to start, then where could they go? Right? Like if I didn't have all of that time in in kind of I don't want to say wasted, but I the in the same example, right? If it didn't if it didn't take me two and a half days to do something and it only took me two and a half hours, how much further could uh could we all be in our careers? Right? Like where if this is the plan and this is where we're headed, and folks who are coming into fundraising now with all of this, what's your crystal ball say? Where are we going? Like, where are we headed that this is the jumping point?

SPEAKER_02 18:41

It's I look at my daughter as like as you know, she's nine years old. Yeah, like that's the next generation. I tell her sometimes she'll ask me some hard questions. Why is this happening in the world? Why are this thing or this animal or whatever? And I'll say, because a lot of adults made mistakes, and it's up to your, you, and your friends when you get older to help us try to fix it, and I'll support you in that, right? So all to say, I think the next generation will be much more comfortable with this. Who knows if there's an another step change in technology that happens between now and then? I don't know. I hope not. You know, we can only take so much as humans. But for those that are getting into fundraising and nonprofits now, I think start with these tools that are AI enabled, right? Um, I think the AI native tools, they're a pretty big lift, they're a pretty big mindset shift for organization. It's really if an organization wants to make step changes and really go, you know what, we need up a level instead of incremental uh improvements with enabled. But start with enabled, start seeing those benefits. And I always talk about it's not about saving costs or just, you know, uh saving time. It's about reallocating time. It's I just I saved $20,000 on my direct mail campaign. Let me put that into a social campaign. Or, you know, I've saved two days on preparing this list. Now I can finally get to that thing that I've been wanting to do. That thing might be reading a book. We were talking about this before, Megan.

SPEAKER_01 20:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:16

Maybe you want to read a couple chapters of a book that will help you in your professional career. Maybe you want to tackle that thing on the website navigation that's been bothering you for six months and you can finally get to it because you have this time saved. But to your point, how much further could we be not only in our careers, but in the missions that we're fulfilling?

SPEAKER_00 20:35

Yeah. So

A Practical Adoption Framework

SPEAKER_00 20:37

I something to take this back to your the original LinkedIn post that caught my attention. Um talk to us a little bit about your kind of your framework and your way of thinking for how to decide which is best for what you want to do. How do we because I do think there are a lot of leaders right now going, yep, we gotta do something. Uh we gotta do something, but I don't even know what that is. So what's the how do you know which way to go, which path is right?

SPEAKER_02 21:09

Yeah. It depends on how ambitious and aggressive the organization is and the size and capacity and so on. So um I had built a little chart and I and I have it up on my screen here in a nutshell, and we'll just kind of run through this little chart. When you look at AI versus, sorry, enabled versus native, the helper, the doer, the philosophy around the enabled is it's adding AI to what we already do to help it go a little easier. And when you're looking at AI native, you're saying, let me rebuild my process for what AI can do for me. There's a difference there, right? Um quick example using AI to create an Excel formula on a spreadsheet will save you the 15 minutes that you would spend to try to figure out how to make that formula, but you're still doing a spreadsheet. But using predictive AI models, To create your list for you completely, that's a whole different process that you need to enable. So that's the philosophy. We for enabled, we're gonna get quick wins. The workflows are the same, they're familiar. When we move to native, the doer, it's at scale, it's predictive, it's a lot of change. An example of each uh on the helper, drafting a donor email, writing a formula in Excel. The doer, it's gonna predict who's gonna cancel a gift for you, you know, a monthly subscription for you. It's going to create your your to-do list for you in the morning and know where to focus priorities on. So that's the framework. To go back to where to start, if you're a smaller org, all the way, start with the very simple AI policy. If you if the word policy scares you, the AI six do's and don'ts bullet list, print it out, stick it out in a fridge in the kitchen, give everybody a PDF to put on their wall, whatever, and then start using those enabled tools. So Blue Marine has it built in. You know, all so many tools are using it built in. And if you're looking for more than that, start looking at native tools. Talk to me, talk to all the guys and girls in this space that are really in it. You have Slave, she leads with AI, uh, which is a female-led uh AI initiative, and so on and so forth, fundraising to AI and so on. But in the article, I created a quiz that you can fill out a question or so. You say yes or no, tally it up, and whichever side you're on for that. It's I think it's very easy to determine what point you're at based on the responses for that. So I think that quiz in there is probably helpful for that.

SPEAKER_00 23:45

Yeah. And I I have that link, so we'll make sure we link that in the show notes. I guess my my closing question on this would be in your personal opinion, is it one or the other, or do we just need both?

SPEAKER_02 24:03

You need to start with one.

SPEAKER_00 24:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 24:08

And your timeline, or was it MMV, your your mileage may vary in how fast you get to the full native adoption? Depends on your org. In five years, you you've got to be moving to the native, or else we're getting further behind. We're not going to be able to attract talent to work with us because they want those organizations that are using tools like that. We're going to have burnout from our staff saying this organization isn't letting me use any of these tools. I'm out because I can't spend another day in a spreadsheet uh, you know, for three days, you know, and so on. So I think there's a number of ramifications, but we'll all get there eventually.

SPEAKER_00 24:51

Yeah. Because it just, yeah, it really struck me as you were explaining kind of the difference. Well, no, I I want both of those things, right? I want the I want the helper that's gonna help make my workload easier, but I also want that that native predictive. I yeah. I'm gonna have to choose. I would like both, please.

SPEAKER_02 25:09

Yeah, I get it. It's like, you know, you know, you get one dessert on the menu, and I asked my daughter at a restaurant. She's I want dessert, she says, I want this and this, and you gotta choose one. We can if your organization is at a point where it's ripe and ready for a big change, go for it. Go all in, double down. Otherwise, I think you're kind of delaying the inevitable.

SPEAKER_00 25:29

Yeah. I agree.

SPEAKER_02 25:31

Yeah.

How Daytaro Scores Donor Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 25:32

So obviously, you know, you're coming at this from a specific perspective with Daytaro. Tell us a little bit more about the work that you all do uh and what that looks like AI-wise for your company and the organizations that you help.

SPEAKER_02 25:45

So I I want to step even one level higher. I come at this from a perspective of organizational resiliency and efficiency. And that now has followed me from fundraise up to here and focusing on the donor experience and making that just a better experience. A donation form that has Apple Pay and is mobile responsive is just as important as not calling the guy or girl that gave 500 bucks and that's all they got in their bank account and not calling them. Those are equally important donor experiences that need to be addressed.

SPEAKER_01 26:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:20

Now, Daytaro, what we're doing is we're plugging into the CRM, we're ingesting all the data in a privacy compliant way, GDPR, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we're running predictions and modeling on which donors are most likely to X, right, be a mid-level donor, cancel their monthly gift in the next 60 days, most likely to convert to a monthly gift, most likely to be a planned gift, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we're running prediction scores on all of them, which then get pushed back into your CRM to automatically create lists that are prioritized and very efficient. And that is what results in not calling the $500 donor that is at the top of their capacity. That is what results in spending half a day, not two days on a spreadsheet, and so on and so forth.

SPEAKER_00 27:09

So good. And if folks were curious about that, wanted to learn more about Daytaro or connect with you to learn more, how would we do that?

SPEAKER_02 27:17

I would email me at salvatore at daytaro.io uh d-a-t-ar-o.io, or find me on LinkedIn. Go to the website if you want to, but if you go through me, I'm gonna make it super easy and and uh I'll protect you from the uh the demo hounds.

SPEAKER_00 27:32

Fantastic. I would I and I don't say this lightly or with about a lot of people. If this is a subject that interests you at all, absolutely connect with Sal on LinkedIn. Because the way that he frames it and the the wisdom that he has to share is fantastic. So highly recommended as a resource. Um

Book Picks And Closing

SPEAKER_00 27:55

okay, speaking of resources, our closing question, we've kind of dubbed this year as the year of learning. So I'm curious for you, what's a book that's on your man, everyone's got to read this because it really impacted me or the way that I think about something. What's something that you would recommend for that must-read list?

SPEAKER_02 28:14

I'm going to mention two books that coincidentally were gifted to me by Justin McCord of RKD Group.

SPEAKER_00 28:23

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 28:23

And he sent one last year and sent one this year, and these have now become my annual book that I read kind of things. Uh one is called Soundtracks by John Acuff.

SPEAKER_00 28:34

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 28:35

And the overall premise of that book is you've got to change the soundtrack in your mind if you want things to change. I applied that personally at the time I had some challenges. I applied that professionally. Uh, the the sector, if you want to stop, we can't keep saying, oh, donors are dropping, dollars are this, we're not, you know, efficient, we don't have a policy. If you don't change the soundtrack, change the soundtrack. So that's one book. It's called Soundtracks. And then the second would be Chop Wood Carry Water. I forget the author's name, but it really goes into how the hard work needs to happen before you get the glory and how how much the details matter in the work you do.

SPEAKER_00 29:17

Excellent. I like the sound of both of those.

SPEAKER_02 29:20

They're fun.

SPEAKER_00 29:21

Plus, I I just really enjoy Johnny Cup's writing. So that's definitely a good adding to my list for sure. Awesome. Excellent. Sal, thank you so much for being here. I always appreciate the conversation and the the wisdom and reasonableness with which you approach a topic that can be a little scary for folks. So thank you. I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_02 29:41

Thank you so much for having me. I try, I try to temper down some of my ideas a little bit. They can get fiery, but uh thanks for having me. And let me let me share some of it.

SPEAKER_00 29:51

Absolutely. This has been another episode of the Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Spear, and we'll see you next time.