Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the Abundant Vision Fundraising Podcast. Whether you are a seasoned professional or a first-time fundraiser, we have the advice you need to take your next step toward major gift mastery.
Speaker: I'm your host, Tom Dauber, President of Abundant Vision Philanthropic Consulting. Last week's conversation was a blast. I'm so excited to have you with me for this next segment.
Speaker: Let's get back to the show. What's working for me with AI? What have I seen success with? Well, i I think grant writing can be really helped ah by AI.
Speaker: Now, I say that with a couple of caveats. ah there's There's ways of training an AI to represent you and your organization more authentically.
Speaker: A lot of times that involves getting a lot of samples of your writing, getting a lot of samples of maybe maybe speeches you've given, magazines, things like that, and putting it into a file folder ah that you can share with the AI so it can understand what are the sorts of things your organization says about a particular issue. you know how What has worked in the past, like the previous,
Speaker: ah grants that you've written. As you develop what some people would call like a data room, you can invite that AI into that data room for learning so that it can understand, well, how would I answer this question?
Speaker: What does our elevator pitch sound like? What are the points that are relevant? um That can be really, really helpful. You still need to personally calibrate the tone and the strategy, you know but that can be really helpful.
Speaker: but Especially if, and this happens, ah especially in grant writing, is you know I've got this new grant. Many ah foundations ask the same questions.
Speaker: They just do. And those answers kind of become canned after a while. Like you just go to your old grant ah or a different grant and you get the answers from that and you paste it into the new one.
Speaker: Well, if that's really all you're doing anyway, that's that's something that AI can certainly help you for. Another thing that I've personally found helpful, and I've got a very real world example of this,
Speaker: you know Maybe six months ago, i was trying to pull together some charts and graphs ah showing some data around giving ah history.
Speaker: And um you know I was trying to pull that just writing doing using the reporting function on CRM. and was really having a hard time ah replicating other work that had been done by another person.
Speaker: And I reached out to that person. I asked them, hey, I'm not getting the same numbers as you did. Would you mind pulling this report? Because if you've pulled reports out of CRM, you know that it's a really delicate thing. it's It can be really, um depending on who's pulling it, you might get two different answers.
Speaker: At the end of the day, ended up having three different people involved with it. And many, many hours, probably six hours of work to just try and get a single chart.
Speaker: Well, a particular CRM that I was using since then has actually added integration into just the the CRM overall, as well as into their reporting page, but the part of the CRM where you just write reports, which allows you in very normal English ah to ask for different things and it will get it for you and it will get it consistently.
Speaker: um I've been incredibly impressed with it. and And in fact, I needed to generate that data again and Instead of taking like six hours and then three people's work, it took about 15 minutes.
Speaker: And it's even less time now ah because i know what the query is. In fact, I've got on my notes page, or Google Keep is what I use. um I actually have pinned to the top of my Google Keep specific queries for specific thing for reports that I run each month.
Speaker: And it's it's very reliable. it's It's accurate. And it's done the same way each time. And it is so much faster ah than in doing it with people. um So as a small shop with no ah really back of the office people on my team presently, it's been really, really, really helpful.
Speaker: And you can, I mean, so that's something that I do with fundraising activity metrics, historical fundraising, and even projections.
Speaker: you know You can AI to do even Monte Carlo simulations where you look at historical giving, compare it to present giving,
Speaker: and so you can have some sense of, well, what's this quarter going to look like? How's that going to go based on our past four or five, even 10 years, depending on how far back your data set goes, you know, if I'm at 75% of goal at the end of the third quarter, what's the likelihood that I'm going to hit goal or exceed goal.
Speaker: AI can help you do that very quickly. Um, uh, your CFO, uh,
Speaker: We'll be really happy if you can give them that data. um yeah Another thing you can do that I've found that's really handy is you can use the AI within your CRM, if you've got something like that, to generate a data set.
Speaker: ah And then you can take that data set and put it into Claude, and it will generate really great graphs for you. um Now, I will tell you, I started out using ChatGPT.
Speaker: And I found it helpful for visualization work, like creating imagery and things. But i have concluded, at least for my purposes, I prefer open AI, not open AI, Anthropics Cloud.
Speaker: My experience is that it's better at writing. It doesn't sound kind of stereotypically chat body. You know, even if you try to train people,
Speaker: OpenAI to to speak a certain way it just doesn't seem to be able to help itself. I think a thing that drives me crazy is when chatbot will use framing language around like X. X is not Y, it's Z.
Speaker: fundraising is not ah pressuring. It's inspiring, right? That sort of language. We see it a lot in writing today. If if you look for it, you'll it's everywhere. I hate it.
Speaker: I just absolutely despise it. And i also, I've never used M dashes in my writing. I don't like it. and And I think, again, I know a lot of people do like it. My stepdaughter's a great writer and she was using M-dashes before chat GPT was a thing. And i think she she kind of is upset about how that all that's gone. But no matter how many times I would ask OpenAI i to don't do those things, it still would.
Speaker: I seem have better luck with with Claude. ah in in working with it on things like that And, um but yeah, I will generate data within my CRM and then pull that into Claude and can really make some ah very nice charts and graphs that way.
Speaker: That again, would take me many hours of time if I just did them myself. um And again, I don't believe donors are going to care or my board is going to care ah that I didn't make every single graph myself, make every chart myself, and pick out all the colors. And that's that's just, that's not the relationally important part of what we do as fundraisers. and And I think as a fundraiser, you should feel free to take advantage of those tools. I mean, truthfully, my training,
Speaker: formally, is in computer art. And I can tell you many of the things that I learned how to do back in the 1990s, whether it has to do with computer animation, computer modeling, like 3D modeling, or even image manipulation on Photoshop, so many of those things that I learned to do, they're all just done with algorithms now.
Speaker: and And it's been like that for a decade or more. You know, like the fancy thing your phone will do where it will remove, you know, an unwanted person from the background of your image. That's the sort of thing. I mean, I used to go in pixel by pixel and I could fix those things and I was trained to do it.
Speaker: There's just some things that, yeah, I could do it back then and I could do it now, but why? Why spend that time if if you don't need to? There's more important things to do as a fundraiser, especially, but also as an artist, right?
Speaker: I think another thing that can be helpful is you know you know something something like a, you've got all this data in your CRM and it may have things about wealth ratings. It may have things about who's given recently, and who who's given historically.
Speaker: And in one thing I was always really good at is getting into that data pulling out massive Excel spreadsheets and analyzing that data to really understand who should i be meeting with?
Speaker: Who should I be prioritizing? Who seems like they're ready? Now, I know how to do that. I mean, it's it's very instinctual and intuitive for me because I've done it so much and I've done it for decades with great success.
Speaker: I love that that I can do it instead of spending half a day or a full day even pouring through that data to come up with that information. and love it that I can use AI to do that now.
Speaker: And I highly recommend you do that as well because it's one of those things that it really is just about the data. It really is just about pattern recognition. And if you give it the right inputs, the right query um or prompt, I'm sorry, not query.
Speaker: If you give it the right prompt, um and honestly, CLAW, ChatGPT, any of these things, if you tell it what you want to accomplish, you can ask it for the right prompt.
Speaker: what prompt would get me this output? And it will give you something that you can reuse each time to get you the type of work that you need. um But yeah, I highly recommend that as well.
Speaker: um Another thing that could be helpful, too, is if you do create this data room, if you do create a folder with all the pertinent things about your organization, it becomes very easy to pull together a case statement to...
Speaker: you know to to at least get the beginnings of something that would help you make the case, um or even a white paper for a campaign, as to what you want to do, where you want to go, why donors should support it.
Speaker: um I highly recommend that. um And that's, you know, that's, you know, for me, if I'm doing a campaign, the first thing I want to do is create a white paper. I want to build a white paper that serves as the one source of truth ah for the entire campaign.
Speaker: And every communication, every argument, everything that comes out of my organization for this campaign, it all comes out of that white paper.
Speaker: Well, if you have that white paper, if you've taken the time to build that, well, then all of a sudden you have a document that you can give to a chat bot and say, okay, this is the data set.
Speaker: This is where you get your information. Now, again, you've got interrogate You've got to review that data. You can't just trust that whatever it pulls for you is is going to be accurate.
Speaker: um You've got to read it. You've got to understand it. You need to be an expert in it yourself so that you know when something's wrong, because at least at this in the game, things will be wrong.
Speaker: And you're going to look like a fool if you're not careful about that. You know, I think, you know, putting together calendars ah or plans ah for around annual giving or or campaigns in terms of, okay, what should a timeline look like?
Speaker: And what are the steps that we should do to pull this together? I found it to be pretty effective at that. And of course, job descriptions and salary research, both for internal descriptions and and even competitive benchmarking across the sector.
Speaker: It can be a great resource for you there. Again, it all still requires your work and expertise. At this point, I would not trust it to just do everything for you, but it can be a great help to get you going.
Speaker: i think I think sometimes having something in the in your hand to edit gets you farther faster than than starting with just a white piece of paper that that you can format and do do all those things.
Speaker: So what haven't I tried? You know, i i don't know about agentic AI. You know, i I hear about it. I know you can use cloud code to kind of create very independent AI agents that can do things for you.
Speaker: In my comfort zone, in my understanding, I don't don't really know how to do that. um And I'm not sure what to do with that yet. I have people in my life that are experts that i'm I'm hoping will help me understand that and how that could potentially be integrated into a small shop that doesn't have a big budget ah to maximize the manpower, the person power, ah the woman power that we have, right?
Speaker: You know, that's the thing that I don't know much about. Again, the virtual engagement officers, um you know, like, again, see, I've seen the output of those. I've read about the impact they can have.
Speaker: I know some people are having success with them. i'm I'm still a little nervous about those. And I know the organization I'm at, certainly that would not, that is not an option.
Speaker: They're expensive. So, but maybe for your organization, maybe that's different. So that's something to think, think about. Now, in terms of prospect research, you know, again, I think there's, there could be some real opportunity there.
Speaker: You know, i I can tell you another thing that I do with it that's really helpful. In terms of putting together briefings for myself or or for an executive leader, very helpful.
Speaker: and I can go into my CRM. I can tell it who I'm meeting with and I can ask it for a briefing, a summary briefing, you know, for an upcoming appointment.
Speaker: And that's the sort of thing that would usually take me a few hours to get done. it will do it in seconds. And again, it's it's very constrained in its dataset. It's not going online to look for things.
Speaker: It's very reliable that when it's looking at the CRM and what's in there, it's very reliable in terms of what gives you. I know a lot of people are, again, are worried about hallucinations. i'm not I haven't seen hallucinations in that particular context.
Speaker: um However, if you're using something like Claude or GPT or Gemini, that can that can go online and really give you a pretty robust ah report on somebody. Now, again, you don't you don't know how accurate it is, so you've got to check it.
Speaker: ah But if you can really define for it who that person is, a lot of times it will get you what you want or at least a good starting point for it. Yeah. So I think there's a lot of potential for AI yet, ah even in things like stewardship strategy design.
Speaker: think um i think we're just at the beginning. And and yes, i I was listening to Diary of the CEO today, and he was interviewing a guy that thinks ah there's a 70% chance that AI leads to the Extinction of humanity.
Speaker: Now, am I going to be partly to blame for that, for pulling a report using AI? I i honestly don't think so. um AI in its current form, I don't think is going to do that. Now, it's going to become something, but I don't see it going anywhere.
Speaker: I think the cat's out of the bag, no matter how you feel about it. and And so the question is, are you going to use it? Are you going to use it to make a difference for the cause that you care about? um It's a tool and tools can be used for bad things.
Speaker: Tools can be used for great things. And um I really think it's important to take advantage of those tools that we have in front of us, even if we're not entirely comfortable with how they came around.
Speaker: So anyway, Again, I'm not an expert on AI. I can tell you what has worked for me and where I found it helpful. um But I welcome your questions. I welcome your comments. Maybe you've used it for other things.
Speaker: I'd love to hear from you. So thanks again for spending some time with me on our journey to major gift mastery. Have a great day. Now, if you've enjoyed this podcast, please be sure to subscribe and give us a five-star rating on your podcast provider.
Speaker: I'm your host, Tom Daubert. Thank you for joining me as we journey together towards major gift mastery on the Abundant Vision Fundraising Podcast.
