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 i'm your host tom dauber president of abundant vision philanthropic
Speaker: I think I was working off of a Word document. Maybe even Word Perfect for those of you who are as old as I am.
Speaker: i turned 50 this year, so that gives some sense of my ah vintage. But yeah, I i had... a document I printed out with all of my donors' names on it, and I would just go through it and I would talk to those people.
Speaker: um That was back in the day when I was doing what they call in the faith-based world missionary support. So I would get $25 pledges, $50 pledges, $100 pledges from ah friends and neighbors and local churches that wanted to pay my salary to work with young people in the community.
Speaker: But yeah, that's where I started 30 years ago. And today we're in the age of AI. What a radical change. I mean, I didn't even have CRM that I was working with back then.
Speaker: I didn't experience a CRM until I was eight years into my career. And um that's that's a different thing, right? When I started, mail merges were kind of cutting edge, you know, a thing you could do, right? That not every, not all of my colleagues knew how to do, but I did.
Speaker: And, uh, Boy, things have changed. And that's why in this episode, I wanted to talk a little bit about where technology is going. Now, I'm no expert on technology or artificial intelligence.
Speaker: And I know there's a lot of controversy out there. I know that some folks feel like the scraping that was done to train these AI experts chatbots was just inherently unethical and that the whole thing should be scrapped.
Speaker: I know there's some people that have real concerns about AI ah leading to the extinction of humanity. I'm not here to comment on any of that.
Speaker: Rather, kind of want to just take a look at, from a very practical standpoint, what I'm seeing and what I'm experiencing as a fundraising professional, where I'm seeing benefits um and maybe where things need to get better and maybe even some things that I have hope for in the future.
Speaker: um But I will tell you, I do use ai I have used Claude. I have used Gemini. I've used ChatGPT in um different settings for different purposes.
Speaker: And for those of you that are still kind of thinking, well, how would this work for my organization? yeah Hopefully this will be helpful if you haven't dove in yet to explore it.
Speaker: And um again, I'm no expert and I can only speak from my own experience with what I've used.
Speaker: And i'm I'm sure many of you have done really creative, useful things. And and if so, I hope you'll comment on ah LinkedIn page or shoot me an email at thomasdaubertabundantvision.net and let me know what you've done or even comment here on this podcast.
Speaker: But yeah, Yeah, I began using ah because I've been working my last two stops in very small shops ah with just a handful of fundraisers and really no back office support at all.
Speaker: and And so when you don't have a lot of people, you have to look to technology to try and make up for that. And um back in the day, 30 years ago, that meant doing mail merges instead of writing each email separately and personalizing it, right?
Speaker: But today, means asking a chatbot to do something for you that you may not have time to do yourself. Now, a couple of things just to address. um I know that there is concern that ah dependence on AI ah could somehow undermine authenticity in dealing with donors.
Speaker: What I mean is this, is fundraising is built on trust and relationships. um And if we're inauthentic, if we're if all of our material is being produced by chatbots in a way that isn't authentic to the organization, that doesn't really represent us in our voice, well, that can be a problem.
Speaker: If I just have some artificial intelligence reaching out to my donors as a point of engagement, I don't think that's ideal either.
Speaker: I think many of us have experienced AI customer service bots on the phone. And um I find myself having very little patience with them.
Speaker: And you know they they'll ask me a question, I will give the answer and they will misinterpret what I say. i know that AI has been used in the past in drive-throughs around the country. I think it was McDonald's maybe or White Castle. I can't remember which one, but it ended up getting recalled in many places because it was just leading to really bad customer service experiences. And and so I think there's a real legitimate criticism, at least at this point,
Speaker: about AI maybe not being the best thing ah for customers and clients and donors, right? and And ultimately, because we're a trust-based industry or a trust-based organization,
Speaker: practice yeah you might say, if we're relying on it to do relational work with us, we're not really building authentic relationships more quickly by relying on it.
Speaker: but But what we can do is we can automate the things in our life as fundraisers that aren't relationship-based.
Speaker: and And I'll talk about that more in just a bit. buts But it's important to just recognize AI does not replace relationship work. Yeah, I don't believe donor would care if I used AI to sort some data or evaluate some data.
Speaker: I think they would care if I had a chat bot call them and ask them for an appointment. I don't think they'd like that as much. um And I think it's also important to be honest when we use AI for something.
Speaker: and We don't want to take credit for things that we didn't do. Not necessarily something we need to announce necessarily, but what we want to be transparent about ah the work we do and how we do.
Speaker: And so the question before we get into how one might use AI is what can we use it for? um Again, i think it's really helpful for synthesizing information, looking for patterns, trying to understand um the data that you already have.
Speaker: And I see that as important because it's really helpful when it comes to doing things quickly and efficiently. But we only want to do that in contexts where quality doesn't degrade, right? I mean, if you had a job description to write, I think it's totally fine to use AI for that.
Speaker: If you had some benchmarking to do, I think it's totally fine to use AI for that. um AI can very quickly scan a lot of data who to understand things about your industry. Like what's what's an appropriate percentage of your budget to be spending on fundraising?
Speaker: It can get you that answer. Now, I know there's a lot of concerns about hallucinations. Is the AI um you know making things up? And you've you've you've got to be, you need to check that data.
Speaker: The interactions I have with AI, a lot of times I talk about them in terms of being interrogations. It will suggest something. It may produce something. But then I'm going to probably spend a number of hours interrogating that data and asking questions and challenging it and asking for sources.
Speaker: um If you think that you can just get away with offloading a whole bunch of work to AI, at least at this point in the game, without checking it, I think you're going to be setting yourself up for real problems.
Speaker: um Another good thing AI is really great at is is looking for patterns that you and I may miss or we may just not have time. Digging through large sets of data to see, well, are there patterns here that would indicate that a donor might be ready for a larger ask um or that this might be an ideal time to go try to visit with this donor?
Speaker: That's what it's really, really great with is looking for patterns and and synthesizing and analyzing data. But again, with any type of output like that, you've got check it.
Speaker: You've got to review it. You've got to calibrate it. I think AI is really, really helpful for people who are experts and have enough expertise to be able to tell whether or not the output from the chat bot is good or not.
Speaker: If you don't have that expertise, I think it's really dangerous because you you don't know what you're getting. um It could be really bad, but you wouldn't know. So I think sometimes when not to use it, one is when you really need a lot of authenticity.
Speaker: I wouldn't have AI call a donor, a first-time donor on the phone to say thank you. I do that personally in my organization.
Speaker: and And I call the person. I tell them how important their gift is and why it matters to us and why our mission is important. And I think if I had a chat bot doing that, it would come across as really insincere and it would not make the personal connection that you need to have with a human being.
Speaker: And I know people using virtual um engagement officers around the world, in higher ed especially, i think there's a case to be made for that.
Speaker: I'm a little skeptical. ah But I understand if you have half a million alumni and you have 200 fundraisers, it can be hard to connect with each of those people individually.
Speaker: That's a conversation for another time. I'd love to have one of those folks on actually just just to talk a bit. But... um But, you know, theres there's something to be said for a personal connection and and certainly ask.
Speaker: It requires a lot of times some conviction. It requires some nuance. and And in the context of the conversation as a fundraiser, a lot of times you're making ah judgments about where to take the conversation and how to interact with that donor.
Speaker: And um I'm not sure that I trust a bot to do that. really. You know, I think too, when you're dealing with donor privacy um and donor intent, that's that's something too that I would be very careful about using with, um you know, especially, you know, there's different types of ways to work with, like say, ChatGPT.
Speaker: if If you just have a free account and you're going on there, The data that you're using is being used to train that chatbot.
Speaker: And so if you were to put donor data, sensitive donor data, giving history with identifiable names, that sort of thing, into that chat bot, you're risking making your private data available ah to OpenAI.
Speaker: And I just wouldn't do that. I think that's really unwise. If you're going to do something like that, You've got to make sure that you have an account with them that's that's a subscription-based one that's paid, ah where it's explicitly stated that that data will never be used by the company. You've got to have some walls to protect your data there.
Speaker: you know And a lot of times the work that we do as fundraisers really requires us knowing ah specific culture organizationally, um and maybe even some unwritten rules that just wouldn't be obvious to to a robot, right?
Speaker: And if the work you're doing requires some of that stuff, that is, again, something I would not rely on AI for. um And lastly, If you haven't thought for yourself as a person how you would explain something you've generated with AI, I would not present it to a donor. or Because if they start interrogating you about the document and you can't answer it, you're going to look like a fool.
Speaker: If all you can say is, well, i actually don't know the answer to that question because AI produced this for me and I don't actually know if it's right or not. that That's not a position to put yourself in as a professional. You're going immediately undermine that donor or colleague's confidence in you. So those would be good ways to not use AI.
Speaker: um And so just ask yourself, As you're thinking about, should I use AI for a particular project or not? Ask yourself two questions. Would you be comfortable telling a donor or a board member that you used AI on a particular thing?
Speaker: If yes, it's probably fine. If you're a little nervous or embarrassed, that's probably an indicator that maybe you shouldn't. That's all the time we have today, but be sure to tune in next week to hear the next part of this exciting conversation.
Speaker: Now, if you've enjoyed this podcast, please be sure to subscribe and give us a five-star rating on your podcast provider. 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.
