# Nonprofit AI: Carve Out Time To Experiment with AI

An episode of [Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1536843269), 22 Sep 2026, 30 min.

Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1029925/episodes/19848485-nonprofit-ai-carve-out-time-to-experiment-with-ai.mp3

Carolyn Woodard digs into something that hits closer to home this week: a conversation with a friend who knows that parts of her job could be automated, but can't find the hour to actually build it. That tension of fixing the plane while flying it turns out to be a well-documented, structural problem across the nonprofit sector, not a personal failing, and Carolyn spends the episode working through what the research says and what to actually do about it if you need to find the time to look into using AI. What happens when funders and nonprofits invest seriously in nonprofit capacity and cutting down on busy work? What's the intersection with using AI to cut down on those repetitive time-sucking tasks? This episode covers: • Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's "Pace the Frontier" essay is still generating responses from every direction, and the UN General Assembly opened this week with AI as a headline issue - worth watching. • A peer-reviewed 2026 study on nonprofit administrative burden, paired with a nearly 20-year-old RAND finding that one agency spent almost half its staff time on compliance alone, shows this isn't a new problem. A recent post from Vu Le's Nonprofit AF asks the sharper question of how much of that busywork nonprofits and funders create for each other unnecessarily. • Trust-based philanthropy has real data behind it: a Center for Effective Philanthropy study of MacKenzie Scott's unrestricted giving found that over a third of nonprofit leaders reported reduced burnout, and recipient organizations held roughly double the cash reserves of comparable orgs. • A Harvard Business Review field study found AI doesn't automatically free up time. Without deliberate norms around pacing and boundaries, saved time just gets absorbed into doing more, faster, indefinitely. • A practical, step-by-step way to actually carve out the hour: audit last week's tasks, filter for frequent and time-consuming ones, pick just one, define success in a sentence, and pilot it with a human still in the loop. • What to do if you're not sure what your organization's AI policy is? That's not a reason to stop investigating, but it is a reason to ask before you run anything through a tool. Resources Mentioned: • "We Must Pace the Frontier" – Dario Amodei – https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier • "Challenges, Choices and Common Applications: Funders' Exercise of Power and Its Consequences for Nonprofits' Administrative Burden" – Katy Adams, Journal of Philanthropy (2026) – https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/nvsm.70064 • Meeting Funder Compliance (2006) – RAND Corporation – https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2006/RAND_MG505.sum.pdf • "Is a lot of our work just creating work for other people to do?" – Vu Le, Nonprofit AF – https://www.nonprofitaf.com/is-a-lot-of-our-work-just-creating-work-for-other-people-to-do/ • "Breaking the Mold: The Transformative Effect of MacKenzie Scott's Big Gifts" – Center for Effective Philanthropy (2025) – https://cep.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/CEP_Breaking_the_Mold_FNL.pdf • "AI Doesn't Reduce Work—It Intensifies It" – Harvard Business Review – https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it • Case Study: Nonprofits Leveraging Microsoft 365 Copilot for Impact – TechSoup – https://blog.techsoup.org/en-us/posts/case-study-nonprofits-leveraging-microsoft-365-copilot-for-impact • Nonprofit Success Stories (Gemini) – Google for Nonprofits – https://www.google.com/nonprofits/find-solutions/ • Brian Impact Foundation Case Study – Anthropic – https://www.anthropic.com/customers/brian-impact-foundation • "GitLab hosts nonprofit AI demo day to woo investors to innovation fund" – Chronicle of Philanthropy – https://www.philanthropy.com/news/gitlab-hosts-nonprofit-ai-demo-day-to-woo-investors-to-innovation-fund/ • AI Acceptable Use Policy Template – Community IT Innovators –…

## Transcript

[0:23] Carolyn Woodard: Hello, and welcome to the Community IT Innovators Midweek Nonprofit AI Check-in.
[0:29] Carolyn Woodard: I'm Carolyn Woodard, your host.
[0:32] Carolyn Woodard: Start with my usual disclaimer: I'm not particularly techie.
[0:36] Carolyn Woodard: I'm not an expert in AI.
[0:38] Carolyn Woodard: I have been working in nonprofits for so long now, decades, and uh working with tech for nonprofits and seeing nonprofits adopt different, you know, moving to the cloud and using CRMs and using social media and all different kinds of tech adaptations.
[0:56] Carolyn Woodard: So I'm I'm just fascinated by this moment.
[0:59] Carolyn Woodard: And um just there's as I always say, there's this fire hose of information coming at us.
[1:03] Carolyn Woodard: So I'm hoping that this podcast is helping to curate and control everything that's coming at you and really relate what's happening in AI more generally, policy worldwide, uh, to what is going to happen and is happening in our sector, how nonprofits are using philanthropy, foundations, um, associations.
[1:25] Carolyn Woodard: So, what is happening to our sectors, the communities that we care about, the work that we're doing, and how AI is intersecting with all of that.
[1:34] Carolyn Woodard: So if you have any questions, I love to get uh feedback and uh QA.
[1:40] Carolyn Woodard: So you can contact me through the podcast, uh, through our website, on LinkedIn, on Reddit.
[1:47] Carolyn Woodard: Um, there's lots of ways to get a hold of me.
[1:49] Carolyn Woodard: So I love hearing from you.
[1:50] Carolyn Woodard: Uh
[1:51] Carolyn Woodard: I wanted to do just a quick recap for anyone who missed last week.
[1:55] Carolyn Woodard: Um, also, it's just still all in the news.
[1:59] Carolyn Woodard: Uh, anthropic CEO uh Dario Amodei published this essay called Pace the Frontier.
[2:07] Carolyn Woodard: And he called for AI labs to deliberately slow development of their most advanced models.
[2:13] Carolyn Woodard: There was this resignation very public of a senior anthropic researcher.
[2:19] Carolyn Woodard: Um and within 24 hours of Amadei publishing his essay, OpenAI, uh, XAI, and Google Deep Mind CEOs had all said something similar.
[2:31] Carolyn Woodard: They were down with this idea.
[2:34] Carolyn Woodard: And then uh, you know, it's evolving.
[2:37] Carolyn Woodard: So just a this is just a quick update.
[2:40] Carolyn Woodard: There's nothing really happening.
[2:41] Carolyn Woodard: Um I'll be interested to continue to continue to keep an eye on, you know, the their meeting at the UN General Assembly this week.
[2:49] Carolyn Woodard: They're talking about AI as one of their headline issues.
[2:52] Carolyn Woodard: There's still lots of hot takes coming out in response to that Pace the Frontier essay.
[2:57] Carolyn Woodard: There's, you know, the kind of these doomsday scenarios are kind of spiraling.
[3:01] Carolyn Woodard: Um, nothing has been resolved.
[3:03] Carolyn Woodard: There are regulatory frameworks out there already that could be used.
[3:06] Carolyn Woodard: There's a big response of, well, if you're so worried about it, why don't you just slow down yourself?
[3:12] Carolyn Woodard: So it'll be interesting to see what happens, but you know, it's just underway right now.
[3:17] Carolyn Woodard: And so if you are involved in advocacy, if you want to keep an eye on things, uh, it's all over the news right now about AI more broadly and the policy and regulations that are being proposed.
[3:31] Carolyn Woodard: Um, all right, but
[3:32] Carolyn Woodard: What I wanted to talk about this week was I had this interaction with a friend about productivity, workplace productivity.
[3:41] Carolyn Woodard: And I think this is something that a lot of nonprofits are exploring.
[3:45] Carolyn Woodard: Uh, if you are exploring it, I hope this will be helpful to you too.
[3:49] Carolyn Woodard: But my friend said that she is, she wants to be able, she knows there's lots of pieces of her day-to-day job that could be automated and that that workflow could go better.
[4:02] Carolyn Woodard: There are certain, she has very strong processes in place for, you know, like grant writing or contracting, all of these processes that have evolved over time and are very strict.
[4:12] Carolyn Woodard: And, you know, it's just an email sequence.
[4:15] Carolyn Woodard: Once the first thing happens, it triggers, you know, there's five emails that go out, and she does those manually.
[4:21] Carolyn Woodard: And she does have little scripts that she, you know, like can put into the email, but the whole thing, she just does it.
[4:28] Carolyn Woodard: And she said that um she it she is so busy, and this is something that so many nonprofits you know talk about is being under-resourced and understaffed.
[4:38] Carolyn Woodard: So she just doesn't have the time to carve out the time to spend time on investigating if an AI tool could do the automated, you know, email sequence, could help with parts of it safely.
[4:55] Carolyn Woodard: So she doesn't lose control of it, but that it could do certain things and she would be, you know, the human in the loop, but she wouldn't be spending, you know, an hour per contract following up with the people.
[5:08] Carolyn Woodard: It would be able to automate some of those emails.
[5:11] Carolyn Woodard: And so she she doesn't have a lack of interest in AI, but she doesn't have a lot of experience with AI because as I said, she's got her head down, she has things that she has to do, you know, eight hours a day that have to get done.
[5:22] Carolyn Woodard: So she just is really what we say, you know, she's fixing the plane while she's flying it, and it's just really, really hard to find that time to do the due diligence, to investigate the tools, figure out what tool would work, what's possible, test it, pilot it, put it in place, and eventually get to a place where she trusts the automation that's going to, you know, clients and partners with these contracts.
[5:48] Carolyn Woodard: Um, and so, you know,
[5:50] Carolyn Woodard: Just the reminders, not she was like, I don't want it to take out of the loop, you know, me reading the contract because I'm responsible for it.
[5:58] Carolyn Woodard: Um, but I do want to see if there's ways that we could make those emails just go out more easily with less of my time on just busy work.
[6:06] Carolyn Woodard: So I thought that was just such an interesting encapsulation of the bind that a lot of nonprofit staff and foundation staff, philanthropy staff find themselves in.
[6:16] Carolyn Woodard: So you you just can't, you don't have time in your day to even, you know, get the toolkit to see if you can fix the plane while you're while you're flying it.
[6:25] Carolyn Woodard: Um and there was uh
[6:27] Carolyn Woodard: I was looking into this, I was like, well, what resources are there for how can you make that time for yourself?
[6:33] Carolyn Woodard: And I found this um study in 2026 in the Journal of Philanthropy, um, "The Funders Exercise of Power and Its Consequences for Nonprofits Administrative Burden" by Katy Adams.
[6:47] Carolyn Woodard: So this is an article, a long article, which uh looks directly at how funder requirements shape how much time nonprofits spend on paperwork.
[6:56] Carolyn Woodard: Um, and that, you know, there's lots of compliance, there's lots of, you know, reporting, there's lots of um evaluations and complying with that as well.
[7:05] Carolyn Woodard: And uh
[7:06] Carolyn Woodard: I also found this RAND study from 2006, so decades ago, that this is highly very widely cited that one agency spent nearly half of its staff time on compliance alone.
[7:19] Carolyn Woodard: Uh, and that is just time that is taken away from do actually doing the mission.
[7:23] Carolyn Woodard: And not saying that compliance isn't important and reporting isn't important, like what did you do with the money that you got?
[7:28] Carolyn Woodard: Like, you need to know.
[7:30] Carolyn Woodard: Um, but you know,
[7:31] Carolyn Woodard: It's this structural problem, and it's something that the sector has been talking about for a lot.
[7:36] Carolyn Woodard: If you've read any Vu Le, you know, um, you know, the Nonprofit Unicorn - he is always talking about these unnecessary burdens and lack of trust between the donors and the recipients.
[7:49] Carolyn Woodard: Um,
[7:50] Carolyn Woodard: But there was this, you know, this big movement um before COVID, but definitely in COVID, around uh trust-based philanthropy, which is really, you know, like in action now.
[7:59] Carolyn Woodard: There are many practitioners.
[8:01] Carolyn Woodard: There's lots of best practices out there in studies of how trust-based philanthropy works.
[8:07] Carolyn Woodard: Um, and
[8:07] Carolyn Woodard: The Center for Effective Philanthropy studied recently what happens when funders remove those reporting burdens.
[8:14] Carolyn Woodard: And they looked at Mackenzie Scott's giving, particularly as this test case.
[8:18] Carolyn Woodard: Um, you know, she's given over 19 billion to more than 2,000 organizations, and her grants have few to no restrictions or reporting requirements.
[8:27] Carolyn Woodard: It's just, here you go.
[8:29] Carolyn Woodard: Uh, there's no timeline, it has to be spent by this time on these things.
[8:34] Carolyn Woodard: It's just you're an organization, I've done my research, that you're doing good things.
[8:39] Carolyn Woodard: Here is money that lets you do more of those good things.
[8:42] Carolyn Woodard: And this report, this uh investigation, the Center for Effective Philanthropy did, uh, found that three years into the study, over a third of the nonprofit leaders that had received those unrestricted gifts had reduced their burnout and that of their staff, and that the recipient organizations held double, roughly double the cash reserves of comparable organizations.
[9:04] Carolyn Woodard: So it's it's this is kind of like trust-based philanthropy, right?
[9:08] Carolyn Woodard: Is that the organizations know what to do and like having that cushion, having those reserves allows them to do things, um, not even just like go on these crazy spending sprees, but just do the stuff that they wanted to be doing all along, or pay their staff what they need to be able to pay them, or you know, hire more people, or whatever it is that they know that they need.
[9:29] Carolyn Woodard: Um, and that's this real test.
[9:31] Carolyn Woodard: So, you know, less paperwork out of this, you know, article and this research, it's not just that less paperwork and less busy work is nicer.
[9:40] Carolyn Woodard: It's healthier.
[9:41] Carolyn Woodard: It's healthier for the people doing the work and it's healthier for that organization doing the work that it does in its community.
[9:49] Carolyn Woodard: Um,
[9:50] Carolyn Woodard: So anyway, all of this like to bring it back to AI.
[9:54] Carolyn Woodard: Um, so if you are, you know, thinking about these processes and thinking about like, you know, grant applications, uh, grant reviews, uh, all of this, you know, like all of the funding that goes into nonprofits and all of the busy work that's there, like my friend said, contracting, you know, grant reviews, grant applications, um, proposal reviews, all of those things.
[10:17] Carolyn Woodard: What are the tools that you already have that can help you with those processes?
[10:22] Carolyn Woodard: And hopefully you'll be with some funders who also are, you know, organized around the trust-based philanthropy and are going to be giving you more unrestricted funds.
[10:32] Carolyn Woodard: There was an also an article from Harvard Business Review that I ran across where they did this eight-month field study of AI adoption.
[10:42] Carolyn Woodard: And they found that this was at a company, not at a nonprofit, but they their findings were you know applicable to other small organizations.
[10:51] Carolyn Woodard: They found that AI did save time.
[10:53] Carolyn Woodard: That, you know, they had introduced AI, they were using it.
[10:56] Carolyn Woodard: Um, but without a mandate to do so, um, the people, the staff had taken on more scope, were doing more because they had this additional capacity.
[11:06] Carolyn Woodard: I've definitely found that in my own life.
[11:07] Carolyn Woodard: It's like you get in that flow state, you're working with your AI and you're like digging into a problem.
[11:13] Carolyn Woodard: And it it's kind of it's it's exciting to be able to solve, do this thing that you wanted to do for a while.
[11:20] Carolyn Woodard: So you might stay an hour after to just keep working on it and uh get to that point where you can put it in place.
[11:27] Carolyn Woodard: So the researchers at this Harvard Business Review also said, you know, the AI tasks bleed into the more hours of the day, productivity went up, but intensity, fatigue, and burnout risk also went up.
[11:38] Carolyn Woodard: The time savings don't show up immediately or automatically.
[11:43] Carolyn Woodard: And the organizations that were better able to reduce staff turnout burnout and uh increase the use of AI had a deliberate AI practice where they created norms around using the AI for new projects that you're doing, um, and keeping that in scope, uh keeping that you know, timelines in check, and also you know, making sure you get the rest of your work done, all of those things, keeping the human perspective in the loop, um, because the saved time from the AI helping you gets absorbed into doing more, doing it faster and doing it, you know, like forever.
[12:24] Carolyn Woodard: So really interesting to think about in the context of under-resourced and understaffed organizations that are under a lot of um financial constraints and uh, you know, just other constraints, IT constraints.
[12:38] Carolyn Woodard: Um, so you know, this kind of um idealized, like if I had AI, I could do five people's jobs.
[12:45] Carolyn Woodard: I'm already doing five people's jobs, but I could do it better if I had AI to help me with three of them.
[12:51] Carolyn Woodard: Just making sure to keep that in perspective as you are exploring and playing with these AI tools to keep setting breaks, make sure you de-stress during the day, make sure you take a lunch, a real lunch, not at your desk lunch, um, and that sort of thing.
[13:05] Carolyn Woodard: So to tie this back to my friend's experience of trying to find the time to investigate if the AI can help you save time on these busy work tasks.
[13:17] Carolyn Woodard: Um, so here's some advice from you know many sources.
[13:20] Carolyn Woodard: I didn't take this from one checklist, but I kind of compiled it from some different things that you see a lot.
[13:27] Carolyn Woodard: Um, and one,
[13:28] Carolyn Woodard: All these tips are, you know, just tips.
[13:30] Carolyn Woodard: Hopefully you can put this in practice.
[13:32] Carolyn Woodard: Um, try it.
[13:33] Carolyn Woodard: You know, one of the things they tell you is have a accountability buddy and put it on your calendar and try to do it this week.
[13:40] Carolyn Woodard: Like once you heard about it, don't say, oh, I'll I'll look into that next week, but see if you can do that this week.
[13:45] Carolyn Woodard: You still got a few days left.
[13:48] Carolyn Woodard: One thing is to put it on your calendar and um just put that time, carve out the time, like put an actual meeting, block out your time for an hour a week, maybe on a day when you can do it, you know, Monday afternoon, Friday morning, whenever it is that you often have slower time, put that block on your week and and hold yourself to it.
[14:13] Carolyn Woodard: Use that time to just look at the AI and just work on this project.
[14:18] Carolyn Woodard: It's a real project and you're really doing it.
[14:20] Carolyn Woodard: It's not just a like, oh, I wish I could do that.
[14:23] Carolyn Woodard: And then one of the the uh advice, a piece of advice for looking into things that can be automated is go back through your work for the work week for last week and you know, maybe keep a diary or write it down.
[14:38] Carolyn Woodard: What were tasks that you did more than once?
[14:41] Carolyn Woodard: Uh, what were the tasks that were the most frequent three times a week or more?
[14:46] Carolyn Woodard: And what were tasks that were very time consuming?
[14:49] Carolyn Woodard: So 15 minutes each or more.
[14:52] Carolyn Woodard: So though that combination, you're looking for that sweet spot of something that you do frequently that takes your time and um you know is not maybe not something you could put another filter on there of something you don't really enjoy doing, or you know that you don't have to like it doesn't take a human to do it.
[15:10] Carolyn Woodard: It doesn't take it's busy work.
[15:12] Carolyn Woodard: That's what busy work is, right?
[15:14] Carolyn Woodard: The next tip is to pick just one.
[15:17] Carolyn Woodard: Uh you're not gonna organize your whole inbox, you're not gonna create a workflow for like your entire asana or your Monday or whatever it is.
[15:26] Carolyn Woodard: You're choosing one task that has showed up in those filters, right?
[15:29] Carolyn Woodard: You do it frequently, uh, it's time consuming and it's busy work.
[15:34] Carolyn Woodard: Write down what success would look like in a single sentence.
[15:38] Carolyn Woodard: What would it look like if you didn't have to do this, if it were quote unquote done for you?
[15:43] Carolyn Woodard: And then, you know, go from there.
[15:46] Carolyn Woodard: And that's when you start talking to your AI tool of choice, whichever one you use, um, and you ask it, like, hey, I've got this problem and I'm thinking about it.
[15:57] Carolyn Woodard: What do other people do in this situation?
[15:59] Carolyn Woodard: Or what do you advise?
[16:01] Carolyn Woodard: What can you come up with, some ideas that we could do together to tackle this problem of this task so that it gets into your own end state that you just wrote down, what success would look like.
[16:12] Carolyn Woodard: You work on it with your AI.
[16:15] Carolyn Woodard: Now, this can be over several weeks, right?
[16:16] Carolyn Woodard: You've got that hour blocked out per week at a time that works for you.
[16:20] Carolyn Woodard: And you the great thing about AI compared to an associate, a colleague, is it doesn't care if you go for a week way for a week and come back and you're like, hey, where were we when we left off?
[16:32] Carolyn Woodard: You know, like what can you tell me?
[16:33] Carolyn Woodard: I've had these other thoughts in the meantime, you know, I was thinking about this, you know, let's let's uh reconnect and start up again on this on this project.
[16:41] Carolyn Woodard: And it can just, you know, stay dormant indefinitely.
[16:44] Carolyn Woodard: Uh it's one of the great things about AI compared to a human human colleague.
[16:49] Carolyn Woodard: And then, you know, you you're gonna build this thing, you figure out if you listened to my uh webinar uh um a month ago uh about our AI test case, uh where we were talked about building the data lake.
[17:04] Carolyn Woodard: Um if you need a tech coach, uh, you know, a person in addition to the AI, working with the AI, uh, just to make sure you're on the right track.
[17:12] Carolyn Woodard: Um, security, if you have questions about that, you know, which tool you're allowed to work with, if you're gonna let it look at your emails, like is that, you know, what is the policy for that, those sorts of things.
[17:23] Carolyn Woodard: And then, you know, pilot it.
[17:24] Carolyn Woodard: Just like I said, we've chosen one task and you're gonna, you know, do what you can to check it before you, you know, run it.
[17:32] Carolyn Woodard: And just it's gonna, my experience with AI tools is that it's gonna not be great the first time, and you're gonna refine it over time.
[17:40] Carolyn Woodard: And the tool itself is gonna help you refine itself, like, well, I ran it this way, but that's not really what if we did it this way?
[17:47] Carolyn Woodard: What if we add on this and additional instructions to myself?
[17:51] Carolyn Woodard: Or, you know, like you give it feedback and you're like, well, this came out this way, but I was thinking I wanted it, or I've changed my mind.
[17:57] Carolyn Woodard: I wanted it to be this sort of thing.
[17:59] Carolyn Woodard: And then you refine it over time.
[18:01] Carolyn Woodard: And then you, I would say, you know, you don't let it run unsupervised.
[18:04] Carolyn Woodard: Um, you can schedule tasks in most of the AI tools, um, and you can build in parameters to it.
[18:11] Carolyn Woodard: So it has to ask you for permission to access your inbox, or it has to ask you for permission to access a folder that it does something in.
[18:19] Carolyn Woodard: All those sorts of things.
[18:21] Carolyn Woodard: And give yourself a realistic timeline, like maybe a couple of months.
[18:25] Carolyn Woodard: Um, it might surprise you.
[18:27] Carolyn Woodard: It might be like, oh, there's a tool I looked online and there's a tool that does this, and it's free for nonprofits, and you just hook it up this way, and there you go.
[18:35] Carolyn Woodard: And you're like, oh, I was struggling with this task for all this time and it was that easy.
[18:40] Carolyn Woodard: Or it may be something that takes a couple of months to build, test, refine, come back to it, do more research, test it again, all those sorts of things.
[18:49] Carolyn Woodard: But carving out the time, I think is that first step.
[18:52] Carolyn Woodard: And like I said, you know, AI tools make it really easy to chunk things into doable tasks.
[18:59] Carolyn Woodard: And like I said, they don't care if you go away for a while and come back and want to start up again.
[19:04] Carolyn Woodard: Um, they haven't gone off and done their own project.
[19:07] Carolyn Woodard: They're not mad at you because you never finished that thing.
[19:09] Carolyn Woodard: They're just there waiting.
[19:10] Carolyn Woodard: Like, ask it again.
[19:11] Carolyn Woodard: Like, okay, I want to come, I'm ready to come back to this now.
[19:14] Carolyn Woodard: And I think we could run it this way, that sort of thing.
[19:17] Carolyn Woodard: I want to put in a quick note.
[19:20] Carolyn Woodard: What if you don't know what your organization's AI policy is?
[19:24] Carolyn Woodard: You know, we have all these statistics from these different studies that 90% or more of nonprofits are using AI.
[19:30] Carolyn Woodard: A very small percentage of those have AI policies in place, or have, you know, an executive team, have the AI, you know, friend and translator, the guru or um, you know, an official person that's in charge of AI at your organization, you know, which is a best practice.
[19:47] Carolyn Woodard: But if you're not there yet, I wouldn't, I would say don't let that stop you from doing this audit, from finding, going through what do you do every week, what do you think is a good candidate, and starting to do the research into it.
[19:59] Carolyn Woodard: Of course, the audit itself, you know, you're just doing, you're just looking through your tasks and making a list for yourself and running these filters through it.
[20:09] Carolyn Woodard: So, you know, what matters is when you're you know what task you're gonna tackle and you start using the tool.
[20:19] Carolyn Woodard: Before you run something through an AI tool, especially of course if it's uh donor or client data, anything that you just get your little spidey sense comes up and you're like, huh, this might be private information or you know, like internal information.
[20:33] Carolyn Woodard: I'm not sure if I should put that in ChatGPT.
[20:36] Carolyn Woodard: Um, so you need to, if no one's told you you can't do that, that's not exactly a green light, right?
[20:43] Carolyn Woodard: So you need to, you know, just ask around, ask your manager, ask your executive director, hey, what is our AI policy?
[20:50] Carolyn Woodard: I have this task.
[20:51] Carolyn Woodard: Like you then at that point you've already got your argument, right?
[20:55] Carolyn Woodard: Like I have this task, it takes me an hour a month, and I think it could be automated, and I want to know, you know, like where do I go from here?
[21:02] Carolyn Woodard: I want to use this tool, I think it could do this thing.
[21:06] Carolyn Woodard: Um, how what do I do?
[21:08] Carolyn Woodard: How do I go forward?
[21:09] Carolyn Woodard: And you know, half the time, more than half the time, I think the person you talk to is gonna be like, oh my God, that's amazing.
[21:15] Carolyn Woodard: What do you need to be able to do this?
[21:17] Carolyn Woodard: Like, let's figure it out, right?
[21:19] Carolyn Woodard: So uh you might need to talk to your IT people, you might need to talk to your executive director, you like I said, your manager.
[21:26] Carolyn Woodard: Um, if there's truly nothing written down anywhere, you know, like you asking the question is gonna raise it of what are our principles?
[21:35] Carolyn Woodard: Um, you know, what where can I move forward?
[21:37] Carolyn Woodard: How can we do this securely?
[21:39] Carolyn Woodard: We have, of course, our AI Acceptable Use Policy template.
[21:43] Carolyn Woodard: You can download that, adapt it to your own organization.
[21:47] Carolyn Woodard: So that is, I think this is the sequence that I would use to, like I said, try to carve out that time to investigate while you're flying the plane what could be automated and how you would do it.
[22:00] Carolyn Woodard: And there may be something like you may be in an organization that's already identified.
[22:03] Carolyn Woodard: We're on Microsoft, we're using Copilot.
[22:06] Carolyn Woodard: Copilot is approved for everyone.
[22:07] Carolyn Woodard: It comes up, you see the little icon, you know, when you're in Word or Excel or wherever it is, and that's allowed.
[22:13] Carolyn Woodard: So if you are in the Microsoft camp, Copilot camp, there is a great case study that TechSoup did.
[22:21] Carolyn Woodard: I will share this, all these resources in the show notes.
[22:24] Carolyn Woodard: Using Copilot to draft emails, transcribe meetings, and do funding applications.
[22:31] Carolyn Woodard: You know, it kind of feed into the application.
[22:34] Carolyn Woodard: So then at the end, after using these tools, the human is the one who does the final edit and then submits that application.
[22:41] Carolyn Woodard: So I'll share that with you.
[22:43] Carolyn Woodard: Of course, all of these, you know, are very vendor-centric.
[22:46] Carolyn Woodard: They're part of their marketing.
[22:47] Carolyn Woodard: So Copilot is like, look, you can use this to do these things as a nonprofit.
[22:51] Carolyn Woodard: Surprise, surprise.
[22:53] Carolyn Woodard: Gemini also has several nonprofit success stories on their website about different organizations.
[22:59] Carolyn Woodard: And they have different case studies of how they've used Gemini to save time doing their nonprofit things that they do.
[23:19] Carolyn Woodard: And then Anthropic Claude also has a case study on their site, also with the Brian Impact Foundation in Korea, which uses Claude to review fellowship candidates.
[23:33] Carolyn Woodard: And so they were able to increase the amount of applications they could review without adding staff.
[23:40] Carolyn Woodard: So they do, you know, the first run and then the people in the loop do the final reviews.
[23:47] Carolyn Woodard: So different companies, self-published, self-interested stories of case studies and use cases.
[23:54] Carolyn Woodard: But I just mentioning this because you'll find a lot of this type of material out there.
[23:59] Carolyn Woodard: And so if you're kind of,
[24:01] Carolyn Woodard: I think the best step still is start with your own workflow.
[24:04] Carolyn Woodard: Go back, you know, and look at last week and see what you did, or maybe you already know, really, like it jumps out.
[24:09] Carolyn Woodard: You don't even have to do the research of something you would like to automate.
[24:13] Carolyn Woodard: But if you're looking for, like, well, what did other people do for these productivity gains to help them work smarter, faster?
[24:21] Carolyn Woodard: Hopefully, not over time, um, because the AI is helping them more.
[24:26] Carolyn Woodard: Uh, there are those case studies out there, you just need to have a look.
[24:31] Carolyn Woodard: This story, just as I was sitting out to record, I got this uh email from um the Chronicle of Philanthropy about GitLab Foundation, um, which had a uh has an AI for economic opportunity fund created with uh Annie E Casey Foundation, and they uh have brought their 15 you know founding grantee organizations to DC last week.
[24:58] Carolyn Woodard: And so there's this report on them, and there were a whole bunch of you know people there, foundation program officers uh from big foundations, and they so from this also they have a bunch of um use cases.
[25:10] Carolyn Woodard: Uh a lot of this was more around mission delivery, so using AI to do what your foundation what your nonprofit does better, you know, quicker, differently.
[25:22] Carolyn Woodard: So not as much on the productivity issue, but one of the really interesting things in this article that jumped out at me was that Elizabeth Nash from Annie E Casey Foundation um talked in the article about slowing down to build tools like this and giving yourself the time, carving out that time to you know think of uh investigate, research, and implement these types of projects.
[25:50] Carolyn Woodard: And that also goes back to what Harvard Business Review talked about, um, building the automation to save you time.
[25:59] Carolyn Woodard: Is that just going to encourage you to spend more time on more things and lose like you're not gonna gain that um time back?
[26:13] Carolyn Woodard: You're it's gonna fill up with other things that you do or with more AI work that you're doing.
[26:17] Carolyn Woodard: Because once you start working with it and see what it can do, it's that AI literacy starts sparking different ideas of where you could use it in other places and how it could really benefit your organization.
[26:28] Carolyn Woodard: So worth taking that uh deep breath.
[26:30] Carolyn Woodard: And if you get really in working, jamming with your AI tool to make sure that you take time to, you know, touch grass, as the kids say, uh, look out the window, refocus your eyes, get up and walk around, uh, and um make sure that you're still spending a reasonable amount of time at work and having you know plenty of personal time and de-stress time because uh even with the AI tools, we know that stress is a real, stress and burnout are huge issues in nonprofits and nonprofit tech right now.
[27:01] Carolyn Woodard: Um, so make sure that you're taking care of yourself.
[27:04] Carolyn Woodard: I'm gonna include all of these resources in the show notes.
[27:08] Carolyn Woodard: Um, thank you so much for listening.
[27:10] Carolyn Woodard: I hope this was helpful, some helpful thoughts and musings.
[27:13] Carolyn Woodard: You can catch us again, of course, on Friday with our regular tech topic podcast.
[27:18] Carolyn Woodard: And this week, actually, uh tomorrow is our webinar.
[27:22] Carolyn Woodard: This month at Community IT, there is still time to register.
[27:26] Carolyn Woodard: We're going to be talking about growing IT management capacity at nonprofits and speaking to funders and to nonprofits.
[27:34] Carolyn Woodard: This is a lever that we have seen over and over again in our clients in 25 years of working with nonprofit clients that it makes a huge difference, the management capacity at the nonprofit.
[27:47] Carolyn Woodard: So it's not just tools, it's not just money for licenses.
[27:51] Carolyn Woodard: I mean, it may not just be the uh trust-based philanthropy and um operational expenses uh and unrestricted funds.
[27:59] Carolyn Woodard: It really is building this mindset that the IT management is uh strategic and an executive level function, and that when you have that doesn't need to be a technology techie person, but it needs to be managed, and that the better you are able to manage whatever IT you have, uh the more functional and the more impactful your organization is gonna be.
[28:23] Carolyn Woodard: So we see this as a lever that uh foundations and funders could really could have been using and can use going forward to help those grantees really make more of an impact because they spend less time worrying about their IT.
[28:37] Carolyn Woodard: So uh we're gonna be talking about that on Wednesday.
[28:40] Carolyn Woodard: As I said, you can still register and uh we will be back on Friday with that part one in the podcast if you want to just uh have a listen to it.
[28:49] Carolyn Woodard: And then of course I'll be back here Tuesday next week with more nonprofit AI news and uh tips.
[28:55] Carolyn Woodard: So until then, take care.

Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them.