# AI in Practice for Nonprofits with Carolyn Woodard and Erik Solce pt 2

An episode of [Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1536843269), 28 Aug 2026, 26 min.

Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1029925/episodes/19674129-ai-in-practice-for-nonprofits-with-carolyn-woodard-and-erik-solce-pt-2.mp3

In Part 2 of the AI in Practice for Nonprofits webinar, Carolyn Woodard and Erik Solce, IT Business Manager at Community IT, dig into the part of the project that matters most once an AI workflow is up and running: how do you know it is actually working, and how do you keep yourself in the loop instead of just trusting the output? Carolyn walks through her verify but trust framework using a real example from her own marketing data lake. An AI-generated report flagged that YouTube Shorts were quietly pulling down watch time on the long-form webinar videos her organization actually wants people to find, a counterintuitive finding. She confirmed independently before acting on it, then tracked month over month to see engagement recover. She and Erik also share what a few months of working with AI day to day has taught them: it does not remember context the way a human assistant would, a trusted coach makes the learning curve much shorter, and a simple Friday check-in on what is still outstanding keeps a project from sprawling. The second half turns to audience questions, from how to pick the right process to automate to how to keep sensitive documents out of an AI tool's reach. Haven't listened to Part 1 yet? Find it in your podcast feed. This episode covers: • The verify but trust framework: spot-checking numbers against your dashboards, following a metric after you make a change, and cross-checking independent sources against each other. • The YouTube Shorts case study: how an AI-flagged, counterintuitive finding about engagement led to a policy change and measurable results. • Working with AI as a collaborator rather than a tool: session memory limits, the value of a human coach, and a weekly outstanding items check-in. • How to choose what to automate: talk to the people doing the work, map the real process rather than the documented one, and look for high volume, rule-based, repetitive tasks, using a SIPOC diagram as one way to do it. • Security Q&A: reviewing SharePoint and Drive permissions before granting AI tools access, applying sensitivity labels to off-limits folders, and why using free AI tools is not recommended and is not secure. Resources Mentioned: • Verify Then Trust: How to Check AI Outputs, Community IT • Growing IT Management Capacity at Nonprofits webinar, Community IT • AI Use Case Library, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation • SIPOC Diagram, ASQ • Nonprofit IT Management Reddit Community _______________________________ Start a conversation :) • Register to attend a webinar in real time, and find all past transcripts at https://communityit.com/webinars/ • email Carolyn at cwoodard@communityit.com • on LinkedIn • on reddit/r/nonprofitITmanagement • on the Community IT website Thanks for listening.

## Transcript

[0:23] Community IT Intro: Thank you for joining this Community IT podcast, part two.
[0:27] Community IT Intro: You can find part one in your podcast feed if you subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
[0:34] Carolyn Woodard: Welcome everyone to the Community IT Innovators webinar on AI and practice for nonprofits.
[0:41] Carolyn Woodard: My name is Carolyn Woodard.
[0:43] Carolyn Woodard: I'm the outreach director for Community IT and the presenter today.
[0:47] Erik Solce: Hello, uh, I'm Erik Solce.
[0:48] Erik Solce: I'm an IT business manager with Community IT.
[0:52] Carolyn Woodard: So, what kind of projects are you thinking about that you could work on with an AI assistant and a tech coach?
[0:58] Carolyn Woodard: And if you go ahead and put that in chat, while, you know, like it doesn't have to be a long treatise, but just a description of the project you're thinking about.
[1:05] Carolyn Woodard: I'm going to continue on and talk about what we ended up with, the data lake, if this is something that you're thinking about or something similar.
[1:14] Carolyn Woodard: So I say data lake, you know, there's data swamp, a data lake house, a data repository, et cetera.
[1:21] Carolyn Woodard: Our data lake is, I mentioned I have these nine channels, so they all just live in a folder on my OneDrive.
[1:28] Carolyn Woodard: And uh someone asked in the uh the registration about the KPIs.
[1:34] Carolyn Woodard: So I asked the AI about what KPIs were the most important for me to track, where I would find them in these different channels, how I do would do the export, how I could run the API, you know, what were the challenges, um, etc.
[1:50] Carolyn Woodard: So
[1:51] Carolyn Woodard: Claude really helped me with designing uh everything for I have a monthly marketing meeting that I do.
[1:57] Carolyn Woodard: Uh every month I export the data for seven channels, and then I run the API for YouTube and Google Analytics.
[2:05] Carolyn Woodard: Um, I give Claude access to this top folder in my OneDrive each session, so it's not persistent.
[2:11] Carolyn Woodard: Um, then it can see into the subfolders for the rest of the day in that session.
[2:16] Carolyn Woodard: Um,
[2:17] Carolyn Woodard: And I have to tell you, I'm so proud of myself.
[2:20] Carolyn Woodard: After we set it up and Erik held my hand the first time, I am capable of running an API.
[2:27] Carolyn Woodard: So we can all take a moment and just like pat me on the back for this.
[2:31] Carolyn Woodard: Uh, I do, I did get an error one month.
[2:33] Carolyn Woodard: Um, so I asked Claude to help me troubleshoot what was uh not working, but I run the API, not Claude.
[2:40] Carolyn Woodard: So I have not automated that um step.
[2:43] Carolyn Woodard: In fact, I haven't automated any of these steps yet.
[2:45] Carolyn Woodard: I always go out and get the data and put it into the data lake.
[2:49] Carolyn Woodard: Um and I do that at the beginning of every month.
[2:51] Carolyn Woodard: So it's just kind of built into what I do anyway.
[2:54] Carolyn Woodard: Um, and
[2:55] Carolyn Woodard: As I said, Erik and I worked on the most secure way to run the API that monthly with that credential.
[3:00] Carolyn Woodard: And so I have a whole process of how I use it, delete it, save it where it's more secure.
[3:06] Carolyn Woodard: So once I have the data in the data lake, I then I do have some automated reports that Claude can run by itself looking in those folders.
[3:15] Carolyn Woodard: It's only the third month that we've had this, um, so we're still working on the most effective sequence to do that.
[3:21] Carolyn Woodard: Um, but I, you know, I here is
[3:25] Carolyn Woodard: I have Claude create the PowerPoint for me for this meeting that I have.
[3:29] Carolyn Woodard: And I was very skeptical that it would be able to do any kind of PowerPoint.
[3:33] Carolyn Woodard: Um, and this is again from working with Copilot and Gemini, you know, a year ago, nine months ago.
[3:40] Carolyn Woodard: It's really just changed so quickly.
[3:42] Carolyn Woodard: I gave it our format, our template, and it just runs with it and it does a great job.
[3:48] Carolyn Woodard: And every month that it's made the slides, I do have to go in and make them better, basically.
[3:53] Carolyn Woodard: I'm the human editor.
[3:54] Carolyn Woodard: We always talk about having the human in the loop.
[3:57] Carolyn Woodard: Um, so uh I
[4:00] Carolyn Woodard: For example, it was giving me just the numbers on this slide.
[4:03] Carolyn Woodard: This is like kind of my cover slide of all of the channels that I'm looking at, and it would just give me the number.
[4:08] Carolyn Woodard: And I was like, well, that's not really helpful.
[4:11] Carolyn Woodard: So now I asked it to give me this, you know, up or down.
[4:14] Carolyn Woodard: Um, how is the data moving?
[4:18] Carolyn Woodard: And one of the first suggestions that came out of the first month of reports was that we had a YouTube problem with engagement.
[4:26] Carolyn Woodard: So the YouTube shorts example was a concrete example of using this data link and this analysis that Claude could do to make a decision.
[4:39] Carolyn Woodard: How do I verify and not just trust what Claude is saying?
[4:43] Carolyn Woodard: So
[4:44] Carolyn Woodard: If you use YouTube a lot, you already know this, but I'm gonna give you the quick one-second explanation.
[4:49] Carolyn Woodard: So two things were pulling down our YouTube engagement.
[4:53] Carolyn Woodard: So Google Podcast switched to being host on hosted on YouTube a little while ago.
[4:58] Carolyn Woodard: So we had videos of our podcast, but they were just a static image with the audio from the from the podcast.
[5:05] Carolyn Woodard: Um, so I knew that, but I didn't know if it was good or bad.
[5:07] Carolyn Woodard: So I just let it continue to happen.
[5:10] Carolyn Woodard: And then I had started making shorts, and some of our shorts had like a thousand plus views.
[5:15] Carolyn Woodard: So I was like, oh, this is awesome.
[5:17] Carolyn Woodard: I need to ask Claude about having a short strategy and how much time I should put into it.
[5:23] Carolyn Woodard: And then Claude made this report, which made me question everything basically.
[5:27] Carolyn Woodard: People who watch shorts were not watching our longer videos.
[5:31] Carolyn Woodard: In fact, they were clicking right off of them.
[5:34] Carolyn Woodard: So because they were seeing the short and then clicking right off, that was eating into our average watch time.
[5:40] Carolyn Woodard: So, counter-intuitively, the more views we got on shorts, the less often YouTube was suggesting our longer form videos to people who were looking for longer form content because they thought there was a lower engagement with it.
[5:54] Carolyn Woodard: And those people who want the longer, the one hour videos that I put up of our webinars are the people we really want watching it.
[6:00] Carolyn Woodard: And we want them to be able to find it.
[6:02] Carolyn Woodard: So we're not really interested in the shorts people.
[6:05] Carolyn Woodard: So Claude's suggestion was not to spend any more time on shorts, to delist shorts and podcasts, and to turn off the automatic podcast publishing to YouTube because our strength is in our one-hour videos that are on our uh that are of our webinars.
[6:21] Carolyn Woodard: So you need to verify what AI tells you to do.
[6:24] Carolyn Woodard: And you can see in this slide that we're checking it every month and we're seeing that engagement go up.
[6:32] Carolyn Woodard: So that was really exciting to see, and just an example of verify what Claude tells you to do.
[6:38] Carolyn Woodard: It should go in the direction that you expect it to.
[6:42] Carolyn Woodard: Now, for the next example, if you've been in a webinar before, you know that at the end of every webinar, I tell you to fill out our survey.
[6:49] Carolyn Woodard: Um, and again, I just kind of keep that in mind.
[6:52] Carolyn Woodard: So I asked Claude to look at it in the data lake, and you can see that, well, this isn't scientific at all.
[7:00] Carolyn Woodard: For example, we've done a bunch of AI webinars in the last two years.
[7:03] Carolyn Woodard: So it's natural that people in AI webinars would ask for more AI topics in the future.
[7:09] Carolyn Woodard: But one of the number one results under that more AI was use cases, so a case study.
[7:15] Carolyn Woodard: So here we all are.
[7:16] Carolyn Woodard: And the interesting thing was I had already planned to do this webinar, but it was so exciting that it was in, it is in fact in response to what people in the survey were telling us.
[7:27] Carolyn Woodard: And you can also see, you know, we've done some of the other non-AI topics like cybersecurity, Google Workspace, change management.
[7:34] Carolyn Woodard: We have also done those over the past year.
[7:36] Carolyn Woodard: But I'm really interested in this getting started with IT.
[7:41] Carolyn Woodard: So I'm thinking now about like, well, next year we need to do a webinar that's specifically for young, growing startups, small organizations that want to go ahead with their IT.
[7:52] Carolyn Woodard: So stay tuned for that.
[7:55] Carolyn Woodard: Verify but trust.
[7:58] Carolyn Woodard: So, as I said, you need to always check your AI's work, and you are the human that's responsible for what it's telling you to do and the decisions that you're making.
[8:09] Carolyn Woodard: So I asked Claude, like, how are some ways that I can verify what you're doing?
[8:13] Carolyn Woodard: And these were some suggestions.
[8:15] Carolyn Woodard: So,
[8:16] Carolyn Woodard: Spot checking a number.
[8:18] Carolyn Woodard: Make sure that if you're asking an AI to do some kind of analysis for you, that you don't have to check all of the numbers, like that would take forever.
[8:27] Carolyn Woodard: That's why the AI is helping you with it.
[8:29] Carolyn Woodard: But check, pull out a couple of metrics and go back to your actual dashboard and check that those are the same number, that it's not making something up.
[8:38] Carolyn Woodard: Um,
[8:38] Carolyn Woodard: A second thing is to follow the metric.
[8:41] Carolyn Woodard: As I said with YouTube, is once you make a change, is it changing in the way you expect?
[8:47] Carolyn Woodard: After you change something, keep an eye on that metric and that statistic.
[8:51] Carolyn Woodard: If it's another different type of project, whatever analysis you're doing, check that it moves in the way you predicted.
[8:57] Carolyn Woodard: And if it doesn't, go back and check what's going on.
[9:00] Carolyn Woodard: And then a third thing you can do is cross-check the sources.
[9:03] Carolyn Woodard: Do independent sources agree?
[9:06] Carolyn Woodard: So in our case, I have these nine channels.
[9:08] Carolyn Woodard: A couple of them will check are looking at things, but from the opposite side.
[9:13] Carolyn Woodard: So if those numbers are correlating, then you are getting an independent uh example and an independent verification that in fact the analysis that you're doing is um those channels are in fact related to each other.
[9:29] Carolyn Woodard: So that is another thing that you can do.
[9:32] Carolyn Woodard: So, for example, Search Console in Google is telling you what people are looking for, Google Analytics is telling you where they're landing on your page.
[9:39] Carolyn Woodard: Those things are in um conversation with each other, so they should uh agree on some things and you can check.
[9:47] Carolyn Woodard: Uh, and I'm gonna share, I wrote an article on this that tells you more about trusting your output.
[9:56] Carolyn Woodard: So here are some things that I learned from working with AI.
[9:59] Carolyn Woodard: It was invaluable in helping me chunk up this project.
[10:03] Carolyn Woodard: As I said, I can do a little bit every day, I could do it once a week.
[10:06] Carolyn Woodard: And when you come back to the AI tool, it remembers what you were working on before, so you can jump right back into it.
[10:12] Carolyn Woodard: If I were paying for an expensive marketing consultant, this would take a lot of time.
[10:18] Carolyn Woodard: And they would have to have access.
[10:20] Carolyn Woodard: And I wouldn't be able to say, you know, like, I'm gonna come back and talk to you about this in two months.
[10:25] Carolyn Woodard: They I would still be on the clock with them.
[10:27] Carolyn Woodard: We would be paying them to help me with this project.
[10:29] Carolyn Woodard: So I really like that part of it.
[10:32] Carolyn Woodard: Um,
[10:32] Carolyn Woodard: Working with AI made me better at working with AI.
[10:36] Carolyn Woodard: Um, I knew that I learned I needed a trusted human coach to help me with the technology.
[10:41] Carolyn Woodard: Um, one big thing that Erik and I learned was this working locally was really helpful for um Claude at least.
[10:48] Carolyn Woodard: And then we make a copy and we put it into our SharePoint uh every month.
[10:53] Carolyn Woodard: Um,
[10:53] Carolyn Woodard: Claude is smart, fast, and capable.
[10:57] Carolyn Woodard: It does not learn or remember things that a human would learn and remember if you had an actual assistant.
[11:02] Carolyn Woodard: So that is just something to keep in mind as you're working with it over time, the things you have to remind it about.
[11:08] Carolyn Woodard: Um, some things we asked AI to do really lingered.
[11:11] Carolyn Woodard: Um,
[11:12] Carolyn Woodard: And then one thing I've started doing that is a little piece of advice is to get a weekly report of what's outstanding.
[11:19] Carolyn Woodard: I had a lot of chats going.
[11:20] Carolyn Woodard: I'm asking it about a lot of different things, I'm writing a lot of different things.
[11:24] Carolyn Woodard: So every Friday I just ask it to tell me what it thinks is outstanding.
[11:28] Carolyn Woodard: And usually half of those things I can click off and say, oh, those are completed.
[11:32] Carolyn Woodard: So I've also started telling at the at the end of a prompt, like after we finished working, oh, you can consider this completed.
[11:39] Carolyn Woodard: And then you don't have to use AI for everything it can do.
[11:42] Carolyn Woodard: It can make Asana tasks for you.
[11:44] Carolyn Woodard: I've found that I mean it just takes me a second to go over and to Asana and pop a task in, so I don't always ask it to do that for me.
[11:52] Carolyn Woodard: Um, so that is me quickly.
[11:54] Carolyn Woodard: Erik, some things you've learned about working with AI?
[11:58] Erik Solce: Yeah, so um, you know, I've learned that uh AI can help you think of solutions you may not have considered before, and it's good at giving you a cost-benefit analysis for each each option.
[12:08] Erik Solce: Um, but it is difficult for it to give you uh it is difficult for you to give it enough context to narrow it down to one choice.
[12:17] Erik Solce: Um, the decision ultimately is up to you.
[12:20] Erik Solce: Um
[12:20] Erik Solce: AI can walk you through some complex technical processes that you've never done before, but you need to be familiar enough with the concept to know what a successful end result actually looks like.
[12:32] Erik Solce: You need a base level of understanding of what it's guiding you through in order to know if it's leading you down a false path.
[12:38] Erik Solce: Validating answers is as important as knowing how to ask them.
[12:42] Erik Solce: After you've received a response, you're probably going to want it to list its sources so that you can check them and verify.
[12:49] Erik Solce: Um
[12:50] Erik Solce: And one of the most useful tasks that AI can perform is enabling multitasking.
[12:55] Erik Solce: So for example, I can format a report faster than Claude just using Excel macros.
[13:01] Erik Solce: But if I task Claude with doing that, I can also work on other tasks at the same time.
[13:07] Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, I found that also is really important and helpful.
[13:11] Carolyn Woodard: And I would say on a totally different project, I got this report about our website, and I was able to work through it with Claude and ask Claude to give me some third-party sites that I could use to verify things that were in the report, you know, that this other company vendor had given me.
[13:29] Carolyn Woodard: So that's always yes, you need to verify what you're getting from an AI as the output, but it also can help you with verification of suggesting other places that you can get that independent collaboration.
[13:43] Carolyn Woodard: So all right, we're gonna move into there's so many great projects in the chat.
[13:48] Carolyn Woodard: So I'm gonna put these all in the transcript because I don't know that I'm gonna have time to go through all of them, but all of you that are in the webinar right now can see them in chat and be thinking, like, oh, I could do that, or maybe that's a good thing to look at.
[14:00] Carolyn Woodard: So um anything from
[14:02] Carolyn Woodard: Formatting messy data to migrate into a new CRM, uh,
[14:06] Carolyn Woodard: Personalized stewardship for individual donors based on history, um,
[14:11] Carolyn Woodard: Working on a hub site with associated department sites with dashboards for all,
[14:16] Carolyn Woodard: Automating contract workflows, that makes sense, uh,
[14:19] Carolyn Woodard: Dropping aggregated monthly financials into AI so I can quickly ask it questions.
[14:24] Carolyn Woodard: So
[14:25] Carolyn Woodard: Another project that someone is asked uh is sharing is that they could store all of their grant agreements.
[14:31] Carolyn Woodard: So you can ask it questions about does this grant allow food expenses?
[14:35] Carolyn Woodard: Do we have to segregate interest earned, etc.?
[14:38] Carolyn Woodard: Great use case.
[14:40] Carolyn Woodard: Um,
[14:41] Carolyn Woodard: Avoiding duplication of tasks with grant applications, that's a great one.
[14:45] Carolyn Woodard: Um, and that's a little bit longer, so I'll I'll include that in the transcript.
[14:49] Carolyn Woodard: Um,
[14:50] Carolyn Woodard: Just so many interesting projects you got here.
[14:54] Carolyn Woodard: So I love it.
[14:55] Carolyn Woodard: Thank you everyone for sharing these with us.
[14:57] Carolyn Woodard: And I hope this is sparking some of the things that uh people in the audience are thinking about, and that those uh you uh who are reading and looking at this later also on our website will be able to uh have think about and maybe use uh some of these.
[15:12] Carolyn Woodard: And there are also some websites out there that have some use cases, so I'll share that in the transcript as well.
[15:17] Carolyn Woodard: I know McGovern Foundation has one uh where people can upload what they're using AI to do, and other people can look at it and be like, oh, I could do that.
[15:26] Carolyn Woodard: All right, so we have a little time for QA while we have Erik with us.
[15:31] Carolyn Woodard: Um
[15:32] Carolyn Woodard: So, Erik, one of the questions that came in in um the registration was do you have preferred tools or methodologies you like to use when assessing the business processes to be automated that you're gonna use AI on?
[15:48] Erik Solce: So um I think that it's important to you know walk through the process with the people that are actually doing the work.
[15:55] Erik Solce: Um you should talk to your coworkers about what processes can be improved.
[15:59] Erik Solce: Um, they're the ones that know what takes the most time, what's the most repetitive.
[16:04] Erik Solce: You want to note the actual processes, not just what the documented processes are, um, because those can differ wildly depending on how good your documentation is.
[16:15] Erik Solce: Um try to map it all out in something, for example, like lucid chart or maybe even just on a whiteboard.
[16:22] Erik Solce: Um
[16:22] Erik Solce: I would then identify items that are high volume, rule-based, or repetitive, ideally all three, because these are good targets for automation.
[16:31] Erik Solce: Um
[16:32] Erik Solce: And then I would uh make sure you're discussing these processes with others.
[16:36] Erik Solce: I would definitely include IT or security teams because we want to make sure that we are managing risk appropriately.
[16:43] Erik Solce: Um,
[16:44] Erik Solce: As far as specific methodologies, um, so I've never used it before, uh, but SciPoq looks pretty good as just uh a good process to improve.
[16:54] Erik Solce: So maybe check that one out.
[16:57] Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot of sense.
[17:00] Carolyn Woodard: Um, and
[17:01] Carolyn Woodard: I think we have time for one more question, which was how do we ensure our sensitive documents are not compromised inadvertently?
[17:08] Carolyn Woodard: Um,
[17:09] Carolyn Woodard: And that is something that you know we've kind of mentioned security a couple of times here.
[17:13] Carolyn Woodard: Um, but we do have some other resources on using AI tools safely and securely.
[17:19] Carolyn Woodard: We've done some podcasts on um checking permissions, you know, anything that you have permission to, your AI tool, you can give it permission to see.
[17:28] Carolyn Woodard: So that's something else that you know your IT team wants to be careful about.
[17:32] Carolyn Woodard: Or if you're kind of running into it and thinking, uh I don't know if I should have access to this, you know, bringing it to somebody's attention, or if you're like, I don't, I'm not sure I should use AI on this.
[17:42] Carolyn Woodard: Um, and
[17:43] Carolyn Woodard: I think the number one thing to do for AI and security is make sure you have a policy, make sure your staff know what the policy is and do that over and over.
[17:53] Carolyn Woodard: So don't assume that they know it and don't assume that the AI tool isn't going to prompt them to do something that seems helpful, but actually is creating risk.
[18:02] Carolyn Woodard: Make sure that your staff know they can ask questions if they're unsure about something.
[18:08] Carolyn Woodard: Um, they should go with that gut feeling and they should make sure that they know who to ask.
[18:14] Carolyn Woodard: So in your organization, someone on an IT team who's, you know, knows about security and isn't going to make them feel stupid for asking.
[18:22] Carolyn Woodard: Um,
[18:23] Carolyn Woodard: I think of it kind of like a souped up anti-phishing training.
[18:28] Carolyn Woodard: You need you need to stop and think, you know, when you're thinking about doing something with AI or giving it permission or automating it or letting it do something for you, stop and think.
[18:37] Carolyn Woodard: Um, give it minimum permissions by default and check with somebody, talk with someone if there's something that feels like it might be a little bit suspicious or just be going a little too bit too far, giving that AI permissions that you might not want it to have.
[18:53] Carolyn Woodard: It's better to be safe than sorry.
[18:55] Carolyn Woodard: You might run it by somebody on your team and they're like, oh yeah, that's totally fine, like this is how you do it, and here's how it's secure.
[19:02] Carolyn Woodard: And that's a great position to be in and a great feeling uh to have.
[19:07] Carolyn Woodard: But I think you know, AI by its nature can let people go off by themselves in different directions using the AI as like their only assistant.
[19:15] Carolyn Woodard: And so, as again, just being really open about those conversations, I think is really important because also, like we just saw in sharing the different projects here that people are thinking about, you have people at your organization that are thinking about or doing projects, maybe doing something really similar to what you're trying to do.
[19:33] Carolyn Woodard: So you could find them by talking openly about it and running it by them.
[19:37] Carolyn Woodard: And um, just so important to have those conversations openly.
[19:42] Carolyn Woodard: Uh,
[19:43] Carolyn Woodard: Erik, do you have some steps you might add into uh security?
[19:47] Erik Solce: Yes.
[19:47] Erik Solce: Um I so when I saw this question, I thought about it you know more from the technical steps that you could take.
[19:53] Erik Solce: So obviously doing something like reviewing uh permissions in SharePoint or your Google Drives, especially if you're giving the AI tool access to your document repository.
[20:05] Erik Solce: Uh you want to make sure that the people who are using the AI have the proper permissions and they don't have access to something they shouldn't, because if they query AI and it has access to that data, it will give them a response.
[20:18] Erik Solce: Um
[20:18] Erik Solce: You can also add sensitivity labels.
[20:20] Erik Solce: So like if you have like an HR or a finance folder that you never want it to look in, uh you can apply sensitivity labels to that in SharePoint to make sure that it's not pulling information from there.
[20:31] Erik Solce: And then if you're using a less well-known AI tool, so it's not like Claude or ChatGPT, uh definitely read the terms of service and the privacy policy to see what they're doing with your data.
[20:42] Erik Solce: And along that same line, never use free tools.
[20:45] Erik Solce: Uh if the tool is free, you are the product.
[20:48] Erik Solce: So they're using your data to train their LLM or sell it to marketers.
[20:53] Erik Solce: So please pay for uh please pay for your AI tools.
[20:57] Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
[20:59] Carolyn Woodard: And that gives you those enterprise protections as well, such as they are.
[21:03] Carolyn Woodard: They are better than the freemium tools, um, for sure.
[21:07] Carolyn Woodard: All right, so um we did have someone in the Q and A saying, you know, in recent incidents, AI tools have gone beyond what was intended, um, and those kind of agentic AI, which we're gonna do some more podcasts and um content on as well.
[21:22] Carolyn Woodard: I think I haven't seen a lot of nonprofits using um agents.
[21:27] Carolyn Woodard: That's something that's pretty tech forward.
[21:29] Carolyn Woodard: Um but yeah, if you're in that situation and thinking about creating an agent, um, definitely you need to have more security on it.
[21:36] Carolyn Woodard: But the the agents that got out at the big tech companies were um pretty sophisticated and um were being tested for what they could get out of, I think, in a couple of those cases.
[21:47] Carolyn Woodard: So not something that most nonprofits will be dealing with, but something that we need to be aware of.
[21:51] Carolyn Woodard: Um, because it is like
[21:52] Carolyn Woodard: In the smaller level, it is true that you can have an AI do something in your name or write something.
[21:59] Carolyn Woodard: You know, the human in the loop, that's what we keep talking about, is that AI is not going to get the blame for it.
[22:05] Carolyn Woodard: Like you are responsible for it.
[22:06] Carolyn Woodard: If you put something on your website that's not true just because an AI wrote it, you're gonna be the one that's responsible for it.
[22:13] Carolyn Woodard: So I want to quickly go over our learning objectives.
[22:16] Carolyn Woodard: I think we hit a lot of these, Erik.
[22:18] Carolyn Woodard: Um, how can you structure an AI project at your nonprofit with this three part structure that really worked for us.
[22:24] Carolyn Woodard: What did we learn about using AI on a real messy data problem?
[22:27] Carolyn Woodard: You know, stay tuned.
[22:28] Carolyn Woodard: We're still learning, but we learned a lot.
[22:30] Carolyn Woodard: How do you know if your AI-assisted workflow is working?
[22:33] Carolyn Woodard: How can you verify?
[22:35] Carolyn Woodard: How do you keep the human in the loop?
[22:36] Carolyn Woodard: We've talked a lot about that.
[22:37] Carolyn Woodard: And what would it take to try something like this at your organization?
[22:41] Carolyn Woodard: I think that's something that all of you need to answer for yourselves.
[22:45] Carolyn Woodard: I will invite you back next month, I'm going to be talking with Johan Hammerstrom about why IT management capacity, not just funding for IT tools, is a real lever for nonprofit resilience.
[22:57] Carolyn Woodard: And this is a project that is near and dear to my heart.
[23:01] Carolyn Woodard: IT management often becomes separated from organizational leadership.
[23:06] Carolyn Woodard: And nonprofits that struggle with the quote unquote wrong software or tech stack usually got in that situation because no one at the organization owned the strategy, governance, and decision making behind their technology.
[23:19] Carolyn Woodard: So the owner doesn't have to be a techie, but they need to know how to manage IT.
[23:23] Carolyn Woodard: Next month, we're going to talk about this challenge and some ideas for funders, nonprofits, and vendors to see this capacity growing as a really good opportunity to better support the nonprofit sector.
[23:35] Carolyn Woodard: That's at 3 p.m.
[23:37] Carolyn Woodard: Eastern, Noon Pacific, Wednesday, September 23rd.
[23:41] Carolyn Woodard: You can find the registration page on our website at communityIT.com, and I'm going to share it in the chat right now so you can register right now if you want to join us again.
[23:50] Carolyn Woodard: Please don't forget as you exit the webinar today to take our short survey, because as we know now, I actually read all of those answers, but now I also will be able to make sure that those topics get covered in future months.
[24:04] Carolyn Woodard: One lucky winner chosen at random receives a $25 gift certificate for helping us learn more.
[24:11] Carolyn Woodard: Also, we are going to hop right on over to Reddit.
[24:14] Carolyn Woodard: It's at r/slash nonprofit IT management.
[24:17] Carolyn Woodard: And I just shared that in the chat.
[24:20] Carolyn Woodard: So we'll be answering some more QA over there for another 30 minutes or so.
[24:25] Carolyn Woodard: So please join us there.
[24:26] Carolyn Woodard: And you can join us anytime on Reddit and ask your question.
[24:28] Carolyn Woodard: We'll see them be able to answer them.
[24:30] Carolyn Woodard: You can also get in touch with us through our website.
[24:33] Carolyn Woodard: I'm so happy that you all joined us today.
[24:36] Carolyn Woodard: Thank you so much.
[24:37] Carolyn Woodard: An hour of your time is a gift and we appreciate it.
[24:40] Carolyn Woodard: I hope that this information was helpful to everyone in the webinar today and later listening.
[24:47] Carolyn Woodard: Erik, thank you so much, both for sharing your expertise with me when I did this project and also for sharing this hour with us today, because I know you're super busy with all of our clients, and I just really appreciate your time.
[25:00] Erik Solce: Thank you for inviting me and thank you for having me.
[25:02] Erik Solce: It was great.
[25:02] Erik Solce: I learned more doing our project than I ever have with any other AI initiative.
[25:07] Erik Solce: So it was incredibly useful to me as well.
[25:10] Carolyn Woodard: Oh, thank you.
[25:11] Carolyn Woodard: I'm glad to hear that.
[25:12] Carolyn Woodard: I hope it is useful for those of you who are listening that you we walked through kind of the good, the bad, and what didn't work and what worked.
[25:19] Carolyn Woodard: And um I hope that you can use this again.
[25:21] Carolyn Woodard: If you have any questions, uh you can always get in touch with us.
[25:25] Carolyn Woodard: I'm on LinkedIn, uh, we're at our website, and of course, come back next month for our next webinar.
[25:31] Carolyn Woodard: Thank you so much for joining us.
[25:36] Community IT Intro: Thank you for joining this Community IT podcast, part two.
[25:39] Community IT Intro: You can find part one in your podcast feed if you subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

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.