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Carolyn Woodard catches up with Brenda Foster, Senior Vice President and Chief of Innovation at Vanguard Communications, a year after Brenda shared her five-question framework for thinking through nonprofit AI adoption.
Most nonprofit staff now use AI, but much of that use happens quietly, one person at a time, with no guardrails. Brenda explains why not having an AI policy is itself a policy, and why the policy Vanguard wrote at the end of 2024 already needed a rewrite. Her team started that rewrite by interviewing staff, without judgment, about how they use AI, what they want from it, and what worries them.
Brenda and Carolyn also take on the concerns nonprofits raise most often: confidentiality and AI note-takers, fear of staff replacement, and the future of entry-level roles.
Brenda makes the case that refusing to use AI does nothing to slow data center construction, and that nonprofits can bring their advocacy skills (and AI tools) to push for more responsible data center siting and design.
She closes with practical advice for the year ahead, from workflow-based guardrails to 24/7 chatbots and multilingual support that expand what nonprofits can offer their communities.
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In addition to serving as Vanguard Communications’ Chief of Innovation, Brenda Foster is a communications researcher and strategic planner who has shaped direction and messaging for numerous successful national nonprofit and government campaigns. A former broadcast journalist, Brenda is a sought-after producer and speech, script and media writer for clients and spokespeople that include celebrities, CEOs, farmers, caregivers, advocates and youth. Brenda loves to learn, and has been playing around with AI to help herself help her clients, and is inspired to share her insights and advice with nonprofits to help them adopt these tools too.
Carolyn Woodard is currently head of Marketing and Outreach at Community IT Innovators. She has served many roles at Community IT, from client to project manager to marketing. With over twenty years of experience in the nonprofit world, including as a nonprofit technology project manager and Director of IT at both large and small organizations, Carolyn knows the frustrations and delights of working with technology professionals, accidental techies, executives, and staff to deliver your organization’s mission and keep your IT infrastructure operating. She has a master’s degree in Nonprofit Management from Johns Hopkins University and received her undergraduate degree in English Literature from Williams College.
She was happy to have this podcast conversation with Brenda Foster about AI for nonprofits now.
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Carolyn Woodard: Welcome everyone to the Community IT Innovators Technology Topics podcast. I’m Carolyn Woodard, your host, and today I am so happy to welcome back an old friend of the pod, Brenda Foster from Vanguard Communications. So, Brenda, would you like to introduce yourself?
Brenda Foster: Well, I’m really glad that you’re having me back. I love talking about this. It has become my passion over the past couple of years. I’m Brenda Foster, and I’m the senior vice president and chief of innovation at Vanguard Communications. We are a full-service PR firm that works on causes. And AI has become one of our biggest causes, making sure that it’s adopted ethically and that the tools it can bring to nonprofits are good for them and good for the world.
Carolyn Woodard: So, Brenda, we last talked about a year ago. You were on the podcast talking about a process that you were urging nonprofits to use to think about AI as they were implementing it. And so I wanted to revisit that. And I wanted to ask you, as an early adopter (and I know you use AI a lot in your work), what are you using AI for now that you weren’t a year ago when we last talked?
Brenda Foster: It’s a really good question. And I think it’s less about what I’m using and more about how I’m using it. I think I’ve become (and I’ve talked to so many people in our office and clients who have become) better at a workflow. So here’s how I’m going to use AI to kickstart my brainstorming, here’s how I’m going to use it to maximize a product that I did in one way, and now I can give it to a nonprofit in two more ways, in a way that I wasn’t able to before. So I think just really finding a real workflow has been great for us.
But I will also say that in that time, we wrote our AI policy at the end of 2024, and we revisited it a few months ago because we had some questions. The tools are really advancing, and everybody’s so excited to tell you, you’ve been using this tool for years, and now we have an AI component. And so suddenly we realized we were behind, because something that was written at the end of 2024 has no bearing on what’s happening right now at the end of 2026. So we’re in the middle of actually rewriting that policy.
And the way that we’re doing it really reflects what we’re urging other organizations to do, which is to talk to your employees and really sit down and talk about how they’ve been using it on their own, without judging how they’ve been using it. How they want to use it, what they’re worried about. What are their worries? What are they afraid AI is going to do? Are they worried about losing their jobs? Are they worried that we’re having too big of an impact on the environment? And sort of find that out.
So we just finished up those interviews this week, and now we’re going to go back and take a look at our policy and say, okay, we have employee input over here, we have Vanguard values in the middle, and then we have all of the new things that have come up. So how do we make that go back to those five questions and make it more in line with where we are now? And we also realize we have to look at it every six months. There’s just no question, because something new is going to come up or some terrible thing’s going to happen, and suddenly you’re like, oh, we shouldn’t do that anymore.
Carolyn Woodard: I was interested to hear you talk about that process, because that is what we have also been urging our clients to do: either have that as a big open conversation, a project where you’re going to write your policy or rewrite your policy, or even just institutionalize having open, transparent discussions, kind of weekly, or mini discussions. Because you’ll just find that 20 different people at your organization are using AI in 20 different ways. And there’s a lot of risk in that, and there’s a lot of missed opportunities, where you’re not seeing what other people are using it for.
But we’re finding there’s considerable reluctance to do that, because I think some people are worried about opening up a can of worms. There’s one person on your staff who just doesn’t want to use it at all, ever, for anything, and is adamantly against it. And if you start having these open conversations, then the people who love it are like… it’s hard, because that’s a work colleague and you have to get along with them. But we’ve still been urging people to have those conversations, because you want it out rather than swept under and invisible.
Brenda Foster: That is absolutely… So I spoke at Netroots this summer, and that was the overwhelming conversation I was having with people. Because look, still only about half of nonprofits have any kind of policy at all. However, what they don’t realize is that not having a policy is in and of itself a policy.
What you’re allowing people to do is sort of do it on their own. So what they’re finding is that 92% of people who are working in nonprofits right now, 80, 90%, are using AI. But 81% of that group, it’s individual heroics. Meaning, I figured out a way to do this faster. I’m not going to say anything to anybody. I’m just going to hand them the product, and look at me, how great I am. But that doesn’t really work for an organization if you have a set of values you want people to work by.
And then on top of that, the data and privacy risk is enormous. There have been a lot of situations where you’re putting information in, and people don’t necessarily know what is private, what is confidential, what is a risk around copyright. Like putting something in that’s copyrighted that needed to come back. And so without those conversations, that fear that you’re talking about, you’re really just shoving all your problems… I mean, the can of worms is open. It’s open. When ChatGPT launched, that was literally when the can of worms opened.
So I do think that what we’re seeing, the biggest concerns we’re seeing from nonprofits… Number one, I think this will be a funny one: note-taking and meeting recordings. They do not want to use it for that. They feel like they’re having confidential conversations and that there is no place on earth that they trust enough to allow to do that. I find that an important conversation to have, because how do you make sure that there’s a tool out there that you could actually use for that? Because what you’re also doing is you’re denying a level of employee any advancement, because they’re still hand-taking notes. And so you have to figure out, where are my ethics here? I want to make sure everything is confidential. I want to make sure that nothing leaks out and that it’s captured correctly. But I also want to make sure I keep my employees happy. So that one’s hard.
The staff replacement issue is certainly one. I’m seeing a lot of concern about it. A lot of concern, but I’m not seeing it in nonprofits, because look, corporations need to save money. And if they can find ways to save money, then they’re going to do that. But they’ve always done that. AI is just another tool for them to do that. But in the nonprofit world, we’ve just never operated that way.
So I think if we can look at it as a way to add capacity, meaning whatever you’re doing with it was never going to be done by an employee; it’s just now you can do it. To make the work more satisfying for your employees, to add value to what you give to your audiences, to increase your reach and impact, again in a way that you would never have done any other way. And then finally, I know nonprofits care about this. They’re going to prioritize human talents. They just are. And so I think sometimes those fears of, oh, I’m going to be replaced… in this particular sector, I really don’t think that’s an issue. People are so cautious. And it’s good for them to be cautious, for sure.
Carolyn Woodard: I agree. I do think that there may be something to the idea that entry-level jobs are threatened by AI. But for nonprofits, that’s like, did you have the budget to hire a junior assistant? No. And were you going to get that budget? No. So I think it’ll be interesting to see, long-term, the pipeline and pathways into nonprofit work and philanthropy work, if those entry-level jobs are more difficult to come by. But also, I see the same thing. You see the layoffs, or Microsoft just announced they are going to do these voluntary buyouts worldwide because they want to spend more money on AI and less money on salaries, and that just doesn’t hold for nonprofits, for sure.
Brenda Foster: No, it really doesn’t. And I think one of the things about the entry level that I feel like I’m noticing is, I’m of a certain age where everybody said to you, if you want to get your foot in the door, just be ready to pour coffee for people. Let’s be honest, pour coffee for men. But anyhow, I’m of that age. But in the end, that was not a satisfying job. It was just a way to get your foot in the door to maybe eventually have a satisfying job.
I think if we’re finding that we don’t have the space for an entry-level employee anymore, we were looking at their job wrong in the first place. Because why were they your main note taker? Why was that their whole job? Why was their whole job putting together agendas? No, because when they get out of school, that’s when they’re most excited about the actual work that you’re doing. So put them into situations where they can manage small projects, where you can gather that enthusiasm, because you don’t want to beat that enthusiasm out of them for two or three years while they’re doing the coffee pouring and the note taking and all of those other things.
So I actually see this as an opportunity to look at entry-level jobs very differently, and maybe just stop calling it that. It is a job that does X, and you are qualified because you just got four years of training, or in many cases, people are coming out with master’s degrees. I’m seeing at American (University) people who are going right through to their master’s (degrees). Look, the stuff that they’re doing is more sophisticated than a lot of people have access to at nonprofits.
Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, and send them out in the field. That’s something that AI can’t possibly do, and you get so much experience interacting with people.
Brenda Foster: That’s right. That’s exactly right.
Carolyn Woodard: Yeah. So, okay, you’re changing my take on that.
Brenda Foster: Well, and I also think if we’re worried about it as leaders of these organizations, then we’re probably not going to do it. Again, this is not a way to save money. This is a way to meet all of our goals. And if we can look at it that way, I think it’s going to do what we want it to do.
I think one thing that I really, really want to talk about, though, is the environment piece. Because what I’m seeing is just abject fear. People are very concerned, and they should be. So I live near Loudoun County, the data center capital of the world. The county next to me has built so many, and they build them so fast, these data centers. And so people are very, very concerned. But what’s so interesting about that is that not using AI isn’t going to make any difference at all.
And so now I keep saying to people, you have a couple of options here. One is, you’re a nonprofit, you know how to fight. So make data centers your issue. Make sure that the people that you’re trying to help are not further impacted by data centers. But stopping using AI isn’t going to help that. In fact, you’d be better off to stop using Netflix. I mean, there’s certain things, of course. If you’re going to look at the levels of things, using it for videos, that’s a pretty big impact. So don’t do that. That’s fine, because that’s human creativity. Let’s let the humans continue to be in videos and make the videos.
But I think also use AI to help you fight the data centers, because why not? And think about how you can get messages out in a way that you didn’t have the opportunity to do before. How can you empower people at the grassroots? Because they’re ready. I’ve seen a couple of studies that show that people are more against this than they were about nuclear power plants coming in, which is huge. So I do think nonprofits… and that’s probably the number one thing that I see.
The Progressive Communicators of DC listserv: I’m a co-founder of that. And so we will have an eruption, I don’t know, once a week, once every couple of weeks, where somebody says, have you thought about this AI tool? And then we have a long conversation about how terrible somebody is for using the AI tool. Totally reasonable. That’s what everybody’s concerned about, and they should be. I’m totally concerned about it.
I’m really excited I happen to live in a small community where we couldn’t fit a data center if we tried. But I have a cousin who lives out near Galax and Hillsville, Virginia, and there’s a lot of land there and it’s gorgeous. And right now that’s where the data centers want to come. And so I’m helping her with the tools and the conversations and that kind of thing. But that, to me, is how we have to use our power now. And not using ChatGPT may feel like a protest, but it’s actually not really helping at all.
Carolyn Woodard: Yeah. I mean, the nonprofit sector is less than 10% of the GDP in the United States. So that build-out of those data centers for AI is all corporate. The entire nonprofit community could stop using AI tomorrow and it would not change at all the amount of build-out that they are planning. And you’re right, the fancy lobbyists that they have going into these little town meetings and talking to the planners are using AI for their talking points. So you’re cutting yourself off from one of the tools that could counter those movements.
Brenda Foster: Yeah. It’s very difficult to wrap your mind around that. And it took me a while as well, because the guilt was just so heavy. I spent my whole life working on environmental issues and protecting public lands and all of these other things. And finally, I was able to figure out for myself that it’s not even an equal conversation. It’s not a trade-off. It’s not even related.
Carolyn Woodard: Yeah. No, I agree. Thank you for saying that, because it’s hard. Like you said, it’s valid to want to live your values and to not participate in a system that is so power-heavy, that is so environmentally unfriendly. But yes, with those tools, there’s such an opportunity there too.
Brenda Foster: Yeah. And I mean, I’m not telling anybody that they have to use AI, but I think what’s happening is that nonprofits are avoiding having the conversation about the policy because they don’t want anybody to use AI. And actually, they’re making it worse, because they put no guardrails down on how much AI is used, what it’s used for. Maybe you’ve got a budding movie producer in the back of your office who’s producing commercials every day with AI, and you have no idea.
So we cannot put our heads in the sand. We really have to look at this and say, it is here. I don’t like it, but I have to face it now. And I am seeing more and more people… Like I said, when I did the Netroots thing in June, that was more of the conversation. It was a lot more than it was before, where people were like, yeah, we’re just not going to use it.
Carolyn Woodard: And I think in that case, particularly with the environmental concerns, looking to what environmental nonprofits are doing and thinking, and putting out their thought leadership on how to use it, how to advocate for where the data centers are sited. It makes a difference. I mean, yes, Loudoun County has so many of them, but it’s very different in places like Loudoun County where there is water, versus siting a data center in Arizona somewhere where they’ve had a severe drought. So choosing your battles, figuring out where you have that agency. And I mean, all of the citizen uprising around the data center issue… It’s exciting. We have agency, right? That’s exciting. Organize people.
Brenda Foster: That’s right. Well, and the other thing that I think hasn’t been part of the conversation (and I did a lot of research on this) is the way that they’re being built. It’s being done that way because, again, they did it silently for a decade before we noticed. I remember 10 years ago, the Loudoun County people saying no data centers. And I was like, what are they talking about? I know now.
But part of the problem is that the faster you can come in and build these and say nothing to anybody, the more you can do it efficiently for yourself, for money. So there was no incentive for the past decade to do anything creative, to do anything better for the environment, because nobody was paying attention. So, let’s do it as cheaply as possible. But now people are paying attention. They are communicating effectively. So now we know that there are ways to do this. You can do it underground. You can do it where you’re recycling the amount of water that you use for cooling. There’s so many different ways to do it, but we never looked at that. We never forced them to look at that. For years, clearly, we haven’t even forced them to pay their own electric bills.
So now we can. I mean, that is really part of advocacy and this agency that we have. And we cannot back down from that agency. And I think, like I said, there’s a role for every nonprofit to play, to make sure that how we go forward with this technology is as responsible as possible. And I think we’re the only ones to do it.
Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, you got to rely on the… especially those environmental nonprofits that are really heavily involved in it. Do you have advice for nonprofits going forward? I feel like in the past year or so, maybe a year or two ago, there were lots of nonprofits that knew what AI was, but weren’t using it. And as you said, now it’s like 89, 92% of nonprofits are using it, usually in this very ad hoc way. We’re not seeing a lot of our clients being really intentional about it. So they’re just kind of adopting it, often without policies, often with different staff using it in different ways.
So for those nonprofits that are now getting their feet wet with these AI tools, or thinking about policy, or really realizing what a tool it is, do you have advice for them for the next year or so? What should they be doing and thinking about?
Brenda Foster: Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing is if you don’t have a policy, it’s time to take a look at that. And it doesn’t have to be complicated, but at least it needs to help come up with some guardrails. And I think the most successful way for nonprofits to look at AI going forward is workflow. What is the team workflow? How does this flow into anything else?
So for example, nothing goes out of our office without it being QC’d. And that is for grammar, that is for the style of the client, that is for whatever. That is part of our workflow. And so if we allow, say, AI for brainstorming, we allow it for regenerating something into another format, for example, what are the rules behind doing that? What does that workflow look like? Yes, you can brainstorm. No, you cannot cut and paste an entire op-ed that AI wrote into this and make an op-ed for a client. First of all, it’s not going to be good. It will not be good. The New York Times says they can tell a mile away how many, you know… And so, what can you do, and how should you be doing it? That workflow piece is really important.
I think governance needs to become the standard, just like anything else. If you don’t have an AI policy, then you’re basically saying you don’t care about any of the issues you actually care about, that you’ve avoided for all this time.
I do think taking a look at how it can expand your impact for your current people, for your current audiences… One of the things that I have found so exciting is these chatbots that can give people 24/7 help in a sector where that doesn’t exist. I spoke to a bunch of public housing directors earlier this year, and we talked about this very thing. We do not have the money for calls to be answered on basic things. And so, I want to know something about my bill, but guess what? I work the day shift, and that’s the only time you’re open. Imagine being able to get that answered in those 24 hours. Imagine something that is triaging. Oh, my toilet doesn’t work. Something that’s triaging it, when you don’t have a person there anyhow. So here’s a chat button. Something that can help: I have to fill out a form for Medicaid, and I want somebody to help me through that.
So those are the kinds of things that I think expand your capacity to help your audiences in ways that maybe you hadn’t thought of before. And I think that will make you feel better about it. Because, oh my gosh, I can do this, I can do that, I can add value. And so to me, that’s really the direction, when we’re looking at this next year: how can we use this to expand what we’re able to do for our communities? It’s the most important thing.
Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, I heard someone talking about the languages issue, and how you have people, if English isn’t their first language, who are taking your FAQ from your website (if they can find your website on their phone) and putting it through a translator so that they can understand it. And what if you move that into the tool itself? So they’re asking the question in their language and getting the answer that’s vetted by you, your FAQ, back to them in language that you know is a correct translation.
Brenda Foster: Yeah, I mean, that possibility is incredible. If you’re serving 11 different languages, but you only have capacity to really give bilingual materials in two… Now, I will tell you, we’ve actually done a couple of blogs and things on this. It’s not great at translation. That should not be your be-all and end-all. But if you had nothing before and you now have something that you can offer people that shows honestly that you know they’re there, you know something about them, and that you are trying, it’s a way forward for us to take a look at how we improve these tools so that they become better at languages. They’re clearly very good at English. So how do we make sure… it can’t be that hard. That, to me, is an investment that needs to be made. How do we do this in all sorts of languages and make sure that we can provide that kind of help in every language possible?
Carolyn Woodard: Well, Brenda, I want to thank you so much for your time today. I always learn something when I talk with you, not just about AI. You have just been using AI for so long, and you have so much experience with it and expertise with nonprofits using AI. So thank you again for coming on the podcast today.
Brenda Foster: I love it. I’m so excited, and I’m really glad to have caught up with you. Thank you, Carolyn.
As advocates for using technology to work smarter, we’re practicing what we recommend. This transcript was drafted with the assistance of AI, and is not a verbatim transcript. The content was edited for clarity, and was reviewed, edited, and finalized by a human editor to ensure accuracy and relevance.
Photo by Diego Romeo on Unsplash
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