Podcast: AI How-To for Nonprofits with Brenda Foster

You’ve heard you should play around with AI to learn it. But no one tells you – how do you really use it for work?

Media expert and self-taught “AI Evangelist” Brenda Foster spoke to Carolyn about ways to help nonprofit staff explore and begin using AI tools to work smarter, calling AI your new assistant that can give you time back in your day to do more for your nonprofit. 

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How and why to use AI at work – and how to get started

Have you been dabbling in AI but don’t really know what to try next? Are you worried about the impact of AI tools on your nonprofit but don’t really know what questions to ask? Concerned about security? Have you set up your AI Acceptable Use policy yet? 

Brenda walks through these considerations and more, while firmly coming down on the side of enabling your staff – no matter your general tech-savviness – to learn to use the AI tools you want and feel comfortable with, to achieve your mission and decrease the “busy work.” 

Some Key Takeaways:

• This is the pool we are now swimming in. You can try to refuse to get in but AI is evolving all around us.
  • Learning which tools you feel comfortable with personally and as a mission-driven organization is essential in this moment.
  • AI has enormous potential to lighten your workload and let you do tasks quicker and easier, but will probably not change your world the first time you use it. You need to learn, and there are very few resources focused on the “how to” for nonprofits.
• Start out by playing around with AI tools to do personal tasks outside of work.
  • Many of the tools are actually geared toward consumer uses and easier to intuitively use for personal tasks like finding a recipe or making a list.
  • Failure is not as big a disaster as would be at work. You haven’t wasted working time or prepared something that didn’t deliver for your team.
  • Learning AI tools on your own time can help you identify which will help you at work
• Five Questions to Ask – use these to inform your your philosophy, policies, training, and expectations. These will be answered differently at every organization.
  • Who is impacted if we use this tool? Negatively and positively. 
  • Who is left out if we use this tool? What biases are baked into the algorithms? But also, are we also able to give chances to people who might not have had them, by using these AI tools we didn’t have before?
  • How does this tool help us achieve our mission? Weigh that when considering the environmental and cultural impacts of AI in this moment. But also, don’t succumb to the pressure to know all the data all the time. Measure yourself against yourself not others, and understand what data and information you need at your own organization (you don’t need it all.)
  • What do employees need to maximize tool use? What kind of training, what it is going to cost, and what time are we going to give them to learn? How many tools should we try to learn at one time?
  • What are the ultimate risks and harms? How is our data being tracked? What are we making public and what are we paying to keep within a closed system private to our nonprofit?

Presenters

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 on AI how-to for nonprofits with Brenda Foster. Stay tuned for a full webinar later this year with Brenda to really dig into training and playing with AI tools to learn what works for you and your nonprofit.

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Ready to get strategic about your IT?

Community IT has been serving nonprofits exclusively for twenty years. We offer Managed IT support services for nonprofits that want to outsource all or part of their IT support and hosted services. For a fixed monthly fee, we provide unlimited remote and on-site help desk support, proactive network management, and ongoing IT planning from a dedicated team of experts in nonprofit-focused IT. And our clients benefit from our IT Business Managers team who will work with you to plan your IT investments and technology roadmap if you don’t have an in-house IT Director.

We constantly research and evaluate new technology to ensure that you get cutting-edge solutions that are tailored to your organization, using standard industry tech tools that don’t lock you into a single vendor or consultant. And we don’t treat any aspect of nonprofit IT as if it is too complicated for you to understand. When you are worried about productivity, change management, and implementation of new technology, you shouldn’t also have to worry about understanding your provider. You want a partner who understands nonprofits.

We think your IT vendor should be able to explain everything without jargon or lingo. If you can’t understand your IT management strategy to your own satisfaction, keep asking your questions until you find an outsourced IT provider who will partner with you for well-managed IT.

If you’re ready to gain peace of mind about your IT support, let’s talk.

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Transcript coming soon