What does the future hold for nonprofit technology from one of the giants in the industry?

Ryan Ozimek, founder of Soapbox Engage and long time nonprofit IT thought leader, reflects on the trends and topics from this recent conference for the sector from Microsoft – particularly the embrace of AI and the potential of AI tools to impact the nonprofit sector.

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Microsoft Nonprofit Tech Conference Reflections

In its second year, the Microsoft Global Nonprofit Leaders Summit drew nonprofit sector and IT activists from around the world to discuss new tools, new partnerships, and new needs.

Listen to Ryan Ozimek in conversation with Carolyn Woodard on his reflections on trends that were discussed and explored at this conference

Some Key Takeaways:

Presenters

Ryan Ozimek


Ryan Ozimek is the co-founder of Soapbox Engage, a twenty-five year old technology company serving nonprofits exclusively with fundraising, engagement and nonprofit management solutions. Since 2001, he has brought software services to the hard-working non-profits and socially responsible businesses that make our world a better place. From enhancing online communications to building mission critical online applications, Soapbox has positioned itself as a leader in Web software development, leveraging existing technologies and building unique solutions for the non-profit sector.

Invited to the Microsoft Global Nonprofit Leaders Summit in its inaugural year last year and again this spring, Ryan shared with Carolyn his impressions and takeaways from this gathering of nonprofits, funders, Microsoft partners and Microsoft thought leaders and engineers. You too can benefit from his Microsoft nonprofit tech conference reflections.


Carolyn Woodard


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 Ryan Ozimek on his Microsoft nonprofit tech conference reflections. More on our Microsoft resources here.


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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.

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Transcript

Carolyn Woodard: Welcome to the Community IT Innovators Technology Topics Podcast. I’m your host, Carolyn Woodard, and today I’m really excited to welcome my friend Ryan Ozimek to talk about a conference that he just attended, where they talked about the future of nonprofit IT technology from Microsoft. First, can you introduce yourself?

Ryan Ozimek: Sure. Ryan Ozimek from Soapbox Engage. We’ve been around for 24 years, and I’ve at least been around for 24 years because I was one of the co-founders of the business. We’ve been focusing on serving small and mid-sized nonprofit organizations through the last quarter century, which is just wild to say. 

But Carolyn, I remember in our early days, we were literally on our hands and knees, wiring Ethernet cable to connect organizations to get onto the Internet, which was going to be a thing. We promised them that once they got connected, the world would change for them. And it is wild to think we’ve gone from that to where we are today. 

I’m out here in the San Francisco Bay Area now. Our company is headquartered in DC. But my boyfriend and I recently had a little kiddo, so we want to be closer to family. Now we’re out in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Carolyn Woodard: Well, thank you so much for joining me from the West Coast. 

Microsoft Global Nonprofit Leaders Summit Reflections

I wanted to ask you a little bit more about the Microsoft Global Nonprofit Leaders Summit. This is the second year of this meetup of people who are working in nonprofit IT and working on some of these big ideas and what Microsoft provides to nonprofits.

Do you have some impressions for us from that conference?

Ryan Ozimek: This is their second year of doing it. I remember the first year when they reached out to me and they said, hey, we’re going to put on an event, and we think it’s going to be a thing that nonprofit leaders will go to. 

And I said, that sounds great. Let me know if it really happens. And then I showed up on the first day last year, assuming that it’s going to be me and 50 Microsoft friends. And that would be about it.

And instead, it was more than a thousand individuals from different organizations. And we’re all really interested in, what is Microsoft and what are we facing as leaders in nonprofit technology? I was pretty surprised and really, really happy that first year. That made a big impression right away. To see Microsoft’s president come out and speak, to have one of their VPs of Marketing come out to speak, and to be really thoughtful and not just say, here’s technology and we’re throwing it at nonprofits. It was more about here’s technology and here’s how organizations can use it to be really successful. And here’s how we want to work alongside you. I thought that was really appealing given what we’re seeing in the broader tech ecosystem. 

So this year, I was open to see more of the same. And I think I got a lot of that. My biggest impressions from it were the artificial intelligence world is changing so quickly that I swear a lot of the content was based on things that had been made four months prior, like really, really quickly in Microsoft and technology terms. It made me think, wow, we are already just barreling down the road of huge changes happening in technology and how our nonprofit organizations can use that technology.

And I walked away from the conference saying, all right, last year, announcements were being made, and this year was more of it’s really happening, and it’s happening faster than we thought.

The Microsoft Nonprofit Philosophy

Carolyn Woodard: Do you have one or two of those tools or products that you want to tell us about? 

And also, I guess I have a follow up question of, you talked a little bit about the philosophy that Microsoft wants to work alongside nonprofits. So, what does that look like?

Ryan Ozimek: Yeah. I think one thing is it’s interesting right now in the Microsoft space. Microsoft has what’s called a division, a group, a team within Microsoft, called Microsoft Tech for Social Impact, which many of your listeners may already know about.

But for those that don’t, it is really focused not on just saying, “how do we give existing technology to nonprofits,” but “how can we both work alongside organizations to create the technology?” 

And how can Microsoft create that technology on their own, specifically purpose-built for nonprofit organizations? During the last year, Microsoft has taken some significant steps back from that last focus of building purpose-built tools for the nonprofit community.

It was interesting to see what was going to happen at this event that had a whole bunch of nonprofit leaders there to hear what they were going to say. 

I think one of the things that struck me was, they’ve gone back to the approach that they had when I was first deeply engaged with them about five years ago, which was, what if we could seed a bunch of fertile land to help a number of different solutions that could be purpose-built by the community for the nonprofit sector? They’re doing this with fundraising and engagement.

They’re probably doing this on their volunteer side. They’re probably doing this in a number of other areas as well too. They’ve got some training, Microsoft Community Training, and some other services and tools that they’ve been building.

My lessons learned from the last year and a half have really been, they’re going to step back into having Microsoft partners be leading those efforts. They’re going to essentially help and hope that the community will rally itself together to provide solutions for each other that could be more focused for specific sub-verticals within the nonprofit space. 

I think that they just looked at what’s selling. They used to say, we’re selling what’s on the truck. What’s on the truck is a whole bunch of AI stuff. Just so much AI stuff is built into office and their whole productivity suite and Teams and biz apps. It’s just, it’s everywhere. 

I think that their focus is probably rightly so, 100 percent focused on what do we need to do to scale that quickly, and then how can nonprofits take it, then get the most advantage of that.

Carolyn Woodard: That makes sense. I mean, that’s been my impression interacting with Microsoft people over the years. And you see it’s a commercial product that’s wildly successful. And then the question is how can nonprofits use that? Instead of saying “let’s build something for nonprofits that does exactly what they need.” And it’s not like we’re complaining, it does what most nonprofits need, a lot of what we need, right? 

But sometimes when you interact with the Microsoft people who have been assigned to the nonprofit world, they don’t know anything about nonprofits. Sometimes they’ve just come straight out of the business, and they have a lot of misconceptions or assumptions about what we would need or how their products would work for us. 

It’s good to hear you say that instead of that model of pushing products out to the community we can come back with, here are the things that we need, or we use this platform to build this thing. Can you help market it and get it to more nonprofits? That makes a lot of sense.

Microsoft AI Tools

Ryan Ozimek: I think one thing that’s going to be interesting is right now, just like when we were first wiring Ethernet cables to get nonprofits online, we’re back at a global starting point for a lot of folks, 98 percent of the world, and saying here’s this AI thing from four months ago. 

We’ve revolutionized AI, everybody’s starting from scratch. It is kind of an interesting time because rather than saying, here’s a 15-year build cycle of CRM solutions, and we’re going to apply that to nonprofits, and here’s 10 years of content management systems that we’re going to apply to nonprofits. Now for businesses and nonprofits alike, universities, synagogues, everybody in between is trying to figure out what this new technology is going to be. 

We’re all at those early starting line discussions, which means organizations have a unique opportunity to be at the table when we’re building these tools, both from the ethics as well as the technology, as well as what’s the purpose of these tools and how we’re going to use them.

A lot of the things that I heard at the event were, wow, that’s really cool. That’s really interesting. How are we going to apply this to our organizations and our community? And everybody left with a lot more questions they had, not in a bad way, but in a positive way.

Be Flexible and Expect Change

This feels like 1999 all over again. This is going from dial up modem to getting on the high-speed internet and what is that change going to be? That makes it an exciting opportunity.

Carolyn Woodard: I wonder about that too, because that time period also, was what was that? pet.com?

Ryan Ozimek: pets.com. Bust.

Carolyn Woodard: There was that period where everyone said, “just be online and you’ll be successful.” And well, no, you actually have to do something, provide a product, provide a service, have a mission, and your online presence will help you reach people with that mission, but you can’t just have a website. Well, I guess you could make a million dollars overnight, but then it went away pretty quickly.

Ryan Ozimek: One of the things that we learned at Soapbox Engage – our corporate name is actually Picnet, and when we started Picnet, we got it together as an idea back in 1999. And I like to say, we started the company in the midst of a global recession at the .com peak busting period, and we were serving a sector that had almost no money to invest in the type of work that we were doing. 

And the benefit of that back then was, it meant we had to be really scrappy. In the DNA of our business is be scrappy, be agile. If you’re choosing to serve nonprofits with technology, know that technology is changing, so you need to always be ready to change.

I feel like we’re back at the time, not necessarily us as a business, but as a community, as a sector, it’s time to really be agile again, because things are going to just change a lot.

And I think as we’re considering what those next steps need to be, building in some sort of risk volatility measures that you can have as a leader in your organization to be prepared for the speed bumps coming up or the big changes happening, either through political changes or technology changes or social changes, is increasingly important. 

We’re undergoing some major shifts right now. And it doesn’t mean step back, it probably means lean in on where you feel most comfortable in taking those early next steps. And you’re right, we don’t want to see the next webvan and pets.com in our nonprofit space.

What can we be doing to learn together? What’s the kind of community gatherings we can have to help make that happen? I do feel like the Microsoft Global Nonprofit Leader Summit was a great way to bring those folks together.

How Do Nonprofits React to Rapid Change?

Carolyn Woodard: It’s an interesting analogy too, because, working as long as you have in the nonprofit IT sector, there were many nonprofits, maybe a majority, in that 1999 period who just said, I’m not going to have a website. I have a brochure, people have been calling me, I go to neighborhood events, and I have a business card. I don’t really need a website. I don’t need to have my donation page online. I have my major donors, etc. 

And as the technology matured and we all changed how we got our information and how we donated and how we found out about organizations that we wanted to support, nonprofits came along, right?

They built a website, they did donations, they changed how they were online, some of them went viral for the ice bucket challenge or what have you. They could really see the potential, but there’s some nonprofits that need to see somebody else do it first, and then they’ll go ahead and do it.

And I feel like AI tools may be a similar situation right now, where, as those tools develop and we have these convenings where nonprofits can learn from each other what’s working and what they’re using, more of them will come online.

Do you feel like that is true?

Ryan Ozimek: I do. And one of the things I’m reminding myself of from way back in the website days, it was how flashy and how pretty is your homepage. And when you have the little mailbox icon that has the mailbox flapper going in and out, and it was spun around with a letter E at the bottom of the page, that was really cool. You really needed to focus on that. 

I think that the challenge for some of the early entrants had back then was they were very focused on some of these things that didn’t actually convert new donors, didn’t actually engage their organization to do more with their mission. It was just trying to keep up with things.

I wonder if we’re in a different state right now because we’ve had two decades of digital technology revolution that’s happened, and the latest generation of young people that are coming out of college to work at organizations, they are ready to rock and roll. They know this stuff better than the folks that were there years before them, folks like you and I do. 

So, I wonder if things are both moving faster, and on the consumer side, the expectations are just so much higher now, that what we’re hearing oftentimes is that somebody on the board of directors of an organization is saying, I want to pay this through my donor-advised fund, and I want it to be three clicks away. Somebody else wants to pay with Venmo because their teenage kid is doing a peer-to-peer fundraising challenge, and all of her friends are paying with Venmo. 

So those are some of the new agents of push that we’re seeing that really are the kind of demand driven on the organizations rather than, let’s just make a spinny e-icon on the home page of our flashy website and call it a win. 

I think that that feels like it’s different this time, and I’m hoping AI will help facilitate that more too.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, the difference in technology for appearances versus technology to be more efficient, be more productive, and those opportunities that we don’t even know yet, that AI is going to pull out for us, of what if we did it this way? 

Who Does AI at Your Organization?

Do you remember back in the day, there were programs to match up the CEO with a young junior staffer who knew what Facebook was? You would sit with the CEO, they were peer learning opportunities, where you would get a mentor if you were a young person, and the CEO would learn, what is this Facebook thing?

Ryan Ozimek: Absolutely.

Carolyn Woodard: Do you see that happening now too? Because I was thinking about what you said about the younger people. I was at a conference maybe last year, and I was at a table, we’re talking about AI tools and AI policy at nonprofits, and an older gentleman said, well, we just don’t let anyone use it. That’s our policy. 

And I said, okay, but are you never planning to hire anyone under 30 ever again? Because I guarantee you, every college kid right now is writing with AI, and other things. They’re used to doing other things with AI. 

I’m just wondering about those generational divides. Was there anything at the conference with Microsoft that kind of spoke to that, of how do nonprofits get up to speed quickly?

Because you have people at your nonprofits who can see the opportunities … if I could have AI search this file and find these things, I’d be cooking with gas, you know, in our mission. 

So how do you make those things happen?

Ryan Ozimek: I think one of the other things that’s different to me is that when we all got connected to the Internet, and we were all building websites for the first time, everything felt really new and really different. 

And one of the things that was really focused on, I think really quite eloquently by Microsoft at this event, it was very much an AI focused event. And because they kept on saying Copilot, and because they kept on talking about agents, and because they said, let’s help you do what you already do better, faster, more efficient, more affordably. It felt less about some big generational change and divide. 

It was more like, do you love your inbox, but hate all your messages? Do you love being able to move really quickly through building presentations, but hate making them from scratch?

Guess what? We’ve got the new and improved technology. 

It was more about layering in Copilot that’s going to help you do the things you’re already doing, but better, faster, more affordably.

It’s felt, at least the way that Microsoft has been kind of presenting it to the nonprofit leaders, more about enhancing the way that folks are doing things that feels really natural. 

You know, if you’re looking for what was the last conversation that Ryan and Carolyn had about this, just go search everything you know about me in my Microsoft environment and tell me what you find. What are the top 10 things we’ve talked about in the past? That would be a huge struggle to do, but now people just know that they intuitively, they would love just to ask some super intelligent power that question and just easily get those answers back. 

So it almost feels like rather than having to learn a tool to use it most effectively to do something, the nice on-ramp to this is just talk to the tool, the way you would talk to a friend or somebody, a colleague of your organization to ask them a question, and it will surface relevant things in a spooky, pretty decently accurate way. At least that’s what we were seeing at the event and that’s what we were testing out ourselves.

It makes me feel like the generational gaps and the on-ramps, the gaps will be narrower, the on-ramps will be smoother, and that feels like that’s a starting point. 

I think that things are going to be more interesting, more challenging is what happens after that. 

But in terms of productivity, I think the promise of what Microsoft has been doing with Copilot and the agents that they’re now building out is just that. Let’s make this an easy on-ramp for folks. I think that people were pretty blown away by what they were able to see.

Carolyn Woodard: That’s good to hear.

How Can Nonprofits Prepare for this AI Moment?

To segue from that, is there anything after hearing all of these advanced views of what’s coming at us? Do you have any advice for what nonprofits should be doing to prepare for this moment?

Ryan Ozimek: Yeah, that’s a good question. I know that there’s probably a lot of smarter people that have built full portfolios about training and preparedness for this. 

Focus on Fitting Your Tools to Your Needs

The two key things I would say, is one, as I’ve always said, technology is not a panacea. Let’s think about what problems in the world are we trying to solve and then find the right tools to solve them. So often I see new technology comes out, organizations rush to adopt the technology to then find the problems to solve with. I say, no, no, no, let’s work the other way. Let’s work the other way around. We don’t need AI to do certain things. We might need AI to do something.

Let’s stay focused on the problems that we’re trying to solve and where we feel technology like AI could be a good fit. Let’s approach it that way rather than the other way around, which could just burn too much valuable time and money for an organization. 

Be Agile and Be Nimble

And then second, what I was talking about earlier is, being prepared to be more agile and more nimble than ever before.

If Microsoft is telling us that the entire AI world for them is just changing in four month increment periods, there’s no way that the average organization just trying to serve a social mission and use technology to do that is ever going to be able to keep up with this. 

So just being nimble, being able to make small bets in small places to test things out in a lightweight way and not worry about chasing what’s the home page spinny e-icon look like on your website and say, let’s get focused on what the technology can do to solve specific problems right in front of us. Those would be my two top things out.

Use AI to Learn What AI to Use

And then maybe a third thing, go talk to your favorite AI agent about what you think technology should be doing for your organization. Because I think you’ll be surprised. One of the things I’ve learned a lot is if you ask these AI systems, what are the types of questions I should be asking you to solve a particular problem? It’s surprisingly good at least helping you build that framework.

So that’s two and a half items there.

Are Nonprofits Ready?

Carolyn Woodard: Well, and that’s reassuring because I think one thing that nonprofits that I’ve worked with and for have been pretty good at is knowing their mission really deeply, front, back, left, right, up, down, inside out. They know what they’re trying to do in their community or wherever they’re working. 

And I think most people who work for nonprofits are there because they believe the mission, and they also have that expertise or experience in what the nonprofit is trying to do.

So being able to give staff those tools to turn that deep experience and knowledge into action; being able to do the things that they know they want to try and do better, that’s an opportunity. 

I think that’s interesting to think about in terms of tech savviness of nonprofits, which is something we talk a lot about. How ready are you for change? How good are you at strategic planning around technology? 

Or is it something you just say, oh, my IT director does that. I don’t know what our tech plan is. I don’t know what our policies are. 

So maybe those are things you can ask your AI agent, for example, what policies do I need for AI?

Microsoft Copilot Agents Paradigm Shift/Workforce Changes

Ryan Ozimek: You know, one of the things that I think was a big takeaway that was said at the end of a number of the different presentations was last year, Microsoft focused on Copilot, your friendly navigator guiding you through artificial intelligence. 

And then this year, they talked about Copilot and behind Copilot are any number of agents. We think of those almost like micro services from the IT side that are specialized services to do very purpose-built things.

And I think what the underlying message there was is that there’s going to be labor force changes, especially at organizations where the cost of having a certain number of people on staff is often times running right up against the revenue the organization is making. That is often making it more difficult for organizations to achieve the mission they’re trying to achieve. 

Microsoft’s takeaway was we should be less worried about people losing their jobs and more worried about those people being able to be more effective in doing the things that’s necessary for the mission of the organization. And that was the promise of productivity tools to begin with.

 

It’ll be really interesting to see what happens if we move away from just making the individuals and the organization more effective and productive, and instead augmenting them with more artificial intelligence agents that are just doing the things. 

We’re talking about asking it questions and then coming back and helping you reason and being your Copilot. Well, what happens when it just starts doing the things? Whatever those micro systems or solutions are. 

So, maybe one last item for listeners would be, what are those types of things where nobody in our organization should be spending any more time in coming years doing any of X type of work? If there was any micro service that we could just train enough to feel 95%, 90% confident that was doing a good job, what are those things?

Get that list ready to go, because I feel like that’s coming really, really quick.

Carolyn Woodard: Oh my gosh, I was at a nonprofit way back in the day, where their year-end fundraising, first it was a letter, then it became an email. It literally took a team of five or six people, four or five months to every year to put that fundraising email together. Things like that, you could see being improved with AI.

But I wonder too about the employment issue though, because as you said, it is often what money do you have coming in? What are you paying out in your payroll? 

I also feel like the nonprofit sector often is in this world where if the person could be more productive … you have people, it’s like a typing pool or something back in the day, right? You have people that they’re spending those five months on the fundraising appeal. If that only took them a week, the nonprofit would probably use that other four months and three weeks for them to be doing different things for the nonprofit to reach their mission and to achieve their goals, right? 

So in some ways, when you add in the artificial intelligence, doing the busy work, then at a lot of nonprofits, I think the people are free to use the rest of their time to think more deeply about things, take more opportunities, go in different directions, understand more what their nonprofit is doing in a way that I feel like the for-profit would just fire those people, right? They would say “I have a chatbot now that answers the phone. I don’t need phone answerers.”

Whereas I feel like I’m hopeful about nonprofits. A lot of the nonprofits that we deal with in our clients, they have smart people working there who want to know, why does it take half my day to answer this inquiry or whatever it is?

We’re in a Moment of Needs

Ryan Ozimek: I also think we’ve made choices, at least in the United States. We’ve made choices as a society over the course of the last couple of decades to have our government and government services do less and put more of that burden onto the social services sector. And going into 2025, that seems to be happening even faster.

So, what I need to make sure is that every organization that I get a chance to touch has whatever tools necessary to make every one of their team members more productive, while also just recognizing there’s a lot of emotions going on, there’s a lot of pressure going on, there’s a lot of individuals that are hurting in different ways. 

We want to be able to strike that right balance of, let’s achieve our missions more effectively and faster because the world needs us more than ever before. Oh, and by the way, the world is a really crazy place right now.

We know you’re bringing home a lot of stress, and we need you more than ever before. So, I think we need game changing catalysts like AI to help us get there. Because that’s where we’re at right now in society. 

I may not agree with where we’re heading from a policy perspective, let’s say as the United States. But I do think that what we have in front of us requires the social sector to really be able to step up and take on that challenge. And I think we’re prepared and ready to do that.

Let’s just give the best people in the country, the best tools they need, to be as successful as possible, because we’re going to need them more than ever.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, those needs aren’t going away. There will be more needs. 

Ryan, thank you so, so much for your time today. I really appreciate you taking time out of your schedule and catching us up on what the Microsoft Global Leaders Summit covered and the AI that is barreling at us, hundreds of miles an hour.

Ryan Ozimek: Yes, a pleasure as always. And I have a feeling there’s going to be lots of changes coming in the future. I’m excited to see where we’re all heading together.

Carolyn Woodard: We’ll check back in with you. I would love that.

Photo by Terren Hurst on Unsplash