Finding Hidden Capcity in Your Workflows

In the world of nonprofits, the challenge isn’t AI itself, but the capacity issues that AI helps to illuminate. Most nonprofits grapple with limited resources, with AI making these difficulties more apparent. Today, we shift away from the theoretical to focus on real-world applications that can reclaim precious time for these organizations. Welcome to our discussion on Mission Aligned Intelligence—a podcast dedicated to discovering AI’s potential to truly support nonprofit missions.

Meet Your Hosts

I’m Alissa Condra, bringing my expertise in user experience design, research, and strategy to aid organizations in identifying where AI fits into their processes. Alongside me is Mike Mitchell, with 30 years in the nonprofit sector, offering a wealth of experience as both an executive director and senior manager. If your organization is at a crossroads, uncertain where changes are needed or how AI may fit in, this podcast is crafted for you.

Current Trends in the Nonprofit Sector

In conversations with nonprofit leaders, two significant trends emerge: reduced governmental funding heightening competition, and an overburdened workforce due to increased demands. These pressures lead to burnout, hindering those passionate about making a difference. As Mike shares, these stresses are universal, spanning the entire sector. Our aim is to validate these challenges and illuminate paths forward.

Understanding Nonprofit Workflows

Exploring nonprofit workflows reveals many processes were not strategically designed but have evolved out of necessity. This can result in siloed operations with little integration, limiting organizational effectiveness. The same issues resonate across for-profit sectors, demonstrating universal challenges that seem ripe for AI intervention.

Efficiency in Nonprofits: A Double-Edged Sword

The term "efficiency" often provokes resistance in nonprofits, evoking concerns over being forced to do more with less. We advocate for considering efficiency as empowering staff, enriching their capacity to contribute strategically rather than squeezing more out of existing resources. Our dialogue about Mission Aligned Intelligence revolves around enhancing human creativity rather than relegating humans to monotonous tasks.

Maximizing Impact with AI

AI holds great promise in transforming nonprofit operations. For example, strategists can benefit from AI as a system of insight, managing documents and recognizing useful patterns, ultimately offering recommendations based on historical successes. Additionally, in sectors like workforce development, AI can help integrate diverse data points to spotlight meaningful impacts beyond traditional metrics.

Potential Pitfalls of AI in Nonprofits

Yet, with AI's power comes caution. Nonprofits must guard against misuse, such as trusting AI blindly or inadvertently sharing sensitive information. It’s crucial that AI complements rather than replaces the human touch, particularly in personal communications with stakeholders.

Homework and Practical Steps Forward

We provide practical homework to help you reflect on your work tasks’ AI suitability. By imagining how you’d delegate tasks, you identify easily automated routines ripe for AI assistance. Tasks that challenge explanation remain your domain, offering fertile ground for growth once mundane duties are automated.

As you journey ahead, email drafts and constituent communications are great entry points for AI experimentation, providing immediate efficiency gains.

Conclusion and Next Steps

We invite you to continue the conversation, as we release weekly podcast episodes on AI’s role in supporting mission-driven work. Our community is here to explore your workflows and ideas, ready to dive into future episodes based on your feedback.

For more information, visit nonprofit.ai. Thank you for joining us in reimagining what AI can accomplish for nonprofit missions. We look forward to connecting with you next week!

Full Transcript

[00:00:00] Most nonprofits don't have an AI problem. They have a capacity problem that AI makes visible. Today we're not talking theory. We're getting into actual workflows where time disappears and what you can do about it. 

[00:00:12] Welcome to the Mission Aligned Intelligence, a podcast about using AI in ways that actually support nonprofit missions.

[00:00:20] I'm Alissa Condra. My background is in user experience design, research, and strategy, and now I help organizations figure out where AI actually fits into how they work. I'm Mike Mitchell and I've spent 30 years in the nonprofit sector, as an executive director and senior manager, and I've seen plenty of solutions come and go.

[00:00:43] So in the last episode, we asked you to write down three tasks that made you think, I wish I didn't have to do this today. We're gonna dig into that. So if you're running an organization or a team and you know something has to change, but you're not sure where to start, where [00:01:00] AI might fit in, this is for you. 

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[00:01:04] Before we get into specifics, I want to ask Mike, what are you seeing actually happening out there right now when you talk to nonprofit leaders? I know I've sat in some of these meetings with you more recently, but, in your circles, what are you hearing? Yeah, there are two really big trends happening.

[00:01:26] The first trend is that is the federal government reduces funding to nonprofits. That has increased the competition with the available funding, which has created more stress, among nonprofits and more pressure, on staff that fundraise, but also program staff that need to make, delivery on the programs to attract more money.

[00:01:45] and then the second thing is, the. Fact that staff just feel more stretched, because they're being asked to do more, with less money and that stress is causing, burnout. And, it, and it is really tragic in a lot of ways because people choose [00:02:00] this profession 'cause they wanna make a difference and this is limiting their ability to make that difference.

[00:02:07] Yeah, absolutely. you and I sat in,a client meeting yesterday and it is. It is crazy how the words they are using so mirror every other conversation that we've had so far and conversations, with you and friends of yours that I've met. it really does feel universal for, people in this sector.

[00:02:29] Yeah, I would just throw in there, just the,just the observation that we've spoken to people on both coasts of the United States that are in completely different subject areas of mission, and they're saying the exact same things and they don't even know each other. So that resonates with, this whole idea of people feeling burnout.

[00:02:50] so Exactly. It's what we're experiencing and what we see. Yeah. Yeah. So definitely validates our ideas and why we're here, why we [00:03:00] wanna help people do this. so when we start talking today, getting more into some of the specifics, I wanna. Start with a little bit about what I've done from a user experience standpoint.

[00:03:11] So when I run a research and design a discovery project with a business, I often sit with people and watch how they do their work, what they do step by step. And a lot of the workflows that I see weren't designed, they were. Accumulated. So they started doing it one way. They had to get creative piece things together, copy pasting from different systems or old systems or, old processes that someone had put together.

[00:03:39] and they got stuck. is that something that you think is part of the nonprofit world as well? Oh yeah. And in fact, you can look at nonprofits and see the different pillars inside a nonprofit and how the different staff in those particular departments are working towards one end and [00:04:00] develop different workflows that don't really integrate with other workflows in the organization.

[00:04:05] and so that creates loggerheads across an organization and limits the ability of the organization to be effective. Yeah. Yes. That definitely sounds like the business world as well. Even if we call it, lines of business instead of department pillars or whatever that is. I have a, I guess related to that, I have a question for you about, the word efficiency.

[00:04:29] So something that comes up a lot in business and we hear a lot about in ai, um, efficiency and improving efficiency. Um, when you hear that in a nonprofit context, what's your gut reaction? Yeah, my reaction is,reflecting what I see. Nonprofit colleagues respond when they hear that word and it really turns 'em off.

[00:04:51] In a lot of cases, it is not because they don't want to be more effective as organizations, but they often see the word efficiency as a code [00:05:00] word for doing more, with less. And so as we approach the conversation, thinking about efficiency as a way of increasing the productive capacity of a person and equipping them with more is the space we should be going and we should be communicating when we use the word efficiency is how am I equipping the staff member to be able to do more?

[00:05:24] And that's part of why. You and I are talking about this idea of mission aligned intelligence as something that gives people more productive power, versus saying do more with less. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. So it's not, it's protecting the human energy for the human work. So you're being, by being efficient, you are,ideally you're getting admin busy work, the less efficient things off your plate so that you can do that human centered actual kind of capacity building work rather than just [00:06:00] getting faster at admin work.

[00:06:03] Exactly. And I think you and I share an aspiration that we wanna see people, live into their creative space, their potential, and not in their task oriented space. And if they live in the space where they can be more strategic, that means that they can do more. And that's why figuring out how to do tasks like, Automating tasks and getting more hours a week, then that could,give a space to somebody to do more in the strategic, area where their gifts are. Yeah, I think that's definitely, what excites me about it and excites me about what we are building is we're thinking about AI as that strategic partner, not just, a piece of software like, other software sort of revolutions in the past.

[00:06:52] It's not, this is something, a tool you need to plug in. it's actually thinking about your entire, day week [00:07:00] job differently. One of the, by the way, this is all related to why we call it mission aligned intelligence and why we've named our show that, you can download the white paper that Mike wrote about this on our website, nonprofit AI.

[00:07:17] And we'll include that in the show notes so you can read more and distribute it to the people in your organization that you think could benefit from understanding this mission aligned intelligence idea. So here's a question I would ask. Anyone listening, what would your team do with five extra hours per week?

[00:07:38] And what is it costing you right now that you don't have those hours? Or, the other way that I framed this was if you were able to hire as many people as you wanted, who would you hire and what would they do? So I'm curious, I know we brought this up with several of our clients, Mike, so I'll let you put yourself in the nonprofit shoes.

[00:07:59] [00:08:00] what do people usually say or how should they think about that question when it applies to their own work? Yeah, if you were a program manager, if you had five hours extra a week, you could come up with more systems to serve more people. So if you're feeding those facing hunger, you could recruit more volunteers.

[00:08:20] If you had five extra hours, that could in turn serve more people, or you could call more restaurants or grocery stores to donate more food. So something like that would have a substantive impact on a mission. Which is very exciting to think about and aspire to. Yeah. Yes, definitely. I think,I've thought about this a lot in my own, personal week and work and time that I spent.

[00:08:45] But thinking about, people whose ideal part of their job, the actual human part of their job, is oftentimes literally feeding people. that, that's so rewarding.

[00:09:03] ​So back to what we're talking about reducing or get, eliminating some admin work entirely. I'm gonna give you an example of a project that I worked on, before joining nonprofit, ai and I want to see if this sort of resonates with you as well.

[00:09:20] So I was sitting, I was working on a strategy team where each strategist supported multiple lines of business and multiple product areas. So no one owned, just like one sort of neat area of work. every week strategists were in different team meetings, helping groups stay aligned to, a strategy that had been put in place, either a year or five year strategy.

[00:09:45] Quarterly reviews, monthly updates. A lot of the work of the strategy team was, creating slides for these various kind of groups and meetings. On top of that, there was a chief digital officer who [00:10:00] was fairly new, who wanted to be across everything, and often had pretty strong opinions on certain slides of what was useful in terms of reporting and understanding things of the organization.

[00:10:11] So anyway, slides were constantly being created to, propose a strategy or track, progress on a strategic plan, and. Some of these slides would present things, visually very effectively, and there would be certain meetings where someone loved this and they wanted to see that same thing for a different line of business or for a different product area.

[00:10:31] And it was just a total mess of documents, files, slides in different files on different people's computers. So we had. OneDrive, we had Microsoft teams. There was versioning. It was not necessarily like a systems a lack of features in the system. It was system problem, but it was really like a human problem.

[00:10:55] 'cause the knowledge of which slide this [00:11:00] certain leader liked was all in people's head. all that to say the, the files and the, File management and duplicating slides for certain purposes was not a strategist main job, but was really what a lot of their week was spent doing. Does that resonate from a nonprofit?

[00:11:21] Oh, yeah. Angle as well. ask any nonprofit, executive director about what it's like to prepare for a board meeting. And you have a lot of contrasting views about what types of slides to put together. And usually the week, maybe the two weeks leading up to the board meeting are lots of countervailing views about.

[00:11:41] What slides would show the effectiveness of the organization. And it ends up coming down to whatever the executive director and the staff think the executive director wants, not the board. I'm sorry, the board chair wants not the full board. And then everything is tailored to that. [00:12:00] And it may not be what's best for the organization.

[00:12:03] but it's often what's best for the board chair. and that's an experience that many executives. Directors will go through, and sometimes, and that's not as a critique necessarily of the board chair. It's oftentimes just the the executive director trying to do exactly what that person wants.

[00:12:21] And you miss a lot when that happens because information isn't consolidated and integrated. and it's portrayed in a way that is, appealing to one person, not serving the mission. Yes. Okay. That makes sense. And yeah, that sounds very similar to things that I've gone through and it is, it's completely, human to say, we're trying to.

[00:12:45] I'm trying to do this job in the best way I can, in the best way. I know how, but it's often, yeah. who's the loudest in the room that, we need to please. so I have a few notes here about things that I think AI could have been helpful in this case, [00:13:00] so jump in and if you've got some other ones to throw in there based on.

[00:13:04] Things that we've done before. so I think AI could be in this situation, the living source of truth. So using AI to maintain a knowledge layer that helps understand what documents exist and why they were created, who they were created for, and how leadership responded so teams can stop.

[00:13:23] Guessing which version matters. this would've been super helpful for, a strategy team with, years of strategy decks. if you could match that with notes or even transcripts of meetings of what were, what slides worked for, what purpose, and have an AI that you could ask to, recreate that or remind me of what this worked or what was the purpose of this or.

[00:13:48] Who said that I want, I should change that. that would've been so helpful then having to hunt down, random files in different folders from years of [00:14:00] projects. the other thing I think AI could help with is, adapt content that was. So that was effective or helpful in a certain case, adapt that for a new audience, while preserving kind of the narrative consistency.

[00:14:16] So not duplicating files and having. Old copies be lost, but making changes from an original file and proposing ideas of how to adapt, say a strategic, plan for a different line of business. is there anything else that, that you have or that triggered for you in terms of where AI could help?

[00:14:38] On the board meetings or other ones? Yeah, let's look at the program side. and, I used to do workforce development work, which is a fancy way of saying help, underserved people get jobs. And, a lot of times the, the outcomes were framed as how many people did you get a job? It wasn't whether it was a good job.

[00:14:58] Whether, what did the person learn in the [00:15:00] process? And so something that AI could do in workforce development today is bring together the different layers of knowledge that are not just how many people I placed in a job, but what did the person go through in learning to find the job? How did they become sufficient?

[00:15:17] What did they learn about the practice of. Asking for pay, or thinking about how they're gonna save money, how are they gonna budget? And so there are lots of different data points that you can serve in the mission of the organization. that may not come from the straight outright how many people you got placed in a job.

[00:15:36] AI could be such a big factor in helping organizations see better, impact. By using AI to integrate those different data sources into lessons. So that's just one example. Yeah, that's a good example. And it brings up one of the other big topics around AI that I think we'll probably [00:16:00] dive into in a later episode, but is.

[00:16:03] Data. It is. It's the level of data that needs to be recorded and accessed and stored to power. A lot of these AI tools and the AI revolution in general is. Is, growing every example that we've given so far, a lot of it does rely on AI having that, that data. I think that's an interesting aspect of the technology and of the challenges that the sector and, AI as a whole will have going forward.

[00:16:35] So we might need to put that down for a episode topic in the future. You bet. just thinking about what we're doing with our capacity command center where data is more or less housed within our box. but also looking forward, apple is thinking about building chips right now where most of the processing.

[00:16:54] And the work with data happens inside a person's computer and not at some data [00:17:00] center somewhere else. And that's a pretty interesting innovation that Apple supposedly has on the way, thinking about these big questions of data. So let's do that. Let's talk about it in a future conversation. Yeah, that sounds good. 

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[00:17:18] So just bringing it back to, some of the ideas specifically around, the, Documents, presentations, the program example you gave, let's talk about ways where sometimes this can go wrong. So where do you see people potentially messing this up? one thing is if they use AI and don't really look at what, the, what it spits out in terms of information.

[00:17:44] and another thing is, putting personally identified information, what's often called PII and nonprofits actually into a source. into an LLM would be another problem. And so those are two examples of things to be careful about. That would [00:18:00] be a concern, especially in the nonprofit sector. Yeah, definitely. that's two things that we focus on a lot in some of the trainings we do for people who, especially when they're new to using any AI tools, but something that comes up a lot in, when we are implementing our command center or other, tools where we can control that a little bit more to, to improve the safety and the guardrails.

[00:18:24] the other one I would add. We touched on this at the beginning is, an over reliance on AI to automate some of the parts that should stay human, so Rather, so using it for critical, human communication, tasks can. you see this a lot, donor emails, things that people might have used AI for.

[00:18:49] Too much it does feel less personal. So I think there's a way that, you know, individuals certainly, but organizations can help guide where [00:19:00] to use ai, where and where not to use ai. So keeping the humans in the relationship as much as possible. Absolutely. Good points. So I wanna just touch on our homework that we gave you last week.

[00:19:16] So I wanna mention this a few times. So last week we asked you to make a list of three tasks that you did and think, I wish I didn't have to do this. This time we're gonna have you look at those three things, and try what we call the handoff test. So imagine you had to hand this task off to a new employee tomorrow.

[00:19:35] What would you have to explain for them to do it? This helps if you actually write it down, write the steps down of what you do, and what you're thinking at each stage. And as you're writing notice what's easy to explain versus what's hard to explain. So the easy to explain stuff is where you start looking at can, ai do this for me?

[00:19:56] If you can explain it to. A human. If thinking [00:20:00] about I'm hiring an intern tomorrow, or I have a endless staff with endless amounts of time, the things that you can explain and hand off. You can probably find an AI tool or build one to do that for you. The stuff that's hard to explain, the stuff, the work that actually needs you, that's human.

[00:20:18] That's where your capacity can grow If you do get some of these more, automated admins type tasks off your plate. Yeah, and I think, Alissa, you wrote a piece called Revenge of the English major and, that speaks to it because a lot of people don't realize that AI is actually, the better you can explain something and the more likely you're gonna get a good response and a response that's, really.

[00:20:45] true source of truth, to use the words twice in one sentence. and so that's, so that's very true and really good point. the other thing that I think about too is,how can you use AI with,That in a way that you would [00:21:00] ask an intern or ask somebody to do something like, look through these five reports the foundation has published and pull out three trends, so that we can get our grant application really aligned to the way that not that foundation thinks.

[00:21:15] That's something that AI could do where, that would fit with your example and your test, which is another good approach. Yeah. Yeah. That, that is, that's a good one to call out. and we're, we'll, we're wrapping up soon, but is there one more that you can think of that, has been really common in terms of an easy first step, if you're just starting to try to automate some of your work with ai?

[00:21:42] I think a good place to test would be if there is a common set of constituents that you email every week thinking about, could AI draft, these emails for me? and can I be specific enough and what I want the emails to look like? or a blast email. [00:22:00] Can I be specific enough in what I want the AI to create now?

[00:22:04] Whatever it creates won't be your end product, but it'll get you 80 or 90% there. So that's just another way of thinking about it. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. That's definitely one I've seen, some success with, especially on the draft stage, and making sure to add your human touch if it's,if it's needed.

[00:22:21] So that's it for today. if this is helpful, we're releasing new episodes every week on how AI can actually support mission-driven work. in the meantime, you can find us@nonprofit.ai. That's N-O-N-P-R-O. PHE t.ai. And if you've got a workflow that you're stuck on, send it our way. We can dig into it in, a future episode.

[00:22:45] Or if you have any other comments or ideas that you'd love us to talk about, you can contact us on the website or comment, um, this podcast. So thank you so much for listening and, see you next week. See you next week. Thank you. 

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