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Could AI be the game-changer nonprofits have been waiting for in the realm of fundraising? Join us as Meghan Speer sits with Griff Bohm, the co-founder of Give Momentum, shares his unique insights into the revolutionary role of AI in nonprofit operations. From his journey transitioning from academia to spearheading AI solutions, Griff challenges the status quo, suggesting that AI can go far beyond simple tasks like copywriting to fundamentally enhance strategies for major gifts. This episode promises to shed light on how traditional fundraising roles are evolving, providing a fresh perspective on the opportunities and misconceptions surrounding AI in creating effective donor engagement strategies.
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If you're looking to maximize your fundraising efforts donor boxes online donation platform is designed to help you reach your fundraising goals with ease Discover the world of simplified seamless fundraising at donorbox.org donor box helping you help others Welcome back to the non-profit hub podcast I'm your host Megan spear and I am joined today by Griff Bohm who's the confounder of Give Momentum Super excited to dig into kind of maybe a different angle than we've talked about before on AI for non-profits and AI and fundraising And what that actually can do to make your life a little easier and be a little helpful to your strategy So, Griff welcome to the show Thanks so much for having me Megan really excited Nice so tell us a little bit about you and your journey into how you got into the non-profit space and you're Having had conversations with you yours is a little unconventional in the path that you took to get yours So share a little bit about that with our audience. Yeah, sure my background I was a behavioral psychologist at the University of Colorado and Nick who's our CEO and my co-founder was at Duke doing a lot of the same work and you know We were focused on lots of things I ended up a little bit more focused on finances and stuff like that But we both spent a decent amount of our work looking at What makes people feel anthropic what makes people charitable? How does you know all of the psychology that goes into that and then we also basically ended up getting interested in what makes Non-profits effective how how you as a nonprofit can be really good and Steward your donors dollar as well, but also like achieve your goals and achieve your mission. We Ran lots of studies. We did lots of stuff. We loved it. It was super super fun But at some point we both I think kind of just realized that we Maybe weren't gonna be great academics or maybe just didn't want to be and so we sort of spun out momentum was founded in 2019 so we're about five years old now going on six and we've been really just working on trying to actually solve the Problems to have even published papers about them ever since I love it so Do that end right now that you are solving the problems I want to talk today two things specifically Because I do think you know, there's a lot of conversation in the space around AI right now. What are we doing with it? To your point. You and I were talking before the show Everybody wants to talk about what it can do And I almost feel like we're trying to keep it in a box You know, we can let it write our copy we can let it write our social media posts, right? Instead of actually thinking through how it works and how to make that work for us And one of the things I think is so interesting about momentum is that it is Applying AI to a major gifts Approach as well, which I feel like can be a little scary for folks It's one thing to let AI into that copywriting element But we're talking about the folks who are like the major gift supporters How do we make sure that that experience is is the best possible? I think people get a little nervous from that front so Let's start at a kind of a level set What is AI and what should it and what is it not in terms of support in fundraising? Yeah, super super great question. What is AI? I mean, I think even just listening to the name, you know, artificial intelligence Like what is intelligence is a really just interesting question that people have been asking themselves for hundreds of years? Like is an ant intelligent is a colony of ants intelligent, right? Like they can work, you know, they're sort of famously they work together honeybees like are they intelligent? They don't really have brains like we have but they're like they're acting together and in concert and all of that And so I think when we talk about artificial intelligence, there's a question of just like is it what is intelligent at all, right? Like Tesla has their self-driving cars I consider that intelligence because to drive a car and stop and start and turn and all of these things You need to be intelligent enough even if like in Tesla's case, we really understand it really well because it's like, okay They have all these cameras. It has all these sensors. Like we kind of know what it does I think like with chat GPT and stuff like that That's like the most anthropomorphized version of AI that you really have it like is presented It talks to you like a human it's like a human if you like ask it about its consciousness It will at least sort of respond and so I think Yeah, like the question of just like what is it it can be anything, right? But I think like when we talk about chat GPT and sort of like The AI revolution over the last couple of years of just like how it's gone to market and how everybody wants It's been so hot and in my opinion largely overhyped You know, I think one of the main things is just like we're still learning how to use it And what it is and what it can do and what it can't um You know, it's sometimes worth just saying like there's no thinking thing in there One of the funniest things about chat GPT if anybody's listening what you should do You should do it right now go on to chat and ask it how many W's are in the word strawberry There's one W in the word strawberry It will tell you there's two two W's and it's because it's not thinking like it's not actually a thinking agent in there It's just predicting like the next little syllable in a sentence, right? And so it gets super whacked out And so I think like when you look at most of the use cases that people have figured out today In terms of like products or things that you can use to help your nonprofit. It's mostly around copyright um I have this like analogy that I sometimes use that like AI is basically It's like it's like water In that water is only valuable if it's in the right container, right? So if you told me hey griff, you're thirsty I need water delivered to me in a glass or a bottle or something that I can drink it out of If you said I need to mow my lawn, I need water to be in my pipes and my sprinklers Water spilled all over the ground is like totally worthless, right? Like that's not valuable and I feel like a lot of times like with AI that's been what a lot of people have done They've just sort of like spilled AI out onto the ground of their products And they haven't thought about like, okay, what is the right container to put this in? How do we put this? How do we build some sort of infrastructure around maybe the AI? To make sure that it's useful for our customers and non-profits and you know, that's really what we've tried to do We've tried to make sure that we everything that we build is really like has sort of like enough Boundaries around it or enough infrastructure so that where you use AI is in a really narrow use case and in a tight application You mentioned it we use it mostly for major gifts and we end up doing it a lot more around sort of like planning and Targeting asks and some of those sorts of things it does copywriting for us Just like anybody else, but there's a lot of other applications that we've sort of come up with That can go well beyond that as well I have a good friend of mine who makes liberal use of chat gpt to plan out The rotation for his daughter's soccer team He has input the data about who does well in what position because he has an odd number of girls on this team They're all like seven. It's not like Massive stakes, right? But each girl needs to get sufficient playing time and we want to make sure it's fair and So he uses it each week to fill out based on who's going to be there what that roster's going to look like and when they need to sub And it's worked very well in that particular context But tell me some of those other things that maybe people haven't thought about for ways to engage chat gpt Or a similar a tool that aren't copywriting or Soccer team scheduling. Yeah, absolutely So one thing that i'll just quickly plug here if you go to give momentum dot com slash gpt We published a publicly available like Non-profit specific version of chat gpt that anybody can access. It's totally free. You know, you need to give us your email But it's it's it's very it's readily available and it's tell me that address again give momentum dot com slash gpt Perfect and we'll make sure to link that in the Yeah, the episode description as well And a lot of what you can do is like, I mean, I think for major gift officers one of the most important things is Engagement and stewardship planning, right? How are you going to talk to your donors? When's a good time all of that sort of thing? It's super super valuable to just have a plan that is actually Adaptive and it can update and it can sort of react to real things in the world, right? Um, and when you look at like, hey, you're a major gift officer. You have a portfolio of 100 150 200 donors that you're in charge of Building an individualized plan for every one of them can be incredibly tedious And so, you know, that's I mean one of the best one of the top things we do our algorithm is really really great at that And you know at six with your crm and all sorts of other good stuff, but you can just ask chat. Hey, can you Help me with this. I think Asking it a lot of sort of stuff about like identifying donors It's always sort of said you shouldn't identify like a donor's name or something like that into chat tpt But you can say here is a donor and here is all their giving history Here is all their action history. How much would you expect this person to give again this year? And it will come up with a pretty good forecast. It's pretty accurate, right? You can run a lot of complicated statistics and a lot of complicated models and in general and we do this Yeah, if you ask chat tpt in like five seconds. Hey, what's what's your prediction on this versus just like Do all of the actual math? Chat is usually only off by like 10 or 15 percent and it's like a fraction of the topic right and an effort, right? And so it's pretty good So, you know doing all that. I think you should go ahead like paste stuff in there like don't don't put identifiable information But like hey, yeah, this person gave on this this date at this amount. Here's their whole history. None of that is ID, right? Like you can write all that You know, I think there's a really good tool that we've published that people can email me to access It's still free, but it helps you basically identify who should receive a message. So one of the biggest things that our our users our gift officers struggle with is like Hey, okay, our organization just published their impact report or they just published a blog post about some outcome that we've achieved I want to send this to my donors, but I can never remember There's always like 20 people and I can never remember who needs what and so you can just paste a link in and say Who are the type of people who need to get this, right? And it'll tell you here the donors who should receive this It's such a beautiful touch point to just be like even if it's a New York Times story It doesn't have to be something from your nonprofit. Hey, I read this morning and thought of you, right? Like it's just like beautiful stewardship super duper high impact Incredibly easy to do with AI super super super easy. You can of course then have AI like write the email but Frankly like I read this this morning. I thought of you as kind of enough, right? Let me see what else yeah I think automating a lot of the research work that our funders do, right? Like trying to go through and pick out from like a LinkedIn profile or anything like that You can just sort of like dump this huge text blob in there and just say like here's everything I know about Megan from her LinkedIn from you know Like our CRM all of this write me a one-pager, right? And in that case, it's still copywriting for you, but it's not copied seen by a donor or going to be published on your social media It's more just like hey take all of this unstructured big blob of information and collate it for me And that I think is also just a really good use case that we've seen a lot of people do and there are of course many many others I think my personal favorite actually is People don't realize this but if you have it on your phone the chat cpt app Yeah, you can go in there And when you open it up, there's a little pair of headphones right to the right of the like text box where you type in Okay, and you can have it roleplay with you and it will talk like a human to you And so we're on a podcast. So it's a little tough for me to show you, but you can Let's just try it. Hold on. I'm going to do this It's going to like load here And then I can say hey chat. I'd like to roleplay with you as if I was a major gift officer at a non-profit org And then it'll Run let's see how this does got it Whenever you're ready to roleplay as a major gift officer, just let me know and I'll and I'll jump in Feel free to set the scene or provide any context and we can take it from there And so you can miss literally conversation with it like people don't know that you can do that It's only available on mobile, right? You need you can't yeah the website But like if you're a new gift officer if you feel a little nervous about approaching a donor anything like that like Just play dress up with it. It's super fun. Actually, it's really good It's frankly really just like a nice way to use it. That's so interesting. I did not know that that was an option So I want to go back to something that you had said about how this plays into The touch points around major gifts, right? Because we know obviously major gift programs like that are 100 percent relationship building Right those officers are in there They're wanting to make sure that they are taken care of and connected to their people And I think it's interesting to to say like hey This you know this article made me think of you or I read this this morning or have you seen this impact report? Have you all seen? kind of when it comes to How that then comes back, right? So the gift officer sends it out Have you seen anything on the back end of what that's done? In terms of building those relationships are there some like hey people think this was creepy believe me alone What's the what's is there like maybe a downside that we want to consider? or like Hey, here's where the line is of like you you've stepped into knowing me too. Well almost What does that line look like right now? So we go to great lengths to make sure that our product and and stuff like is calibrated well to sort of not come across as creepier Anything like that. Yeah, what we have seen is like it will remember things from years ago That note that the gift officers themselves have forgotten and it will sort of make reference to something and they'll say like oh man like I forgot that happened. Wow. I can't believe it made it eluded to that. That's so good. Like I love that That's more than positive. I think the negative is You know our system we feel like it's honestly like an ethical responsibility We would never send an email without a human clicking send and reviewing a draft right like we're not automating it But if you're not careful and you don't review your emails and you're sort of careless You could send something that an aa has drafted that you haven't fixed up and and it could come to a donor We've had some donors come back to us and say this was really unexpected. I didn't expect this at all But this is a an organization In uh, Virginia that we work with and they basically said look our donors have said to us Are you using ai to talk to me like I want you to be like in order for you to be sort of like using my dollar as well I want you to be investing in this technology And interesting they said like hey if you're not using it you're falling behind and I don't want to support organizations that are falling behind Right And then they had this beautiful response where they were like actually you've been interacting with our gift officers for the last six months Through an ai tool, you know, like yeah, that's awesome You know, like that's great. And I think most of our customers I don't I would be surprised if most of them are like being that sort of Frontal about it with their donors Yeah, but I think if you actually had the conversation with donors, it would bother them less than you think And is there kind of a an industry standard to When those disclosures happen right like at one point do we say hey Just so you know, this is all coming from ai or that we did use ai for You know this report this Copy this social post at what point do we disclose that or does it not matter anymore? So we just assume that a lot of this is coming from ai So the ethics around this are really really interesting And we really take it very very seriously as far as the nonprofit industry goes You have fundraising.ai which and it can I sit on the board of that's Nathan Chappelle's project He's been a fabulous leader for the sector. I can't speak highly enough of it fundraising.ai has published a framework of how to responsibly adopt ai And it is intended and written to apply to both vendors and organizations in the space Right. So us as a vendor selling to nonprofits as well as to our customers who are the nonprofits themselves And it does institute certain rules and expectations and stuff like that about how to do it responsibly At momentum like we take ai shakti much more seriously than I think most people in the world And to get back to the question you were asking You know, there's this concept called human in the loop, which is that there should never be anything that an ai publishes that is sort of sent or Basically people have the right to know when they are interacting with an ai And if we write a draft a human reviews that draft and then sends it The current consensus is that that is not considered interacting with an ai It's there's a human who's reviewed it. They've made changes to the draft. They've updated it And so that that person is in the loop, right? There's a human in the loop our system. We don't allow you to send Automated ai drafts without reviewing them first There are some out there who feel differently. I disagree with that view, but it's still the very early days You know, I mean, I don't want to say anybody's wrong here. I think we're still learning a ton and it's evolving quickly And so I think for me, it's really important. It's really important for our organization to make sure that we are like being leaders on the ethical side of things, but you're going to run into people Who have different opinions who feel differently? We publish actually on our site. We've published a set of questions that any nonprofit should ask any ai bender sort of like a series of questions that you should ask because If you're shopping for a new tool or something like that, you can ask all the all the you can ask the same set of questions of each vendor And their answers will be really revealing and and you should just make sure that they align with your organization and your own ethical sort of compass Elevate your fundraising strategy effortlessly with donor box the online fundraising platform that streamlines your operations Amplifies donations and delivers a user-friendly experience for your supporters Design captivating donation forms except digital wallet payments seamlessly monitor donations and automate receipt generation Joining is a breeze with no setup or monthly fees From customizable donation forms and four times faster ultra swift checkout to seamless in-person giving with donor box live kiosk Donor box makes giving simple and fast for your donors visit donor box org and unlock your full fundraising potential today So i want to circle back actually to something that you could said about that group out of virginia Um where it's important to donors that we are going to staying ahead Um, george weiner and i actually were just having this conversation on the podcast not too long ago when he was on from full will um talking about the tendency of non-profits to be behind when it comes to tech right i I think we all We all can see the use cases of that. We were just talking to somebody the other day who is just launching their instagram account In 2024 right like there are certain pieces that just take a little longer in the non-profit space for everybody to embrace And I do feel like in general non-profits were late to the game on social Late to the game in in establishing some of those general trends outside of the for-profit industry What does it look like? From your perspective your seat on the bus where should an org be at this point At what point would you look and say like nope you're behind Or falling behind or where at this point, you know q4 of 2024 Where is a good benchmark for an organization in their use of a AI at this point? I would say every organization you're everybody every person who works sort of in the professional World today. You should at least try it Like you should go to gbt.com and play with it and just have some fun Yeah, like see what you can get out of it. I actually am a little less bullish than many It's certainly not right now at the point where it's like you absolutely must have this, right? It is not as essential as like the internet today, right? Having a good website. Yeah, exactly like or your CRM, right? Like you should have a CRM before you have AI in your team period, right? That said You do want to be playing with it and feeling it out because there is a ton of use case for it I think like one of the most sort of confusing parts of AI Is that it can be anything? And so it's kind of nothing Like unless you go in with it knowing what you're trying to get out of it It's just this like blank screen chat bot, you know And so you want to try to have I would I would say like for everybody Spend 10 minutes messing with it ask your kid ask your little niece or nephew ask a cousin like What do you do with this like show me how you play with this? If you feel like that level of consternation about it You will learn something Yeah, it will be really an interesting experience And if what you learn is like is you're just kind of shrug and you're like, I don't know how I would use this You're not behind like that's actually okay There's tons of great tools out there that can help you use the technology But it's the job of those tools to be useful to you. It's not your job to find the thing that that like does it for you Hmm. That's a great point My favorite use case is actually for podcast prep. There's a great feature built in where I you know Here's what i'm talking to here's the topic of the day It gives me the background on them and their company and any news articles that they've put out lately or interesting facts readily available on the inner webs So what used to take me and i want to have two hours to do podcast prep for each episode is down to maybe 15 minutes And that's exactly I mean that's almost exactly how we do it for donor meetings for our users Right, like we do a lot of the same stuff where it's like here's what this person's about here's their history with your org Here's whatever any news or anything about this person that might be relevant, right? Like that's a great use case. I come from computer Yeah, it has saved me countless hours this year You'll have to send me whatever you did to prep for me. I would love to see i'm just Like it's actually curious Absolutely. That's I think it's become the new googling We used to be like have you ever googled yourself and seen now? It's like have you ever looked at your chat gpt profile and what it would say if you were being interviewed on a podcast Well, have you seen perplexity? Are you familiar with proplexity? Okay, so go to a perplexity dot a i p e p e p e r p l e x i t y And this you can ask it the same sort of research questions. It's meant to be specifically a research tool Okay, but it will include citations and links to learn more So it'll say here's the youtube video that you should watch here's all this So it's a little closer to actually literal google Where it will be an AI. It will write it all up for you. It will do all that but then it will also say like here's where you can go Here's where I got this from all of that sort of stuff. Um So next time maybe next next podcast prep you do you can you can yeah, that's interesting Um, but yes, I will send you What it said about that so tell us a little bit more about momentum and kind of the platform that you all have built out Sure. Yeah, so we're major gift software We basically try to answer the question every day for a major gift officer Who do I need to get in touch with what do I need to say to them and when do I need to say it? Right because and on any given day if you're fundraising Be it you're like a major gift officer at a large university or you're just like a director of development a small local nonprofit And knowing what donor is the highest party donor and who you need to be engaging with is always the the most important question So we have models and algorithms built that are trying to make sure that you're always Prioritizing the most important set of donors at any given time We make sure nobody falls through the cracks like it's all automated so that you know, oh, uh, there's this like this constant thing Where somebody's like I had this donor and they were really engaged and I kind of forgot about them And now it's been six months 12 months 18 months since I last talked to them We completely resolved that right we're going to make sure that you're always engaging with donors in a high quality way We make it really easy to sort of do the outreach, right? Like make the call set up the meeting all of that sort of stuff parts of that we use AI for sure And then there's a whole other part of our product in our business Which is like automation and integration where and I think this is sort of like the beauty of AI right now is like marrying it with some of these other tools Where we connect to your CRM or your database and we basically use all the data from there to inform the AI And then anything you do through our system is is synced back into your CRM automatically so that it's always up to date It's always good data. It's always clean. You don't if you've ever copied pasted an email From your like that look into your CRM no more that is just like a resolved problem And that's an AI or anything, but it's one of those things that that we have tried to solve for our customers I love that. I having seen a demo of your product. I one of the best Pieces that I saw in it was this idea of like hey, I am a major gift officer and I'm going to be in Chicago next week Being able to tailor not only just tailor the message to These 25 people who live in Chicago, but also tailor the message specifically to other things You've talked to them about what things you know about them all in a very one-click kind of piece I've been very impressed with the tool as I've seen it and even since you've done that We've gone further where now you can look your trip to Chicago where you can find who the donors who you should reach out Who's based in Chicago? Who do you want to reach out to write the message? But then it'll help you set up your calendar so that it's like oh if this person's in Lincoln Park And this person's in Rigleyville and this person's is in the range, right? It'll line your meetings up so that you can travel in the same direction and it's all kind of cohesive for you And then we also have the ability to log contact reports Mobally and all of that sort of stuff so that it's just really clean and easy for you to use the Our whole goal like my like if we had a perfect tool you would be able to spend like seven Hours and 50 minutes a day Talking to donors like actually interacting with your donors and then you have to be like 10 minutes Just a total of admin work through our system and it's all seamless and integrated for you We're not there yet, but we're getting pretty close There's a lot of folks listening right now who just got really excited about being able to actually focus on the work at hand Instead of getting Bogged down in all of the admin pieces. So yes, I'm sure you just made some days Moments Um, okay, so griff if anyone wanted to find out more About momentum or connect with you or check out some of the resources that you've talked about so far What's the best way for them to do that? Yeah, I mentioned the gpt I would encourage everybody to go to givemomentum.com/gpt Our blog we have tons and tons of resources a lot of them are about how to be ready for AI How to prepare for it to use AI how you can play with AI all that sort of stuff I always love hearing from folks if you want to email me. I'm griff at grif at givemomentum.com I'm always happy to sort of just chat answer questions Like it can be really just casual and I think those would be probably the best places Awesome. I love it griff. Thank you so much. This has been Super helpful. I think showed a new light on AI and some of the ways that it can be helpful Instead of just being something that maybe we should be a little afraid of Uh, did you do it Megan? Thank you so much for happening my pleasure This has been another episode of the nonprofit hub radio podcast. I'm your host Megan spear and we'll see you next time [Music] (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
Send us a text Could AI be the game-changer nonprofits have been waiting for in the realm of fundraising? Join us as Meghan Speer sits with Griff Bohm, the co-founder of Give Momentum, shares his unique insights into the revolutionary role of AI in nonprofit operations. From his journey transitioning from academia to spearheading AI solutions, Griff challenges the status quo, suggesting that AI can go far beyond simple tasks like copywriting to fundamentally enhance strategies for major gifts...
