Podcast: How Nonprofits Can Embrace AI for Greater Impact – with Alonda Williams

Season 5, Episode 9

In this episode, Amy Eisenstein sits down with Alonda Williams, President and CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Puget Sound, to talk about how artificial intelligence is transforming nonprofit leadership, operations, and impact. With a background in technology at companies like Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Verizon, Alonda brings a unique perspective to the nonprofit sector and shares how she integrates AI into her leadership and organizational culture.

Alonda discusses how AI helps her team increase productivity, streamline workflows, and expand their reach without additional resources. From meeting summarization and automated board reports to matching mentors and mentees faster, she explains how these tools save time while maintaining the human-centered approach that nonprofit work requires.

Whether you’re curious about how AI can support your next board report, wondering how to introduce AI to your team, or looking for inspiration on how to apply it to your mission, this conversation offers practical, real-world insights from a leader who is already putting these tools to work.

Listen Now:

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Amy Eisenstein:
AI, that is the topic on everybody’s mind. If it’s not on your mind yet, it should be, and I can’t wait to talk to today’s guest.

Hi, I’m Amy Eisenstein, CEO and co-founder of Capital Campaign Pro. My co-host, Andrea, is taking today off, but I am so excited to be talking to Alonda Williams. Alonda is currently the president and CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Puget Sound, the largest and oldest mentoring organization in Washington State. As CEO, she redefines mentoring to empower youth and communities. A TEDx speaker and bestselling author, she inspires audiences with insights on leadership, mentorship, and leveraging technology for impact. She is a self-proclaimed AI enthusiast and early adopter, and I couldn’t agree more.

Outside of her work, Alonda has created a personal platform around empowering girls. Her publishing company and books are designed to uplift and amplify stories that empower women and girls. I encourage you to go to Amazon to check out her books and also to find her on LinkedIn, which we’ll talk about more at the end of the episode. But I am confident that your mind is going to be blown today when we talk about AI. I am so excited. I first saw you, Alonda… Well, first of all, welcome to the program. I’m so happy to have you here.

Alonda Williams:
Thank you. Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Amy Eisenstein:
I first encountered you at an International Association of Fundraising Professionals Conference that we had this past spring, and I was really blown away by your sessions. So, I’m super excited to have you here talking about AI and technology and how you use it at work and with your team.

Alonda’s Perspective on AI Leveling the Playing Field

So, why don’t you first tell us a little bit, just give us an overview of how you think about AI, how you approach technology, and how it’s impacted your work and your life? I know that’s a big ask at the beginning, but wherever you want to start, we’ll start there.

Alonda Williams:
Sure, sure. Well, first, I’ll start by saying I’m not a typical nonprofit leader in that I spent a lot of my early years in technology. So, my beginning career and pretty much until the last, I would say, decade, six years or so, I worked in technology. I actually worked for Microsoft, Qualcomm, Verizon. I worked for technology companies, and I made a shift to nonprofit after working in those industries. That background is really what fuels my interest and quick adoption of technology and AI in particular. So, that’s a little bit of background. The way I think about it is that I believe technology is a tool that helps us improve productivity, but in nonprofit, I think it’s an amplifier. It allows us to scale.

What I’ve learned, again, working in both for-profit and nonprofit is that the resource structure is very different. In large corporations, I had lots of resources at my disposal, probably more than I needed. In nonprofit, we always have less, always. I don’t know that I’ve met a nonprofit leader that has exactly what they need or more.

So, what I’m excited about with AI in particular is that the accessibility is it’s open to everyone and it levels the playing field in my opinion between for-profit companies and nonprofit companies. I remember having to get the lower version of Microsoft Office or the nonprofit edition of Salesforce or these other versions, lower feature versions that were what the company could afford to give a nonprofit discount for, or there were some enterprise-grade tools that we would get access to.

But I just will say that with AI, that’s not the case. It is the same. We have access to the same tools that large companies do, and we can use it in ways that are limitless. So, I look at it as a way to increase our ability to impact the communities that we serve, just to scale our impact. So, that’s how I approach it. When I use it and think about ways to use it, it’s not about novelty. It’s about what can help me be a more effective leader and what can help our organization increase our impact. I believe that if you’re not doing it, you’re going backwards.

Amy Eisenstein:
I so appreciate that perspective and your background makes so much sense because I think that in general, nonprofit leaders, I’m going to totally stereotype here, are late adopters. They’re not early adopters, but that background in the tech sector gives you such an advantage, and I’m just thrilled that you’re going to share it with our audience today.

Encouraging Team AI Use

So, I had so many good takeaways from your session at the AFP Conference, but I want to start with how you empower staff to use AI and how you encourage them to use AI and technology. Tell us a little bit about how you think about using it with your team.

Alonda Williams:
So number one, I think it comes from the top.

1. So, as a leader, I make it okay by the fact that I use it and share how I use it with my team. So, that’s number one.
2. But number two, I encourage them to use it again because of the productivity and the way that, as I said, it helps us to increase our ability to the communities that we serve.

But also, I think there’s this other piece that I feel really passionate about, which is employers aren’t going to be with us forever, and I want to make sure that when they leave, and I feel very happy about the fact that most people that I’ve worked with that leave the organization, they go on someplace else to make more money and do bigger and better things. I want that for all of my staff.

So, I don’t want them to be behind. If they do leave, I want them to go with the advantage of knowing how to use AI. I have a job description, a job posting open now for a marketing manager. It is in the job description that I want someone who is familiar with AI and has used it to improve productivity ideally. That’s the nice to have, but it’s on a job description. That’s how passionately I feel about it. So, as I said, I encourage them to use it. I share what I use. In our team, we have a Teams chat that is all about how people are using Copilot. We bring in trainers.

So, we have some of the Microsoft skilling team. They have done workshops with our whole team to tell everyone how to just basically help them increase their skill level. Then in our team meetings, we have a time where people share what they’re doing and how they’re using it, and it has been a game changer. I will also say there are some staff members who for a variety of reasons are less comfortable.

So, by sharing it, it helps other people get more comfortable with it. They see their peers are using it to do the same job. I also believe at some point, it’s going to allow people to perform at a different level, and those who aren’t using it are going to wonder, “Huh, how is it that they’re doing twice the work that I’m doing and I’m still behind,” that they’re going to want to learn as well.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah, I love that. I love the idea of sharing at team meetings and it’s not just what works. It’s what doesn’t work. Are you encouraging success and failures and lessons learned?

Alonda Williams:
Yes, I think there’ve been a lot of lessons learned. So, yes, we do share things that didn’t go well or there are people who are still a little bit uncomfortable and they might say, “Well, I’m uncomfortable with what that does or that’s too scary for me.” But we still share it. We still share the information and still make it safe. I think the key is making it safe for people to use it. Now you need to have policies like PII and making sure that you’re using enterprise grade applications.

So, we pay for Copilot for staff members so that they have access to something that is protected. We have policies around what information is shared and what isn’t, but for the most part, we share the successes and the failures and the tips and tricks on how to be better at it. So, yeah, I think that it’s helped to increase adoption across the organization.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. All right.

Alonda’s Favorite Technology Tools

So, one of the things you mentioned and that I heard in your talk is how you use it to help you stay organized to be a better leader, to streamline, prioritize, save time. So, talk about two or three of your favorite tools and what you’re using them for, your favorite tools and what you’re using them for.

Alonda Williams:
I’ll say my favorite use case, and there are multiple tools that do this that I do use is meetings. I’m in meetings all the time. What I used to do is I would take my notes and then at the end of the day or if I’m back to back, you’d have to do this at the end of the day. So, to recap, okay, what are all the actions I have? I had a whole bunch of things I was supposed to do. I want to make sure I don’t forget anything. That was pre-AI. Now, I have basically an assistant, an AI assistant that goes to all of my meetings. Outside of Microsoft Teams, I use a tool called Assembly and there are lots now, but Assembly was one of the first. I just have been a loyal Assembly user since it came out in 2023, early 2023.

It just goes to all of my meetings. It summarizes the meetings and creates action steps and a recap. So, at the end of the meeting, I can just see, oh, these are the action steps that I need to take. I don’t have to wait to the end of the day to remember what it was. I don’t have to take the notes. Notes are taken. Inside of Teams, Copilot does that quite effectively. It summarizes the action step. In addition to recording the meeting, it gives you who does what, and within Copilot, it can actually identify the people and assign the action item to them, which is amazing.

So, those two things, I mean, it saved me not only time at the end of the day, but also, I would forget things. I’m human. So, there are things that I would forget and somebody would have to remind me, oh, remember we met and you said you were going to do this. Oh, okay, great, thank you. That doesn’t happen. So, that’s my favorite use case and those are my favorite tools.

Amy Eisenstein:
And these are online meetings. These are not in-person meetings that are somehow capturing the recording, right? I just want to clarify just in case everybody’s in their conference rooms, but these are for remote meetings or virtual meeting.

Alonda Williams:
These are for virtual meetings. However, Assembly does have a feature that allows you to turn it on in an in-person meeting and it can capture the meeting in person. If you just turn your phone on and just put the microphone on, just tell someone I’m recording this meeting and that way you can get the same benefit from an in-person meeting. I do that less often because I can take notes, but it’s certainly fewer notes taking than I have than before.

Amy Eisenstein:
For sure. For sure. Okay, I love that.

The Switch to Using AI in a More Impactful Way

Let’s talk about how you moved from staff making matches for bigs and littles to using AI because I love that story. So, start it from start to finish and how you brought along hesitant staff.

Alonda Williams:
For sure. Let me just say one thing too. There are lots of other tools that I use. I would say I am an AI-powered CEO. So, there are a lot of ways I use Copilot, ChatGPT, and I’ll just say one thing before we go onto that story. That is with Copilot, this is one of the things that I use to save myself lots of time and that is I said, “Please look at the last month and summarize key points for my board report.” So it looked at all of my team chats, all of my emails, all of my meeting notes, and my calendar, and summarized all of the things that could be good candidates for me to include in my board report.

So, rather than me having to go through that work, because I do that every month. I’ll go through and okay, I’ll write notes throughout the month, but this summarized it all and it was spot on. So, I just had to do some editing and I was ready for my board update. It was fantastic. So, that is something that, woo, amazing.

Amy Eisenstein:
For people listening, my jaw is on the floor. You had it summarize a month’s worth of content for your board report.

Alonda Williams:
And it had the number of emails and the number of teams, it was in the thousands, because if you’re like me, you’re busy. You have the thousands that it’s summarized in a matter of minutes. It was incredible.

Amy Eisenstein:
And it was accurate. I mean, I’m not suggesting that you didn’t have to edit it and refine it.

Alonda Williams:
I had to edit it.

Amy Eisenstein:
But instead of spending hours and hours on this board report, you spent how much time?

Alonda Williams:
I would say throughout the week, I would normally spend about five hours pulling everything, reviewing other meeting, pulling out the pertinent things, summarizing it, a day here, a day there, a day here, and then at the end of the week, editing and getting it ready. I spend an hour.

Amy Eisenstein:
Incredible. I mean honestly, isn’t that what it’s all about? I mean, that highlights how valuable this is for nonprofits that are chronically understaffed, under-resourced. The number one issue I hear from development directors, CEOs, executive directors is I don’t have time. So, what AI does when it works well is gives you back time.

Alonda Williams:
Absolutely.

Amy Eisenstein:
I mean, that’s what’s magical in all of these tools.

Alonda Williams:
Absolutely. Okay, so now I’ll go back to my… So, at the conference, I was sharing how when I started my role. I was at an event actually, and I met a mom whose son was on our wait list. This mom was telling me about how worried she was about her son. She didn’t know what to do. She signed him up for our program, but he had been on our wait list. It broke my heart because she was exacerbated. She’s just like, “I wasn’t sure what to do. He was on the wait list.” My husband happened to be with me at this event and she turned to my husband. She was an African-American woman with her son Miles and my husband was there and she said, “Could you be my son’s big?”

And again, I was fairly new, so he hadn’t quite signed up for the program. He is now, but at the time, he was shocked and he looked at me. My heart hurt for her because I thought in that moment she turned to us and she’s waiting. Her son is waiting. So, I made it really a priority to figure out our wait list. So, I took that information into my next year or so. Now we’re talking about AI and I was actually presenting at a conference and I started thinking, “How could we use this in our mission, in our work?” Again, the challenge was that our match process is complex. We look at all sorts of information. We look at a big or a mentor’s willingness to work with someone who might be from a traumatic background or if they’re looking for a particular age or what their interests are.

Generally, our staff have to look through pages and pages of interview notes and assessment notes. They could be four to five to seven to eight pages and that takes a lot of time. So, we partnered with Microsoft and KPMG to build this AI match recommendation engine. Essentially, what it does is just like what I said, I combed all my emails, went through all the assessments, pulled out the pertinent information, and the same thing for the prospective mentee, the little, and recommends the top matches for the staff member. So, rather than a staff member having to go through all of that information, they are now able to look at a list of recommended matches and each one has a score.

So, they’re able to look and see. They always can go in and look at the detail and validate that that’s a good one. But that process is saving our staff time and allowing them to match faster, allowing kids like Miles to get off the wait list faster, and again, allowing us to increase our impact. So, that is an example of how we brought AI into the very core of our mission.

Helping Staff Make the Transition

Amy Eisenstein:
I absolutely love that. From what I recall, you had some hesitant staff members who were worried that the AI would not make as good matches as the staff would make. So, talk a little bit about that. How did you bring along hesitant staff members and does the AI make as good of matches as your team did when they were doing it manually?

Alonda Williams:
Well, yeah, that was definitely one of the concerns. The other concern was we’re in the relationship business. So, just the idea of AI or even just a computer getting it something that’s non-human getting involved in the match process created a lot of concern for the staff. So, what we did was from the very beginning brought them along that they were a part of the development. We started out with really trying to understand… At least when I was talking to our partners, I said:

“We have people who are not technology adventurous. They are not necessarily people who are going to embrace this. We want to make sure that for those who are tech-averse, they have a thumbprint on the final product.”

So it was important to bring them in at the beginning. Really every step of the way, we had staff members involved and they participated. They provided feedback, and then validation of the matches, it still happens today where they can still go in and look. So, the matches, it makes recommendations and the staff members choose from those recommendations the ones that they would select and all of them have a score.

And so far, so good. So far, there might be little, small things like things that aren’t included in any of our filters or that they just might know but they didn’t write down from talking to the person. So, those are always elements that we’ll refine it, but it still results in, at the end of the day, saving time.

Amy Eisenstein:
I would imagine saving significant amounts of time. It’s the same thing with writing with ChatGPT. It spits something out. You still have to edit it, check it, review it, and the same thing goes for matches. So, it’s not that there’s no human element at all, but it gives you a huge head start.

Alonda Williams:
Huge head start. Again, I’ll go back to what we’re going to see pretty soon, I would imagine I’m already seeing it in myself is I am much more productive than I was before. When you see that with a group of people who are using AI and knows that they’re not, it’s going to leave some people behind and it’s going to be hard to catch up too. So, again, this is why I really believe it’s important for us as an organization to embrace it in a responsible way, but also for our staff members to be skilled. So, that if they ever leave and we know that one day they will, they’re prepared.

We also do it with our youth quite frankly. I believe our families, our youth, I want to make sure that all of them are future ready as well. So, we’re bringing it in to one of our match activities. We’re partnering with code.org to have this hour of AI for all of our matches and their families to really learn about and get comfortable with AI so that they’re not afraid of it.

Amy Eisenstein:
I love that.

Taking Inspiration from Alonda at Capital Campaign Pro

All right. So, I want to tell you a story. I heard you speak in April and I ran back to the office. I said, “Oh, my gosh, we can use the example that you gave of how you match your bigs and your littles for us to match clients with [our] consultants or advisors as we call them.” We put in a system. It used to take us hours and hours to talk through who would be a good match, who has the right skills, who has the experience, looking back at all the personality characters and traits and what they love to do and who we thought would be a good match. It took us many conversations to match consultants with clients and we put into place the same system based on your story at that conference.

Alonda Williams:
Wow, that’s so great.

Amy Eisenstein:
Now what used to take hours takes… We still talk about the matches, and you’re right, it recommends the top three. So, then we can have a thoughtful conversation from there. Why did AI pick these people on our team to be matched with this particular client? I have to say, it often picks up things that we wouldn’t have thought about and it sparks a whole different conversation, which has been really transformative in how we match consultants with clients here at Capital Campaign Pro.

AI Can Help Get Around Human Biases

Alonda Williams:
I love that. I will say too that one of the things that I knew and this tool helped us to validate is that sometimes we have our own biases. When it moves to something that’s much more objective, it definitely allows for more conversations and exploration around the biases. I think it hopefully will give our team a little more confidence to really stand behind their recommendations. So, you’re right. I’m glad that was helpful.

Amy Eisenstein:
So helpful. All right.

Using AI to Help Screen Job Candidates

So, before we hit record just a little while ago, you told me that you heard about something that blew your mind this week. I can’t wait. I’m on the edge of my seat. What blew your mind?

Alonda Williams:
Okay, hold on. This is not something that someone told me. This is something that I did. I told you I have an open position. So, because of the job market, we’ve gotten lots of very qualified candidates. So, my process was going to be okay, we have the candidates, eliminate those that are disqualified because they’re not at all qualified. The remaining, there’s a fair number of them. So, I created a screener and I was going to give different members of this team the resumes and the cover letters to screen based on this rubric. One person was a board member. He wanted to be involved.

So, I wanted to make sure we had a screener that included all the things that I thought were important. Well, I sent the screener off to the staff members and then I said to myself, “I wonder what would happen if…” We have an enterprise version of ChatGPT and Copilot, by the way. I said, “I wonder what would happen if I had these ChatGPT do the screening.” So I put in all the resumes, I put the screener in.

Amy Eisenstein:
What is the screener? I don’t know.

Alonda Williams:
I developed basically a scoring sheet for each resume to determine if we were going to invite them in for an in-person interview.

Amy Eisenstein:
Got it.

Alonda Williams:
That was essentially what it was.

Amy Eisenstein:
So a set of criteria, a rubric.

Alonda Williams:
A set of criteria, and it was a rubric and it included everything from their experience, their connection to our mission, all sorts of things, do they meet all of the criteria, and also the nice to haves as well. So, they got points for extra nice to haves. I like people to have a cover letter that says something about why they want the role. So, it evaluated the cover letter as well.

Amy Eisenstein:
Great.

Alonda Williams:
So I had about, let’s say, 25 candidates. I put the candidates in ChatGPT, put the screener in ChatGPT. In two minutes, I had a scoring sheet, a ranking of every single candidate with their scores based on the rubric that I provided just like that with highlights and strengths and weaknesses.

Amy Eisenstein:
Oh, my gosh.

Alonda Williams:
It was mind-blowing. I couldn’t believe it. I went back and I checked and I was like, “Whoa.” Again, there’s fatigue that sets in after you get to candidate number 20. You’re like, “Okay, in number 21, okay, check, check, check.” So there’s this human fatigue that happens and bias that happens. You might not see every single thing. ChatGPT or when you think about AI and its objectivity, it doesn’t get tired, there’s no bias. It’s just objective based on what I looked at. So, I went back and looked at every single one, to look at the top ones just to make sure. I was like, “Whoa, it was fantastic.” Two minutes.

So, I took out that whole step. I don’t need to do that because I already have them scored. So, now I know who we’re inviting in for in person. I looked at some of the other ones and it didn’t miss anything. It probably did it better than I could quite frankly.

Amy Eisenstein:
That is incredible.

Alonda Williams:
It is a game changer.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. That is a game changer. I want to know, there’s constantly new tools coming out and it can feel overwhelming, especially for people who aren’t quite as excited about it as you are.

How to Decide Which New Tools to Try

So, how do you decide which tools to try? Where do you look for new tools and how do you weed out the bad ones? Talk us through a little bit about if a listener is like, “Okay, I don’t even know where to start.” So that might be different than where I went and started to go with the question, so ChatGPT, but with just being deluged with options, how do you weed through the mess?

Alonda Williams:
I would say be really clear on what your problem you’re trying to solve. There are a lot of tools, but I will say that many of them are based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT. A lot of organizations will white label or license ChatGPT to monetize something that ChatGPT can do. So, my first step, if somebody is just starting out, I would say become very, very familiar with ChatGPT. I did ask actually, I think I’ve had over 3,500 prompts. I’m a prompt expert. So, I’ve played around with it a lot. So, I know what ChatGPT can do and what it can’t and no one’s going to charge me for something that I can get in ChatGPT. So, that’s the first thing is understand ChatGPT really, really well because it is very powerful and a lot of what other people can white label and package up can be done in either ChatGPT or Copilot.

So, that’s generally my first step. But if it is something that is a very specific use case, like for example wealth screening in fundraising that there are companies, Gravity’s ONE, there are companies that do that specifically. They might take proprietary information and then they will load that in and allow it to do something that ChatGPT couldn’t do on its own. That information, I think those are the kinds of things that are use case specific where it does make sense to do it. The meeting, I told you about the meeting recording, that’s also something that’s use case specific and there are services that do that. Canva, Adobe, those do graphic design pretty well and easier. They have a user interface that makes it a little easier than…

You can do the same thing in ChatGPT and in DALL-E, but you can do it easier in Canva and in Adobe and Designers. Microsoft has a version of Designer as well. I would tell everyone become familiar with ChatGPT and start out with something that you know really well. Just play around with something you know really well, use a consistent framework. So, I try to think about making sure I’m clear on what I need, what role do I want the AI to apply, what’s the outcome, or is there a tone that I want it to have, and then what’s the expectation of the person?

All of that context is so important in prompting and so being really good at prompting is certainly something that is really, really helpful, but being clear on what it is you need, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve. The clearer you can do that, the easier it’ll be to determine what solution you might need.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah, I think that’s so helpful.

Using Different Tools: Free vs. Paid

So, just to clarify, you talked about not paying for tools that you can get for free. However, if you’re entering any sensitive information, which we can talk about whether you should or shouldn’t, into something like ChatGPT, there are paid versions that don’t put your information back into the World Wide Web. Can you just talk a little bit about, so people understand when they should be using a paid version versus a free version?

Alonda Williams:
I am not a fan at all of anything free because with free, there’s always some value you’re exchanging and your data is the value. So, I don’t use any free tools. I only use paid tools. So, I only use the paid version of ChatGPT. I only use the paid version of Copilot and I always uncheck use my data for training your models.

So, full stop, I don’t do anything other than that. So, everything I’m talking about is on the paid version of ChatGPT with everything unchecked. Do not use my data for any models. Also, Copilot and Copilot by design is enterprise grade. So, you only are using your data for internal information and it is protected. So, full stop, don’t use any of the free tools.

Amy Eisenstein:
Oh, my gosh.

Alonda Williams:
I mean it’s good. Like DeepSeek for example, I will use DeepSeek for something that I don’t need to retain. Sometimes I use it instead of search if I want some very specific answers. I find DeepSeek is also pretty good. But again, I don’t use it for anything proprietary, just general questions that are more detailed than what I might get from a search.

Amy Eisenstein:
Amazing. This has been such an enlightening conversation. I learned so much from you and I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge, your wisdom, your experience with our listeners. So, thank you for joining us. Now, where can people find you first on LinkedIn and where should they look for your TED Talk?

Alonda Williams:
Yeah, so on LinkedIn, I’m on LinkedIn, Alonda Williams. You can find me. I also have a TEDx that you can find on YouTube and it’s called the Ripple Effect of Mentoring. It speaks to my why.

Amy Eisenstein:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Thank you, listeners, for joining us, and we’ll see you next time.