Podcast: Smarter, Not Harder: How Nonprofits Can Use AI to Save Time and Boost Fundraising Results

Season 5, Episode 3

In this episode, Amy Eisenstein welcomes Capital Campaign Pro’s Director of Engagement, Steven Shattuck, to explore how nonprofit organizations can approach artificial intelligence with confidence, strategy, and purpose. Whether you’re skeptical of AI or eager to experiment, this conversation unpacks what it means to use AI responsibly while staying focused on relationships and results.

Whether you’re running a $60 million campaign or just beginning to think about how to modernize your systems, this episode offers approachable, practical ideas to help you get started (or go deeper) with AI in your organization.

Listen Now:

---

Amy Eisenstein:
If you want to add more AI to your campaign, or maybe if you’re phobic about using AI like I am or I was, we’ve got the guest for you.

Hi, I’m Amy Eisenstein. Andrea’s on a break today, but I have got Steven Shattuck, our Director of Engagement here with us to talk about AI tools and tech, everything that you’ve ever wanted to know. He’s also the author of Robots Make Bad Fundraisers and I can’t wait for you to meet him. So Steven, thanks for being here.

Steven Shattuck:
Sure, thanks for having me.

Amy Eisenstein:
So today we’re going to talk about AI, artificial intelligence and how organizations and nonprofit leaders can think about integrating it into their campaigns and why they should or shouldn’t.

How Nonprofits Can Use AI

So why don’t you get us started in terms of what people need to do to start thinking about using AI?

Steven Shattuck:
Well, yeah, I think it’s like any other tech tool that a nonprofit or a fundraiser could consider or has considered over the past several decades. This is the latest technology, but it wasn’t always the latest technology, 10 years ago maybe it was cloud-based CRMs. And I think the advice is the same.

You really have to know first:

• What are your needs?
• What are your pain points?
• What are you trying to accomplish?

That is always the best sort of starting point to a good roadmap, to selecting the best tool for the task that you want to complete or the pain that you want to alleviate. And I think that approaching AI should be done in exactly the same way. You don’t want to just grab the newest shiny object that everybody else is using, but you’re not really sure why or how it could benefit you.

So kind of slowing down to speed up a little bit, assessing your needs. What are we really trying to accomplish? What are some things that are maybe slow in our organization or painstaking to get done? Or maybe some things that we’ve always wanted to do but haven’t been able to accomplish. Having a good robust list of those things, getting the team together, maybe even getting board members involved and really being clear in what you’re trying to accomplish, that’s going to lead to the best outcomes of selecting any tool including AI, and maybe it’s even more important for choosing AI.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. So I think two things that I want to point out:

1. One is nonprofits in general I think are late adopters for a variety of reasons when it comes to technology.
2. One is lack of resources and funding and investment opportunities, but also I think just as a sector we’re populated with do-gooders, people who are caring and passionate and maybe not as interested in technology or tech tools as people who are lining up at Apple to be the first people to get the new whatever the latest tech gadget is.

And so a combination of a lack of resources and maybe less of an interest, for lack of a better word, makes us really lag in terms of adopting new technology. And almost the irony is that nonprofits, because they’re under-resourced, could benefit so greatly from the latest tech tools in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. And one of the things that we are really proud of over here at Capital Campaign Pro is being on the forefront of adopting and vetting and sussing out the latest technologies to really help our clients and people in the sector leverage their campaigns and their fundraising to be effective and efficient.

Selecting the Right AI Tool for the Right Job

So let’s talk a little bit more about identifying their needs and selecting the right tool for the right job. You’re sort of in charge of that here at Capital Campaign Pro. So how do you think about selecting the right tool or even identifying the need? Where do you want to start?

Steven Shattuck:
Yeah. I mean I think it’s looking at the operations of the fundraising team of the nonprofit and looking for those gaps. Maybe are there tasks that just take a really long time for seemingly no good reason? Are there things that we’ve always sort of wanted to do but never been able to do? And I think critically, are there people on staff that are enthusiastic or maybe at least curious enough to try new things?

Because you can put together the best list of needs and wants, but you still sort of need at least one person in the organization to sort of champion things. And I think I maybe somewhat play that role here to what you said earlier in the intro, and I think that’s really important because you can’t really force someone to be reading a bunch of articles and looking at random tools and looking at demos and experimenting with things.

There usually has to be someone in the organization and maybe it’s a volunteer, maybe it’s a board member. It doesn’t have to be a staff member that is maybe already a little bit literate about tools or at least wants to be and can sort of be that ambassador, if you will, internally for saying:

“Okay, these are things we want to do. Here are maybe three or four things that I think could accomplish these goals. Can we invest some time, an hour a week, an hour a month, an hour, a quarter in looking at them and seeing if they can create the outputs that we want?”

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah, I think that’s such a smart suggestion. And of course, you could have a board member play that role, as you mentioned, a volunteer, a staff member. But really I think it’s important for nonprofits these days to actively look for someone who can help them, bring them along in their technology use, their AI use, but experimenting with one new tool, app or service a month, a quarter, whatever it is, being brave, trying it out. If it doesn’t work, you don’t have to continue using it.

Most of them are low cost or many of them are no cost, at least to get started. And honestly, because they’re so flooded in the market, they are low cost. $50 a month, maybe a $100 a month, but many of these tools are extremely, extremely affordable.

How We’re Using AI at Capital Campaign Pro

Let’s talk a little bit about how we are experimenting and employing and rolling out AI here at Capital Campaign Pro, just to give some examples of how we use it, how we think about it, helping fundraisers and specifically campaigns. So you want to back up and start with the idea of our Online Toolkit?

Steven Shattuck:
Yeah. I mean, when you guys founded the company back in 2017, a cornerstone of it was the creation of the Online Toolkit. And you tell me if I’ve got the history wrong because I’m a little bit of a late joiner to it, but my sense is that, and I made this observation as well, which is probably one of the reasons I was excited to join is all the things you said earlier about nonprofits are true, they’re overworked, they’re under-resourced, it’s not their fault that maybe they’re a few years behind. I would kind of consider that a badge of honor in a lot of ways.

And the observation is that in between meetings, in between trying to get work done, we’re Googling for things. I really need an example of this pledge form or a template that I can get started. I don’t really know how to make that from scratch. I don’t have one. Let’s Google, let’s go out on a Facebook group and ask around. That takes a lot of time to source those things. And even if you do source something, there’s this kind of question of is this really up to snuff? Does it adhere to best practices? I’m not a huge best practice kind of person, but you want to feel some confidence that this is a good example of the thing I’m looking for. And to me, that was sort of the impetus of the Online Toolkit.

And AI I think is a very natural extension of that philosophy because a common frustration with AI, and I’m sure listeners have at least seen this in their news feeds, if not experienced it themselves, is you go to ChatGPT, regular old vanilla ChatGPT that is free, or maybe you pay 20 bucks a month for, and you ask a question and it gives you an okay response or maybe an image with some typos that are kind of weird looking and that sort of leads to frustration about AI in general. Right? Whereas maybe that was not the right tool for the job, maybe the prompts were not correct.

So we want to bring that to bear in our work as well. Because we know that our clients are probably doing that, right? It’s just a realistic reality of the sector. So one thing that we did, which I think you’re alluding to is we created and trained our own chatbot and put it in the toolkit because we want people getting the best possible answers from AI and they’re probably not going to get that from just a generic ChatGPT that is free to use.

So that’s just kind of an example of how we bring it to bear and work. We’re not just saying everyone should use AI and everyone should just jump on the bandwagon recognizing that people are probably already going to be gravitating towards these tools. Let’s make sure they’re using the best possible version of it. Just like in 2017, we wanted to make sure that people were using the best possible example of a campaign asset that we put in the toolkit, for example.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. I mean because Google gives you lots of things and you have to sift through and sort and determine what’s good and what’s junk, and sometimes it’s hard to determine that. And especially if you don’t know good campaign strategy, then you can get led down a wrong road. I mean, when we were playing with ChatGPT over the last couple of years, we’ve asked all sorts of campaign questions and gotten all sorts of really crappy answers. But if you don’t know that they’re crappy answers, you might think, oh, ChatGPT’s telling me to raise lots of money through events that sounds maybe like a good idea or send a mailing or do a billboard campaign. You might think, oh, that maybe makes sense.

But of course if you’ve been in fundraising a while, if you know campaign strategy, that’s a terrible answer. But that may be an answer that ChatGPT publicly gives you, which is why we want to use tools that make sense, that are trained, that work for people. To your point.

Using AI Responsibly

Okay, so you’re advocating for AI and you wrote a book called Fundraisers, Robots Make Bad Fundraisers. So isn’t AI just a robot?

Steven Shattuck:
Well, yeah. You’re in a long line of people who have made that observation, and I actually have no problem reconciling those two things. I know you’ve read the book, but if other people who haven’t read the book, you’ll find that it was written in sort of before the age of AI, although there was some prognosticating about it back when I wrote it in 2019, but it’s not an anti AI book. It’s not an anti technology book. I think the philosophy of the book is really what we’ve been talking about, which is using tools responsibly rather than sort of going all in and using them instead of everything else.

You can never fully remove the human touch from fundraising and AI when use responsibly really should have no danger in doing that. Right? And that’s sort of again, the philosophy that we bring to bear in our services, in Andie, our AI tool, in the toolkits, it’s additive. It’s not replacing all the work of fundraising, which I think would lead to that outcomes.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. I mean, to me at the core, fundraising is still about relationships, but if there are things that you can do on the front end and back end of meeting with donors that are more effective, more efficient, help you prepare for the meeting, then better help you get the meeting, there are all sorts of tools and resources that can help you around that. I just got an email actually from a client, you don’t even know this. So we just rolled out Andie, our AI chatbot in the toolkit a couple of weeks ago.

And so I just got an email, one of our clients is doing a $60 million capital campaign and they’re a pretty sophisticated shop, and she said that she just asked our AI bot for an agenda for her upcoming development committee meeting. She said it was amazing. She needed to make tweaks. But I think that’s important. Everybody needs to understand you can’t use what AI spits out verbatim or you shouldn’t. You look at it, you edit it, you customize it, but it is such a great starting point.

Steven Shattuck:
Starting point.

Amy Eisenstein:
She said it saved her over an hour because she would’ve really struggled, but she put in a few key things and it spit out this great agenda. She was so excited.

Steven Shattuck:
And if she hadn’t done that, she probably would’ve gone and Googled meeting agenda template and looked through 20 examples. So that’s —

Amy Eisenstein:
Or she would’ve just sat at her desk with a blank screen.

Steven Shattuck:
Right. And spent even more time creating from scratch. Exactly.

Amy Eisenstein:
And I’m not making fun of her at all. She’s totally brilliant. She’s totally brilliant. But these are the things that AI, just some examples. We were talking about an AI tool that we are encouraging clients to use and it helps them prepare and practice for donor conversations. And we were talking about how it gives them responses and how it will help them role play and prepare for donor meetings.

But what it doesn’t do is give them strategy. And that’s where I don’t know if someday AI is going to do that. They say it will, but to me, you still need human advisors and expertise and strategy to figure out what you’re going to ask for and how much you’re going to ask for. But there are different tools and AI platforms that will help you prepare for those asks, which is amazing.

Steven Shattuck:
And all of those experts that you mentioned, they can, and we did do this, help train any AI tools that you might use and leverage. And that really, I think is the critical point, is a generic chatbot for example, can scan the web and return what it finds and sort of coalesce them into a good response. But there’s no sort of replacing or competing with a bot, for lack of a better word, that you expertly train and focus to do one thing really well. And that’s a big responsibility that I think weighs on the vendors to do that rather than trying to take shortcuts in something that is not trained. Right?

A Few Words On Using AI Safely

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. Let’s talk about how and when to use AI safely. Do you have any recommendations or thoughts? And then I’m going to ask you to recommend a few tools that people might dip their toes into. So let’s start with safety.

Steven Shattuck:
Well, I come from the database world having spent a decade at Bloomerang, which is a CRM provider and data security is paramount in the nonprofit sector. You don’t want to share private donor information, for example. And when you are using free versions of a lot of these tools, it’s either very hard to know or it’s outright said that the data will be shared to the knowledge base to train our model or whatever. So anytime you’re using the internet as a fundraiser, just be real careful about donor data, client data, anything that would otherwise be very secure in other formats, maybe your database or maybe internal documents. Just be real careful there.

But if you are willing to spend some money on these tools, usually that unlocks sort of a feature around, “Hey, we’re not going to use your information to train models. It stays confidential,” but also not being afraid to delete your chats once you’ve completed them and gotten what you want. Because that in many cases, not always, but can kind of remove that information from the tool itself. But I think the shorter answer is just using common sense, the same sort of rules that apply to every other tool you’ve probably been using the last 10, 15, 20 years. Your CRM, for example, online giving providers, those apply too to AI tools for sure.

Amy Eisenstein:
You know what? I think that is such an important reminder that safety, because I think it is somehow even the common sense goes out the window maybe when you’re using some of these chatbots because you don’t think about those aspects. But if you’re writing an email or a letter to a donor, you may have sensitive information in that and you may just load it in and not be thinking about it. So I really appreciate that reminder of being careful of what you put in, especially publicly available chatbots and tools.

More About Andie, Our Own AI Chatbot

Okay. I said I was going to ask you for specific recommendations of tools that people were going to dip their toes into, but I want to go back to Andie for a minute because it’s something that we’ve been working on for the last year, training this chatbot with all of our knowledge, making sure that when it gives campaign advice, that it gives the right advice and advice that we agree with and it’s good strategy to help our clients.

So what are some examples of things that, questions that you’ve seen loaded in or what excites you about having Andie in our toolkit and available for our clients? How do you envision it helping them?

Steven Shattuck:
Well, I love the story you just told and actually looks like … I’m kind of looking at it as we’re talking. I can see a log of what people are asking, which is anonymized and of course private to all the points we were just talking about before. I think one thing that’s cool is that people are using it to … They’re using it in conjunction with their advisor that we provide them. So it seems like I’m making an observation that our clients and our advisors are sort of collaborating together, which is just kind of fun to see. So I assume that would create a time saver in a lot of cases.

I think what I mostly see is a lot of sort first drafts of something, the meeting agenda you mentioned, a potential letter to a specific donor type, a specific gift agreement. It’s a nice starting point that people are taking rather than that blank sheet of paper, which is very scary and can be a little overwhelming and editing those things rather than starting from scratch.

So I see that and I know, okay, that person probably just saved a half hour, that person saved an hour, and they can be doing so many other great things at that time, calling donors, making personal connections and interactions with donors because it is all about relationships like you said. So that is gratifying for sure.

Amy Eisenstein:
I have to say, sorry, one of the things that we were joking about the other day on a call with clients is that they could of course ask some of these questions to their campaign consultants, their advisor, but if they get up in the middle of the night and they can’t sleep about their campaign, they can just go and ask the question and —

Steven Shattuck:
Exactly. They don’t have to wait till the next meeting. I think the other cool thing along that same thread is volunteers, board members, and also maybe new employees who are maybe closer to entry level in their experience. We give the whole team practically access to the toolkit. And I like to see that those people are going in and sort of using it as campaign training. What is a gift range chart? What do you do in the quiet phase?

And again, this is happening off hours. So rather than spending time with the advisor, kind of getting those people one-on-one information, they can sort of self-train, if maybe that’s the right word, in between meetings while sort of the main person who is already sort of well-versed in campaigns is maybe doing some higher-level tasks.

Again, instead of that person searching on Google for random webinars and having to sit through two-hour long conversations about campaign one-on-one. And that stuff is good, and it’s useful in a lot of contexts, but just seeing people have conversations like, what am I supposed to do in this phase? Or what does this term mean? What is a depth chart? I don’t know what that is, even though I’ve worked in fundraising a few years. That is cool to see. And maybe wasn’t even something that we … There’s a lot of things we didn’t necessarily expect but that we’re observing, like that meeting agenda. That’s fun to see.

Game-Changing AI Tools for Nonprofits: Our Recommendations

Amy Eisenstein:
All right. So let’s say somebody is thinking about a campaign, they’re dipping their toes in, they’re not ready to start working with us yet. They’re gearing up their fundraising. What are one or two tools that you would suggest that they should be experimenting with as real game changers in the sector? And it doesn’t have to be for fundraising, maybe it’s for efficiency, maybe it’s for time management, maybe it’s for project management. I mean, there’s so many amazing tools out there. What are some of your favorites?

Steven Shattuck:
Well, the first thing I’ll say, which is maybe a little counterintuitive to your question is check what you already have. This is something, this is sort of a flag I have been carrying for as long as I worked in the sector just based on my observation about tech is very often I have observed people go and searching for things that they may already have. So check with your current CRM provider, for example, check with your current wealth screening provider because they may have already embedded some AI tools. They can sort of supplement what those tools already do.

So don’t want people going out and spending money they don’t need to or researching things. First check. And so once you’ve done that, one thing I like to recommend to people is that ChatGPT does not have to be your default. It’s not the only thing that can help you write an email or write a newsletter or a blog post or whatever. In fact, there’s one that I really like called Claude, it’s C-L-A-U-D-E. It’s created by a company called Anthropic. And when I use tools to maybe write first drafts or check drafts of things that I’ve written, I’m almost always happier with the results from Claude than I am ChatGPT for writing.

And once you sort of realize that, oh, there are specific tools that are maybe better at things than others, that sort of opens up a whole realm of possibilities to assigning, this is a vendor that is really good at this purpose. This is one that is maybe better at making images. This is one that is better at analyzing data or trends, for example. But map that out for yourself. And I’ve got a little cheat sheet for this. Maybe we’ll put it in the show notes, but a lot of people would just kind get frustrated with ChatGPT and then say, “Well, AI stinks,” and then they become phobic if they weren’t already.

And that I think is kind of a shame, but it’s up to these companies to prove their value to people and to get the word out for sure. But I love the question you’re asking because there are tools that are better at some things than others. And when it comes to writing, which I think is probably the baseline for a lot of people’s use of AI, I love Claude. I think Claude beats ChatGPT seven days a week and twice on Sunday.

Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment

Amy Eisenstein:
That’s fascinating. And I think it is hard for people who are unfamiliar with the tools to start to figure that out, but it’s so important to dip your toes in and ask questions and experiment. The truth is, you can even ask some of these tools the question. I mean, we loaded into ChatGPT, “What should we be asking you for versus Claude versus Perplexity?” We asked all three, and it was fascinating to see what they spit out and what they recommended. And then you have to use your judgment, obviously, who gave the best chance, right? But that is a fun thing to do.

I have to say, I was at a conference a few months back and I heard somebody from, I think it was Big Brothers Big Sisters speaking, and she talking about encouraging her staff to experiment and that every month they would get together and everybody would talk about an AI tool that they had tried. And one thing that had worked and maybe something that didn’t work, but the biggest takeaway I think that I came from there is that they were using AI to help make matches of bigs and littles, the mentors and the kids.

Steven Shattuck:
Oh. Great. Wow.

Amy Eisenstein:
And she said that her staff was really skeptical that AI would be able to make good matches, and somehow they came around to the idea that they would try it and the staff would then compare it to the matches they would’ve made. And they said that 99% of the time, the match was as good or better than the staff would’ve made for a variety of qualities and characteristics, and that it used to take them hours and hours to make a match comparing interests and schedules. And AI does it in minutes. So talk about a time saver. I mean, so one really practical application that a non-profit’s using, it saves them hundreds of hours a month, a quarter, whatever it is.

Steven Shattuck:
It’s a perfect example. I think maybe a cynical AI phobic person would assume that the goal of an organization like that is to put the kid with an AI chatbot instead of a person. That’s not what it is. It’s exactly what you said. It’s using AI to speed up the process and make even better matches with a human. I mean, that sort of encapsulates my book in a lot of ways. That’s a great example. I may even steal that for some other talks, but man, I love hearing that.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. So I mean, there’s so many. I think there are endless examples of ways that people are using AI effectively. So what advice would you say to somebody who’s really skeptical, who thinks it’s turning our society into vampires and robots? And I mean just bad for humanity, which maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. I think we have to find where it is good and where it helps and makes us effective and efficient. I mean, certainly that’s what our goal is in terms of helping people leverage their campaigns and being more efficient. Everybody in the nonprofit sector says, “I don’t have any time.” So what does AI do? It gives you back time.

Steven Shattuck:
It saves time.

Amy Eisenstein:
That’s what it does.

Steven Shattuck:
Yeah. Principally that’s what it does. But I think you said it exactly. There are bad things, but if someone is skeptical, but at least willing to try, the more they use the tools responsively and can create good examples and good stories like that boys or Big Brothers and Big Sisters example, I think that’s going to help people avoid perhaps pitfalls or use cases that do lead to that outcomes. It’s not going away. You could ignore it forever and maybe be fine, but again, how much time could you save if maybe you did adopt these things in a responsible way?

But I do think it comes back to your good advice earlier of maybe finding that internal champion that can kind of be your guide, a volunteer. There are people out there that do this. They are vendors that can offer this type of consulting. And maybe even investing in something like that is worth it if it ultimately pays dividends in terms of the time that you save.

So I think it’s just like anything else, the investment that you put into it and should pay dividends when done well.

Amy Eisenstein:
All right, let me give one analogy for anybody who’s still on the fence.

A Real-World Analogy in Favor of Using AI

So in my lifetime, five decades, listening to music, I’ve listened to music since I was a child. Everybody loves listening to music. When I was a child, we had a record player in the house. Can you imagine? Then there was cassettes, then there were CDs, and then there’s streaming. Did I skip anything? I don’t know. So four or five changes in each decade, right? So the purpose listening to music hasn’t changed, but how we listen to music has changed, right? Records, cassettes, CDs, streaming. Did I miss anything? I don’t know. But listen, I took to college a tower of CDs, and now those CDs are in a landfill somewhere and my car doesn’t even have a CD player anymore. I can’t even, or a cassette player. I had cars with cassette players, I had cars with CD players.

And now we literally couldn’t even listen to music that way if we tried. And I think the same is true with some of this AI and tech. The way we work is changing. The purpose doesn’t change. The relationship building, the meetings with donors, how we connect as humans on human levels. But so the purpose doesn’t change. The method changes and how we function at work changes. And the more you’re willing to experiment and try new things and learn the new technologies, the more effective and efficient you’re going to be. I mean, you can’t listen to music right now practically in any other medium. It doesn’t mean —

Steven Shattuck:
Well, I have a record player at home.

Amy Eisenstein:
That’s Steven. Of course you do. Listen and you love going to concerts. It doesn’t change that. But how you buy tickets to concerts has changed.

Steven Shattuck:
Absolutely.

Amy Eisenstein:
So I don’t know. Silly examples. Silly examples.

Steven Shattuck:
I love it.

Amy Eisenstein:
All right. Final thoughts?

Final Thoughts

Steven Shattuck:
Don’t go it alone. I think it’s just like anything else. There are good resources out there. There are people who want to help. I mean, there’s AI fundraising conferences and webinars, there’s whole groups devoted to these things. I think that’s also a good starting point if maybe you don’t have someone internally or within your orbit, that could be your personal guide or ambassador for it.

But I think one thing that we haven’t said is early adoption I find tends to pay off, and that can be a potential game changer for your organization. And something, the Big Brothers thing made me realize that if you can unlock something and bring it to bear to maybe your network or your peer group, just think of the impact that you can have on a lot of other organizations, not just your own.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. All right. So we’d be remiss if we didn’t tell people, visit the Capital Campaign Pro website and talk to us about how we are using technology and AI to help organizations and nonprofit leaders advance their campaigns and run effective efficient campaigns.

And ask any vendors that you’re considering working with:

• How are they using the latest tools?
• How are they going to help you come to the 21st century?

Because that’s what you’re hiring consultants and experts to do. If you are hiring consultants and experts that are only doing things the old-fashioned ways or using antiquated tools, you’re missing out on a world of possibilities.

So you want vendors that are forward-thinking and using the latest tools in technology. Let them experiment so that you don’t have to, so that they’re bringing you the latest tools that are working, that are effective, that are efficient, that are going to help your fundraising and your campaigns and your nonprofit systems and infrastructure. So we’re really proud of doing that at Capital Campaign Pro.

Steven, I want to thank you because you are really leading the charge in that area. And I would encourage listeners to visit our website because the latest tools in tech are being featured more and more in our blog and in our webinars, and we’re just super excited to share that with the sector.

Steven Shattuck:
Definitely.

Amy Eisenstein:
So thank you.

Steven Shattuck:
Yeah. Well, it’s been fun and it’s a group effort, so I can’t take all the credit.

Amy Eisenstein:
All right, thanks for joining us and we’ll see you next time. Bye for now.