Name: Work Smarter, Not Just Faster with AI: Using AI to Augment Your Fundraising Brain
Uploaded: 2026-04-16T19:32:16.290Z
Duration: 54 min 28 s
Description: Work Smarter, Not Just Faster with AI: Using AI to Augment Your Fundraising Brain

Transcript for "Work Smarter, Not Just Faster with AI: Using AI to Augment Your Fundraising Brain": Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for our fundraising master class session today, Work Smarter, Not Just Faster with AI, Using AI to Augment Your Freight Fundraising Brain, which is presented by our nonprofit AI expert, Beth Kanter. Before we kick it off, I just wanna let you know that you will receive a link to the recording today. And please enter any questions that you have as you think of them throughout the session into that q and a box. You'll find the chat where you can interact with everyone that's on the line, the messages tab where you can direct message myself. If you have any kind of issues, please let me know. And then, you can also access incredible resources to help guide your mission's next chapter in our docs, set to the right. And then to the right of that tab, you'll find our q and a. So without further ado, I'm gonna pass it over today to the reason we're all here, Beth Kantor. Great. Thank you so much, Abigail. And I'm going to, let's see, share my slides. So I guess you have to stop sharing. And, so I'm trying to there we go. All the technical stuff. Great. So I'm Beth Kanter, and and I've been working at the intersection of, nonprofits and emerging tech for decades and also leadership training. And so right now, I'm focusing on, working with nonprofits to help them adopt AI in ways that builds the skills to keep humans in charge. So that's where we're gonna start, with human centered, AI. And, when we work, under time pressure, we often go to AI to help us save time, and it can. But that's when we're more likely to start offloading our thinking to AI. So the most important question that we have to keep in mind as we use this tool, what are we going to do with that time, that AI gives us back? And that's being human centered. So I'm gonna kick off, with a poll. And, if you have, a mobile phone with you, you can just fire it at that QR code or you can go up to slido.com and type in the event code and answer the question. If, AI could save you five hours a week, how would you strategically repurpose that time to get more impact as a fundraiser? So just give it a moment here. Hopefully, it is working. I see some people starting to type. Outreach. Okay. And you've all probably seen word clouds before. Those of you who say the same things, it's gonna blow up big, like outreach and stewardship and more face to face. Yay for face to face and humans focusing on strategy, relationship building. These are amazing. I'm seeing, so many great ways to reinvest that time that AI is giving you that I call the dividend of time. So, so keep these in mind. So one thing I I wanna say is that recently, Berkeley researchers have released some research, and it's one of many studies that are starting to come out now. And they followed a company after they adopted AI, and they found that staff were multitasking constantly and they were overworking and they were working through breaks, because AI made doing so feel effortless. Nobody told them, they just did it. So you can see without a plan, the time dividend, that time that AI saves us, doesn't buy you rest or stronger donor relationships or outreach or more stewardship or space to think strategically. It just buys you a faster hamster wheel. And you all just named exactly the right things, and the Berkeley research is all about how easy it is to never actually get to those human centered things that actually matter to fundraisers. So, I want you to remember this. Saving time does matter. I'm not dismissing it. But efficiency is not the endgame. And Yuval Harari, who is the author of Sapiens, he said it like this. For every hour we gain with AI, we should invest an hour in being a better human, or I would paraphrase to say being a better fundraiser. And, AI can help us get there by helping us sharpening our thinking, deepening our skills, making us better at work by holding that time, for all those things you just named. So, I think that begins with a strong understanding of what effective human and AI collaboration, means. So let me give you a simple way to think about it, a fun metaphor. You got three hats in the kitchen. So you got that prep cook hat, and that's your AI automation mode. You let AI handle the repetitive chopping so you can save your brain for the real cooking. Then there's the sous chef hat, and that's where AI is your collaborator, it's your teacher, it's guiding you to refine your recipe, but you're adding the final seasoning. It augments your skills, but it doesn't replace them. And finally, we have that family recipe, and that's you. Those are the human only tasks that make that that is your unique touch and your human judgment that makes that dish special. So that's the gist of human and AI collaboration. We have three different modes of working and each one with just a different way to work or teaming up with AI. And And there's lots of research going on on the most effective ways to collaborate with the AI. And, AI and human collaboration comes down to a skill that I like to call discernment, and that's figuring who does out what who does what and how much human oversight each workflow or task needs. And, one of the best studies that's come out recently is from the Stanford Human and AI Institute, and that study created the human agency scale. And it gives us this whole spectrum of how we collaborate. We can do full on automation. We've heard of all those, you know, AI agents. That's letting them do the work with a little minimal human oversight at the beginning and a little bit at the end. There's guided automation, and that's having it do the task. You spot check it spot check it. Then there's equal partnership or where you're thinking along with the tool. That's AI augmentation. That's what we're gonna go in deep today. And then, of course, the human only work where judgment, context, or interpersonal skills and decisions really can't be delegated. So, some tangible examples. An AI notetaker is, that's in your weekly staff meeting. You set it. It runs on its own. It produces a transcript. That's that autonomous piece. Right? If you took those notes, right, and you ran it with a prompt in, you know, in Claude or ChatGPT, and you verified the results or you spot checked them, that's guided automation. But if you were drafting a job description, you would probably bring to it some rough thinking. AI might produce a draft for you or give you feedback on your draft. Then you actually refine it for culture and fit before it goes out. And that's AI augmentation or AI as a thought partner. Choosing who to hire, that's human centered only. So the skill is understanding this question. What am I optimizing for? Is it speed or is it quality? And, research is also showing that we have to be more intentional about this. You know, what mode are we in when we're going to collaborate with AI? And, this is research from a study six, seven months ago from Carnegie Mellon that found the more confidence we gain using AI, the less our brains, were engaged. And we use less critical thinking on the output. And this especially happens when we start to automate tasks that we used to do ourselves. So the research suggests that the best practices to retain cognitive skills is to engage your human brain and thinking before you even touch the AI, and especially afterwards, critically reviewing, the output. So we just have to avoid getting into a habit of use that I call mindless AI productivity, and we have to be very mindful to use it to also stretch our thinking. So, let's talk a little bit about cognitive offloading. So cognitive offloading seems like a fancy term to take something out of your brain, to something external, like writing down notes or putting it your task list in a tool like Asana, to do all the mental work for you instead of holding it all in your head. And, you know, that can be a smart move because it frees you up for the work that actually needs your brain. But I want to make a distinction. There is healthy cognitive offloading and there's unhealthy cognitive offloading. And that difference really matters because the more you hand off your thinking to AI, the less practice your brain gets, and that's a thinking skill. And if you don't use a skill, it gets rusty like anything else. So let's, like, look at a few examples, of healthy versus unhealthy cognitive offloading. So, so here's a great one. Healthy cognitive offloading. Not remembering phone numbers because smartphones store them. That frees up our brain from really important other tasks like identifying your fundraising strategy. No need to memorize, phone numbers anymore and that is not harming your cognitive, and thinking skills. Calculators are another example. They offer benefits in accuracy, speed, and they free up cognitive resources. But when they were first introduced into classrooms, they raised a lot of concerns on the potential impact on our math skills. However, cognitive offloading to calculators is different than a cognitive offloading to AI. Using calculators for basic math operations was is a very narrow cognitive area. And it's shown us, like, I think four decades later now that we have calculators, who still does long division at their work today. Alright? But generative AI, represents the most powerful cognitive offloading tool we've ever created. And we love it. Right? It doesn't just provide information. It provides answers. It writes drafts for us, and it does other tasks like, you name it. It could probably do whatever a lot of our workflows. And it's getting faster. It's getting smarter, and more and more of us are using it. And the tools offer incredible benefits, to help us scale our work as, as fundraisers, to be able to customize emails, to different donors, and to do that with less burnout, with less working all the time. And we know burnout is a problem in our sector. So I'm not saying that we shouldn't use AI, but we need to make sure that we're not using it in this unhealthy way. For example, simply asking it questions or to do a task, accepting what it gives you without any critical engagement of your brain. And research studies are beginning to show, that the cognitive offloading benefits as well as the risks. So let's look at the risks. And there are a lot of studies out there on the impact both in education and on the workplace and more coming. So this MIT study was the first widely publicized study on the risks of cognitive offloading and generative AI, and it was really controversial. The MIT study looked at different groups of students. Some used ChatGPT to write their essays while others used their human brains. The researchers identified a decrease in brain activity when ChatGPT did all the writing. So, of course, this sparked alarmist headlines, Chat GPT makes us stupid, and so forth. But there was more to the research that the media narrative didn't cover. The students who initially wrote their essays on their own were later asked to use generative AI to help improve their essays. And that switch really boosted brain activity and in contrast to what researchers found during the initial experiment. So keep this in mind. Chat GPT doesn't make us stupid, but it can we can definitely use it stupidly if that's a if that's a word. So, so let's just pause for a second, and I wanna get to the question, that on how we use all of this research to our advantage. How do we put this into practice while we're using AI so it makes us smarter and that we're protecting our cognitive skills. So, so, the big difference is is how engaged is our brain while we're using AI. And there is a continuum of it. And let me show you the, brain engagement meter. So I developed this prototype as part of my cap stone project for an IDEO certificate in AI and human design thinking. And so there's really, like, five levels of brain engagement, that happens when we're working with, AI. First is brain in a jar. You ask AI just to do the whole task. You accept the output. You don't look at it. And eventually, if you continue to work with AI, in this way and there's some new research out about this, your mental models of how you see the world actually start to degrade. And there's terms like AI psychosis and those things. It's happening to a very small percentage of the population, but it is a risk if we're using AI mindlessly like this. Then the next level up is something I call sleepy brain. You're using AI, generative AI. You're just simply prompting it and asking it to do something. Maybe you skim the output. Maybe you tweak the wording. But AI is really structuring your thinking, and this is really unhealthy cognitive offloading. Then we get up to level three, which is everyday brain. And you use a structured prompt. You have you know, you ask AI to draft something. You get the draft. You spot check it for accuracy. Here, your thinking stays the same. And I think this is fine for, like, a routine email, but not when writing is your thinking, like maybe doing a strategy brief. That's where I think level four is required. And this is interacting with AI when your brain is thinking. So, this is where you come in with some clear goals, you know, a structure, some challenges that you're writing about, and, you know, you've done some pre thinking away from AI. Then you come to AI and you engage it with a dialogue. You ask it, what assumptions am I making? You pressure test those assumptions. You push back. You iterate. You think about alternatives together with AI. And this is where your understanding really starts to deepen. So this is AI augmentation. And then finally, there's level five, brain learning. This is more of a state of being that comes from regular use of AI, at level four for their appropriate tasks. And you're able to learn from the interaction and metabolize those skills and produce outputs even at a higher quality without AI assistance. So your skills persist and improve when AI isn't in the mix. So I wanna do another little quick poll. I want you to think about a task you do at work most often using AI. And what level do you think you're usually at when you're using it? Are you at brain in a jar, brain thinking, sleepy brain, everyday brain, brain learning? Great. This is great. I'm I'm I'm I'm glad to see this breakout. This is what I'm starting to see when I've been asking this poll for a while. Brain learning is kind of, you know, it's still something that a lot of researchers are looking at. Like, when we take the AI away, are we able to master those skills? So I'm glad to see that intuitively or subjectively, you're feeling like you've been able to learn something and apply it and retain it, with AI. And and it's good to see also that there's a mix of level three and level four, because the idea here isn't, like, do everything at a level four and nothing below that. The idea is it's the right level of brain engagement for the task at hand, and I really think it comes down to our level three and level four. Right? So level three is appropriate for many, many tasks. Routine email, prompt, have it drafted or you draft it. It edit it edits it. You check for accuracy, send, done, checked off your list, and you save time. And your cognitive risk here is probably pretty low. But if you look at the bottom half of the table, if writing to think and you're doing that at level three, that's when you're offloading your thinking to AI, and that's where the potential risk of eroding your cognitive skills quietly over time exists. So for example, let's say you need to design a new program, model or maybe a fundraising initiative. So if you were that's probably a level four task, but if you're doing it at level three, you would be writing a prompt, you'd attach a lot of context. Maybe you would even, attach some skills or style guidelines. You know, how does your organization write in its brand voice? And you have AI drafted and you will lightly edit what comes back. But if you were doing this task at level four, you would probably come with a rough draft and it could be a messy brain dump. And I'll show you some of these techniques in a moment of your thinking. You attach context. You ask AI to give you maybe three framing models for the program or the initiative. Then you pressure test, you know, different ways to measure results. You ask questions like, what would a critic say about this approach? You know, what's missing? And so forth. And, again, I'm gonna show those techniques in a moment. These are the tasks, but they're it's the same task that I just described. You're designing a program model or a fundraising initiative, but you're using different ways to interact with AI and different levels of brain engagement. So the question you have to be asking yourself is, does my level of a brain engagement match the task and protect my thinking? So what I want you to do is to think of a task that you're currently doing at level three but should be a level four. Just think about that for a moment. Maybe write it down for yourself. Jot it down. Reflect on it. It could even be the reverse. What's something maybe you're doing at a level four that could be a level three? You know, a routine task that you're maybe spending too much time on. Too much brain engagement where it could be, you know, everyday thinking. And what I want you to do, especially when we go through the techniques next, is start to think about how you might approach the right brain engagement for the task. Alright. So now I'm gonna get practical. And, how are we gonna apply all this stuff? Right? I just gave you a lot of the frameworks and the theory and ways to think about it because we are talking about thinking. I think that's important. But also understand that the skills are not just about prompting. It's also cognitive skills, ways to deepen your understanding, ways to improve your critical thinking, ways to understand, to have metacognitive skills, to understand how you think and how you learn. These are also what are needed. So I'm gonna start with these and also with just a little warning here that remember that AI lacks common sense. So if you can see this, this is something that's been going around. You could try it. I just tried it this morning with the latest, version of, the newest model of Opus 4.7 with Claude, and I asked it, it's a beautiful day. I wanna walk to the car wash because it's a short walk and I need the exercise, which is good for me. Should I walk or drive? And it's asked me to, to it told me I should walk. Right? So it lacks a little bit of common sense maybe. Even though the models are improving, it still does not AI does not replace human judgment and other human only skills. And so my first tip is that you need to boost your human brainpower because these human only skills are what make you great as nonprofit leaders. Making connections, insight making, your problem solving skills, your adaptability, your creativity. Studies show that humans are way more creative than, AI is. Empathy, judgment, and so on. These only stay strong when we actively use them, and we really need to exercise them. So that's the first tip. You know, walk to think away from the screen. Practice recalling information instead of always looking it up, and that improves your ability to make connections. Use paper when you need some clarity. Writing by hand forces your brain to slow down, organize, and actually think. And you can, boost your brainpower so you're ready to work with AI instead of handing it your brain. And this idea around writing, for clarity, it is backed by a lot of research that shows that handwriting, lights up different parts of the brain. One of my favorite studies is from, and researchers is Audrey Van De Beer, and she is a neuropsychology researcher in Norway with decades of experience studying the human brain. And her research shows that handwriting lights up more brain regions than simply typing at the keyboard does. So when you stop and you write by hand, your brain is doing work, and that extra work is actually what's building memory and deeper thinking. So her advice is blunt. If you want to get good at something, you have to use your brain and challenge it, and handwriting will stimulate more brain activity than typing, leading to better memory retention. So before you open up an AI tool, grab a pen, jot down your thoughts on paper, draw something out. If you're, you're not being old fashioned, you're giving your brain the workout it needs to show up and be ready to think with AI. So human only tasks. You wanna define your human only task because some tasks or decisions can only be done by human brain. And, these are the mental processes that make you good at your job. And I think everyone needs to do this just to remember. I know it sounds like straightforward, but the more you work with AI, the more the easier it is to delegate your judgment. And you don't wanna do that because that's what strengthens your leadership abilities. So make a list, and here's how to figure it out. You know, ask yourself a couple of questions. Will this strengthen my leadership? Does this need my judgment or lived experience? And am I avoiding thinking? So have your own manifesto for what are your human only tasks that you're, you know, you're not gonna hand over or let AI touch. So when you begin to collaborate with AI as a thinking partner and especially when you're doing, like, writing or something where that is the thinking, your human brain always comes first before AI. And I call this human and AI sandwich. You think first. Create the rough draft. That's the bread. Ask AI to poke holes or to coach you through improving it. That's the meat or the tofu. Then you come back and evaluate what AI gave you, and that's the whole sandwich. Now, time pressure pushes us towards fast, frictionless AI use. And it's been called LLMing, like lemming. It's jumping off a cliff, like letting AI do our thinking. So don't let it become your default habit every time you use AI and especially with writing for thinking. And I think that's where, like, Taylor Swift has something to teach us in terms of a metacognitive skill. So, when Taylor imagines three different pens when she writes songs, she thinks about a fountain pen when she's going to write a deep she uses a fountain pen when she's going to write a deep and poetic song. She grabs for a glitter pen when it's fun and bouncy, pop song, and a quill pen when she's writing serious ballads. It's her way of signaling her brain what mode she's in before she starts. And I think we can do the same. So before you open the tool, pause and ask, what level of brain engagement does this task need? That one second decision is a metacognitive skill that you need to develop to get good at using AI. And if we don't cue ourselves, AI flattens everything into one default mode. And that default mode is usually cognitive offloading. And over time, your thinking skills pay the price. So we can put this in the chat or you can, write it down for yourself. Think about one task you do where thinking is the work and you shouldn't turn to AI first or maybe not at all. So just gonna give you a, a minute to digest. Write it down for yourself. What's one task what's one task you do where thinking is the work and you shouldn't turn to AI first or maybe not at all? Okay. So now we're gonna shift into some more technical, techniques, and these are of equal importance to the cognitive techniques that I just covered. People wanna just jump to the technical solutions, and you can do that, but they don't solve the whole problem. So the first one is having personalized instructions. And you can do this in Claude, Chat GPT, and others. And with Claude, it tells you, how to interact with you every time. And I set up mine when I caught myself slipping into everyday brain for everything I was doing with AI. So I had one strong rule. I tell it no polished answers until I share a messy draft first. And that forces me to think before the AI does it for me. And I also filled in an override, because sometimes I do need a quick answer. You know, I type in the word WAVE and it skips my personalized instruction guardrails and it gives me the answer. And I discovered this while being more intentional. I was trying to figure out how much caffeine is in a latte and I asked it and it gave me back the equivalent of an algebra problem. And I realized, just tell me how much caffeine is in a latte. I don't need to, like, compute it, because it was more of an everyday task. So that's when I built in the wave. But this whole process made me very self aware about how I interact with Claude. And now I put in my own safeguards, because the tools don't do that for you. I also wanna be honest that this is a workaround. It's not a fix. Sometimes if you're working in a long thread, it'll forget your personalized instructions. It'll jump to giving you answers or it'll jump to replying to you and asking, can I do this task for you? So the real solution here, is how they're designed. But right now, we have to put in our own guardrails. This is another approach. I call it the brain dump prompt for problem solving. Sometimes you're not sure and you can have AI kinda help think through some half form ideas. And, and you don't actually need a whole polished prompt to do serious thinking with AI. So you bring your raw material and then you let the dialogue help you do the organizing. So you gather your raw material, whatever notes, whatever's in your head. You do the dump. This is where you type it in. Don't worry about typos, dream of consciousness. Don't worry about structure, any of that. The goal is to externalize what's in your head, not necessarily write a good prompt. And then you direct. Here's where you, you you you get AI to initiate a a a document, a dialogue by asking it to ask you questions. And, in fact, there in Claude, there is a tool, called the ask user questions tool, and you just type in ask user questions, and it will ask you questions to help clarify your thinking. And then you go back and forth. You're not done, at that point. You could just go back and forth. You push back against things. You say, no. That's not quite right. Give me some other options. And this is where you deepen your understanding. And then you kinda claim it. You can take the output and revise and write whatever you were trying to think. Maybe it's a strategy brief or something else. The other thing you can do is also ask Claude or Chatibiti to summarize your dialogue, export it as a document, and then take it there and think about it. Let the thinking marinate. So what you're doing here is practicing your thinking, with AI. The next thing is AI augmented brainstorming techniques. Now research is showing that, humans are more creative than AI. So if you're just going to AI and say, give me, you know, some ideas about this, that is not a best practice. What you need, again, is the human and AI sandwich. You need to get your own ideas down first before you start brainstorming. And you should come to it with some context and a good how might we question. And what AI is really good at doing is giving the creative stretch. Again, not give me ideas, but give me 10 absurd ideas for this challenge. AI is really great at divergent thinking. Humans, we say, no, we don't have time. We don't have money. We can't do that. But AI doesn't have those limitations. And it's not that you are gonna take the ideas that are gonna come out of AI as they are, but they might spark others. And that's where that last step comes in. You and your team evaluate it for mission fit, equity, feasibility, because AI doesn't know your stakeholders or community. And that's a judgment that stays with you. So here are a bunch of additional nine, to be exact, kind of creative brainstorming, prompts that you can try with, AI. You can have it, adopt a certain persona. You can have it, you know, give you wild ideas. You can have it guide with examples. You can, you know, do a number of things, and and there are some prompts here and and there is a handout that has, the instructions. So this is, my attempt at a Georgia O'Keeffe watercolor. And, I was, I've been experimenting with how can AI give me good feedback. Right? So I went to test it on something like my watercolors. So, and AI's feedback can really be valuable, but you have to get the persona or its viewpoint right. And I learned this from, playing around with it with getting feedback on my watercolors so I could improve. So when I asked it to, to critique my, Georgia O'Keeffe inspired painting using a basic art expert persona, I got useless cheerleader feedback. I was told I was brilliant and all my work was expressive. So I tried the opposite extreme. I I wanted a brutally critical art critic and professor. And, the feedback was harsh and it was pretty demoralizing. It told me I was confusing gestural freedom with half half Finnish. And then finally, I tried the sweet spot, which was getting a, a watercolor expert, but also expert teacher who had launched the careers of thousands of artists. And that's when I started to get really precise kind of, suggestions on brush techniques. And it also gave me tutorials to watch on YouTube. And it also gave me a little bit more history about Georgia O'Keeffe. So if you wanna use it to help you get, improve in a skill or something, you have to give it the right role for feedback. Become a learn it all and a self directed learner. AI is, you know, really great at helping you learn something. Here's an example of a prompt. I want you to help me to teach me about what topic. Walk me through the process. Here's what I know and here's what I don't know. That's really important to give it that context because it'll know whether to start at the beginning or you could, or or you're more advanced. And each of the models also has different learning and study modes. They're in different places. But, like, for example, on Claude, when you click the plus sign for different styles, there's learning styles. Same thing for, Chat UBT, and it interacts with you in a different way more as a teacher and a mentor versus someone who's going to do your tasks. So these are some examples of prompts you can use, to learn a skill. And I have learned lots from AI teaching me different skills, using prompts similar to this. But I think the most powerful way to learn with AI is to use what's called dialogic learning. Like, we wanna move away from like go to AI, give me the answer, and move on. Dialogic learning is different. You set up the AI to think with you. And and the way this works, it gives you some solid ground and then it starts to introduce some friction and contradict contradictions and it pushes back on your assumptions and that's where learning happens. So you set it up, in a project. I love Claude for this because Claude can, under can, when it's in a project and you have multiple threads going, it can, remember other threads and bring those into the conversations. So I love to do this when I'm trying to learn about a topic. And also, I can give it a lot of background studies and or information or guides. And I can put that in its knowledge base. And that becomes a really powerful learning tool. So then I engage with it. It asks me questions. We go back and forth. And then afterwards, I ask it to generate a learning brief of which I validate and reflect on my own, and I use that as a lot of a pre learning exercise. So I think that's a really great way to approach it. You can also use embed critical thinking prompts into your prompting as well. They're not a they don't replace your critical thinking, but they help you strengthen it. I think one of the best things that you can do while using AI is to challenge the results constantly. Don't accept the first answer. Probe it. Tell it to do better. Engage it in a dialogue. You know, work through the reasoning together. Ask it for alternatives, you know, for different angles. Ask it to interview you. All these kinds of prompts, really keep your thinking skills intact because they support cognitive work instead of replacing it. And finally, my last tip is, and you there's been this thing called AI brain fry that's coming, especially if we start to use it more frequently. And there's been some number of research studies coming out. There was an article in, the Harvard Business Review just a couple weeks ago, on a study on AI brain fry, a pretty significant study. They found that oversight is a very taxing form of engagement, and it can lead to more information overload and more fatigue. And they're also finding this with the programmers who are developing agents, or if you're using it, for automation, kind of, encouraging the multitasking. So, or people who are using more than one AI tool simultaneously, the productivity gains that you get with two tools, they start to dip. So, as a result, people are experiencing this thing called brain fry. And it's really just acute cognitive fatigue. It's not burnout. I have felt it. It feels like when I have 50 tabs open and I'm bouncing between them and I I just can't concentrate. So there's some signals to watch out for before you fry your brain. So the bottom level is the mismatch. You sat down to execute something and here you've been exploring it and, you need to really think deeply about it, but you've been doing rapid fire prompts. Right? That's when you're not sure which mode you're in. You approach it for automation, but, you really should be thinking more deeply or you haven't thought about it first. Then there's the detour. And this is where the conversation that you're in sparks a generally useful idea that has nothing to do with a task that maybe you sat down to do, but it feels productive, but yet it isn't because it's a detour. Then there's the drain. You're reading AI output, but you start your your eyes start to glaze over. You're not really evaluating it. Here, your cognitive fuel is kind of gone, but you're still prompting. You're still going, and you're finding yourself, oh, I don't even know what I think. And then there's the scatter. That's at that red level where you're bouncing between different chat threads, you can't hold a line of thinking. It's not it's multitasking, but it's also, cognitive overload to the point that's not healthy. So when you start to feel this sort of thing happening, my step now is to incorporate a marination step. I pause. I might ask the tool to summarize, where I am. And what's really cool now is that with the new, Google Drive connector, that you can have it write a document and file it in the right folder so you can come back to it later. So I step away, come back tomorrow, and then evaluate the output without AI with fresh eyes. So avoid, AI brain fry. So I'm gonna close with this, and then we'll open it up with, for q and a. One parting thought. You have a choice, in using AI. You can offload your thinking, work faster, or use it to become sharper, faster, and focus on strengthening your human leadership skills and become more effective than ever before. But I think that those leaders who know how to dance between human wisdom and using AI, to either save them time that they can reinvest or to help them think better, Those are the ones that are gonna lead their organizations to more impact, and I think your mission and your communities deserve nothing left. So I also wanna say have a little reflection question about thinking about what your one takeaway is before we go into the q and a. Like, what's one thing that you can do, to use AI to think better and to be better at work? And I also wanna say that the QR code there and that link, will take you to a copy of the slides. I think it's also uploaded in the system. And, there's lots of research citations. And I've also shared a couple of handouts that give you the checklists on how to do some of those prompts that I mentioned. So with that, I'm going to stop share sharing my, slides. And I think Ashley Abigail is gonna join me to help with the q and a. Thank you so much, Beth. I'm sure you haven't even had a chance to check. But based on the chat, everything you just covered was so timely, and really impactful for everyone. So a lot of great input. Thank you everyone for, engaging with us here. And, before we dive into the q and a, I do I popped up on the screen. We have our, AI for impact webinar series. So just diving more into topics around AI. We have a next session coming up in May, so you can scan the QR code on the screen, to register for them. Some really, really great speakers and really great topics coming up. So definitely be sure to join, and I've also linked it in our doc section. So please feel free to keep entering questions as you think of them. We'll go ahead and get started with our first one from Lindsey. So, Beth, Lindsey says, so far, I haven't been able to use AI for any of the tasks that take the most time because they all involve donor data, which I can't put into a large language model for privacy reasons. Is there any way to make AI part of the process of data management, such as pulling list, detuning data, etcetera? That's a really great question, and I think that has to do with the organizational software tools that you're using and understanding what their donor privacy challenges are and understanding, and working through the different donor tools that you're using. Because there are some tools that don't work directly with your data but allow you to prompt your data like that. And that they have, you know, privacy policies in place, enterprise level policy, I believe. So it's not like taking your donor data out of a donor database and throwing it into ChatJPT, which you probably shouldn't do, and especially the free tool. Some, you know or at least toggling off, you know, don't train the, don't train the model. So you you have to I think this that sort of work that you're describing happens at the at the, software level. Perfect. Thank you, Beth. And, I just wanna let everyone know I've opened a poll in case you are interested in learning more about Blackbaud's integrated AI and fundraising solutions. You can go ahead and click yes to that poll. I was was just happened to be the most mention that, timing. but, you know yeah. Yeah. So feel free. And if not, no worries. We we're just glad to have you all here. Alright. Our next question, Charles asks, since nonprofits are famous for being understaffed, workers are tasked with more than they have time for and sufficient skills than they possess. How do you recommend we then avoid overreliance on generative AI? I mean, that is such a great question because I think, you know, I think that's a danger in our sector where we we face time scarcity. Oh, here's this wonderful new thing that can help us, right, with that. And that's why I think that's the attractive part of adopting AI for a lot of organizations. I get it. But then that could also lead us into over dependence. So I think this is where real leadership comes in in, you know, how we're measuring success in adopting AI, right, and how we're thinking about, like, the time scarcity issue. Right? And that's not a technical problem necessarily. Maybe that's looking back and saying, how do we radically prioritize, like, all the things we need to do given the resources we have and make some important trade offs? And I know that is some of the most difficult, decision making because we wanna do everything, right? Because we have these important missions, but yet we don't have the capacity. So that is the leadership challenge. How do we radically prioritize so that we're not burning people out? Or if we decide to adopt AI because, oh, wow, we're so under resourced and this is saving us time that, you know, we end up creating zombie staff with our brains in a jar. Right? So I think that is a real leadership question. I love the question. I wish I. had an answer. No. It's just good discussion. We have Tuesday asking, how do you consider which uses of AI are worth the cost speaking about from an environmental lens? Okay. So which I just wanna make sure I got the question. What what AI tasks are worth the cost of, if I offload my thinking? Of, water. what? Oh. oh, okay. Exactly. Oh, Yep. not just cognitive risk, but also environmental the environmental impact? Environmental. Oh, gosh. Yep. Yes. I have a lot to. say about that. I didn't that's not this session. That's a whole other webinar. But, when I work with organizations, there are, think of it like. Yeah. a, the metaphor I use is river journey. And we have, our own, We're in the canoe paddling, and we need our own values aligned map. Right? And there's the banks of the river, which is our organization's AI responsible use policy and relationship with AI. And then there are the river currents, which are these things that we can't necessarily control, which is like the economic impact, the impact on jobs, cognitive, you know, the the at the systems level. Right? Those those those things. Right? So we your organization has to, like, have a statement around that, a point of view. What is your organization's values aligned approach to using AI or helping people navigate? And then what is your own values align map? And that's what I work a lot with nonprofits. Like, what is the what are the things you are gonna use AI for, because that relates to your values? And what are you not gonna use it for? And that becomes your AI values code. And then you use that to apply it to different use cases. For those who are really concerned about the economic cost, environmental costs, sorry. Not well, but there are environmental and economic costs. But the environment how much water it's using, the rise of data centers, and the harm that they're doing. I I I teach people something called an environmental impact, AI use case decision making matrix. And that's like, these are the high value use cases for me, and I'm gonna use AI for this. These are middle level. I'm not so sure that I wanna use up water or electricity for these, so I might do them myself. And these things, I'm never gonna delegate to the AI. So it's very intentional. So it's intentional at the individual level. It's intentional at your organization's level. Amazing. Thank you, Beth. Alright. Perfect. And then moving on, we have one more question here. So Michelle asks, do you have any suggestions on how to use AI to assist with project management? What are some good prompting questions, if you have any, off the top of your head? Okay. You know what? The bet I don't know which tool you're using, but, I I I've actually tested this with a whole bunch of different projects, but managing from personal projects to work projects. One was to reorganize my art studio. It was quite helpful. But the first step is not to ask it to manage your project or to come up with your scheme, but to have it interview you about the project and then collaboratively come up with how to do the project management and what prompts you need to give it. And Claude has this fantastic tool that's embedded. It's called Ask User Questions. So I might go to a prompt that says, I'm managing this. I have to manage this project. Here's the information about it. Here's where I'm struggling. You know, ask me questions so we can create a series of prompts and a workflow to manage it better. That has been pure gold for me. And what's great about it is that your brain's in on it at the beginning, and then you get to the task. Right? And then you and then by working through that, you figure out, like, oh, this part of it, I wanna hold on to, and this part, wow, Claude can do for me or Chesapeake can do for me, whatever tool you're using. So start with, have it interview you about your project management needs and then cocreate prompts. I love that. That is such a great idea, Beth. It's not, and it's not intuitive much. either. You know? I told that to somebody yesterday. They said, I would never think of doing it. Anyway, sorry. Yeah. No. 100%. Well, thank you, everyone. We I we just had someone come into the chat and say totally. Michelle, who asked the question. Well, thank you, everyone. We're gonna go ahead and wrap up here, and we really appreciate your time. Beth, thank you so so much for coming on today. Everyone, you'll receive the link to the recording, to the email that you registered with. And please don't forget to attend our next fundraising master class session. That is April 28 with Steve McLaughlin, and it's going to be everything you know about fundraising is mostly wrong. So make sure to check us out there, and thank you so much again, Beth. Appreciate your time today. Thank you.