 Welcome to the non-profit show. We are so glad you're here. If you joined us for our green room chatter, you might have thought it was the travel channel, but we were having a great conversation. Our guest, Zach Brown is here. He is CEO of non-profits HQ. I had the great honor to be connected with Zach through a mutual friend of ours. But Zach's here to talk to us as using tech to amplify impact. So he's going to introduce you to your newest team member that you might not even know you had yet. So stay with us. Also want to say thank you to Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Non-profit Academy. She's still traveling doing the great work that she does working with a client and we'll be back here tomorrow for Friday, but I'm leading Friday Eve. I'm Jarrett Ransome, non-profit nerd and CEO of the Raven Group. Huge shout out of gratitude to our amazing sponsors that allow us to continue these conversations nearly a thousand episodes now. Just telling our guest, Zach, I think in March of 24 we'll hit a thousand. But again, thank you to our sponsors which include Bloomerang, American Non-profit Academy, Fundraising Academy at National University, non-profit thought leader, your part-time controller, staffing boutique, non-profit nerd, as well as non-profit tech talk. Most of these companies have been with us on this a thousand, almost say mile, but it's a thousand episode journey. It's been a lot of fun. If you missed any episodes or you wanna go back and listen to what Zach's about to share with us here, you can find us on streaming broadcast, podcast and you can still download that app. So go ahead and scan that QR code. All right, Zach, I'm so glad you're here as a guest. Again, shout out to our mutual connection that connected us, which I've learned now was another connection from another yet mutual connection. So that is how we work in networks. But we have with us today, Zach Brown, CEO of non-profits HQ. Welcome to you, Zach. Thanks so much for having me. It's really cool what you guys are doing with the non-profit show and it's the accessibility to information around non-profits and different things like this. It's really cool to see initiatives like that. Well, thank you. And again, just an honor to have you. Before we jump into the conversation, using tech to amplify impact, tell us a little bit about yourself, Zach, and a little bit about non-profits HQ. What are you doing in this space? I'm curious. Yeah, definitely. So my background, my entire professional career has been in tech and software engineering and then as an engineering leader. And I've always had an interest in figuring out how to use that skill set to do something good, something genuinely good. And throughout experiences of volunteering with non-profits and learning about different organizations and then working on my own non-profit initiatives, I finally found that crossroad, that opportunity to bring powerful tech to this area, this market that's generally kind of underserved when it comes to emerging technologies and accessibility to this tech. And that is non-profits. It's an entire segment that's dedicated to doing good, to helping people, to accomplishing great themes through community and collaboration. And so that was a really, really exciting area to kind of focus on living our technology. And that's what led to starting non-profits HQ. It's a management platform and professional services that kind of all-encompassing stop for non-profits to help them streamline their operations, manage their day-to-day, basically focus more on their mission and achieving their goals and less on the kind of operational overhead and kind of unifying software and tech and things of that nature. Well, thank you. And for someone who wants to help other people do more good, I think you found your niche. That's what I'm hearing in this. Well, Zach, let's jump right in because we have a lot to learn from you. And ironically, I have to share yesterday's guest. We had Jennifer Aliva, managing partner and CEO of your part-time controller join us. She talked about the winners of 2023 and she said, we would really be remiss if we did not talk about AI, right? Like AI is definitely the winner of this year. You're gonna talk to us also about how we can streamline our operations by using artificial intelligence. Nerd out with me on that. And just so you know, that's a compliment. So talk to me about what that means. I've worn my nerd badge proudly my entire life. So I absolutely think that is a compliment. Yeah, so AI or artificial intelligence is a tool that we can employ or deploy in different industries to help us kind of streamline our stuff. We see it happening in big tech. We see it happening in like these for-profit industries everywhere, but we don't see or there's not enough attention on utilizing that technology in the nonprofit space too. Specifically for nonprofits, artificial intelligence can give us kind of that extra edge to help us become more efficient with our organizations, be able to do more with fewer resources. A lot of nonprofits right now are reporting, you know, a large increase in demand, less harder time raising, fundraising, fewer volunteers, staff, things of that nature. And AI can help kind of fill that gap. You know, we can use that technology and areas that are really common for AI in the nonprofit operation space or areas where you can be really impactful are like data management. You know, we can build these models, we can build these algorithms to help us analyze our data, whether we're talking about donor data. So we can build predictive insights and marketing to help identify our most active or most likely donors in a given space or in a given market. Or we can use it to identify performance of our programs in the services that we've offered over the last, you know, whatever period it is that you have data for. And we can use that to generate insights and to help us figure out what the next step is for our organization, what the next best thing is for us to focus on. And it helps us kind of like, it's like another brain, another very powerful brain that we can utilize in our organizations. Data management is also just kind of one facet of that. You know, you can take care of resource allocation, you can help it, AI can help your organization make decisions on programs, on areas to focus. One of the things that we're playing with at nonprofit's HQ right now kind of, I say playing with, right? That's not official marketing verbiage. Researching, yeah, prospecting. R&D, I think we refer to it. Exactly. And we're experimenting with this tool, extending one of our AI models to help analyze the statistics and the data for the specific community that our customers are in to help them make decisions for their programs. So for example, one of our organizations is a group that helps feed homeless population and low income families in their area. So we're kind of using that as a base for this new section of our AI, our product to understand what that actually means in that specific community. What is the homeless population size? What is the low income size? How many people don't have access to healthy wholesome nutrition? How many people would really benefit from the services? And then beyond that, how do we reach those groups? How do we reach those people so we can amplify our impact and we could serve more organization or rather more people? And so AI can help us kind of collect and analyze that data in a very quick and inexpensive way so we can generate this kind of strategy or path forward. That is fascinating. I don't speak the same language or same level of language as you do. Pure Curiosity Questions Act, how much is AI able to be culturally sensitive I say that because when we think of food banks and I've worked with an amazing food bank in my local community at some point in my career, we really found out that we had a very large Latinx Hispanic population. The food that was being donated wasn't necessarily the food that these clients, participants, recipients, I should say receiving were accustomed to using accustomed to cooking with, accustomed to eating. It wasn't just a part of their normal kind of day-to-day nutrition. How does AI play a role perhaps in that culturally, I call it culturally sensitive data to say, okay, if we're working with a San Antonio food bank, we need to take into consideration the demographic. Are you following me? How does AI play a role in that? Yeah, absolutely. And that's a really good question too. And actually a really, really cool area to highlight the capabilities of AI in our missions as well. So one caveat though, or one thing I wanna point out before we jump into that is there is some, this idea of this need for ethical and responsible AI. We're building these AI models, we are extending them and we're training them on large datasets, but those are human created datasets, which means a lot of the content that you run into the potential risk that you're creating biases and you're creating these less than ethical outcomes that are not intended, but they are present in a lot of the data. And there are frameworks and things that you can do to clean that and to kind of remove those biases. So when we do start talking about looking at specific groups of people and specific cultures, we do have to make sure that the information that we're using to build these models and to build this AI isn't just generalizing, oh, this is a Latino area. So all we want are jalapenos, we're things of that nature. So that being said, assuming we're doing this in a responsible way, AI provides tremendous benefit for that because as humans, we can consume a lot of information and process a lot of information, but AI can do it much faster and much more information. So what we can look at are trends and data for those specific communities. You can look at things like grocery store sales, what types of items sell really well in the area, what types of food ingredients, what are the popular food or dishes that are served at large events in that area? And you can really get to that granular level because ultimately what it comes down to is consuming, cleaning and understanding data and your AI is able to help you do that faster and more efficiently so you can be more impactful in what you're doing but it helps us get to that really granular level that would otherwise seem relatively impossible. Sure. And take ample time, right? Like it would take a lot of time. I know we could go down this conversation so much further. I feel like we're gonna have to have you back on because we're just scratching the surface. Talk to us about task automation, how AI can impact task automation specifically. Yeah, so this is actually probably one of the lower barriers to entry in adopting AI in your organization. We all have tasks that we have to do whether they're administrative tasks for building reports or scheduling themes or their cost savings. So we're understanding what we're spending on our programs, what our programs cost to deliver to our customers or our people. And we can use AI to automate those tasks and understand what it is that you're actually doing. So a good example of that could be, every so often I wanna check in with my volunteers for my organization, see how they're doing, see if they need anything. So our AI Toby is what we call it. He is able to also just take those tasks that would be repetitive, that are super important but are also kind of a time suck and handle those tasks by himself. Now you're always gonna have this need for human input and human interaction. The AI can understand and can collect information and generate insights and data and things for you but a human is still always going to need to kind of guide that process or be involved in what happens next with it. So there are a lot of things that you can do that computers already do a task automation that you can enhance with AI which basically just gives it that really good understanding of what that task is, what you're doing. Our AI's are trained specifically on nonprofit operations specifically on nonprofit laws and governing regulations. And so we're able to use that very specific knowledge to ensure that something as simple as reaching out to a volunteer to ask how they're doing stays impactful, stays compliant, stays useful. And we can automate so many things and free up so much time because nonprofit operators have a lot to do in a little bit of time. Very valuable time, often very limited time. And so if we can deploy software or AI that helps relieve some of that time so they can focus more on their mission, I think that's definitely a benefit. Definitely a benefit. A couple of things and I know I mentioned this yesterday with our guest, but we've had another gentleman, Sean Olds on from Boodle talking about AI. And he says, everyone thinks that AI is coming for your jobs and I'm here to tell you it is but for the parts of your job that you really shouldn't be doing anyway, right? Like talking about that automation, talking about leveraging AI to create this efficiency and then Jennifer, again yesterday from your part-time controller mentioned, from a team of over 600 employees, they only have five accountants and that's because they are leveraging AI for their task automation. And that is just fascinating to me, Zach because I look across our nonprofit sector and I often see that we nonprofits are often the last to adopt AI, last to adopt technology in general, right? So we talk about this, but then let's talk about the learning curve because you've totally nerded out with me and I appreciate it, I really do. There's so many nonprofits still doing the same old thing, right? Year over year, not changing much. How do we even begin to adopt to this? Because I feel like there's a flood of options that we could consider, but how do we even get started? And then how do we get started if there's anyone on our team, especially of a decision maker, who's hesitant? Absolutely. And I think that was a really good segue into this part as well, which obviously you've been doing this for a while. But yeah, so like AI is by nature a very complex scope of themes, right? It's not just one particular thing, it's not just chat GPT, right? Which is an LLM or a large language model. And AI is also though not, it's not sentient yet. And we're still a ways from that, from a model or a computer being able to learn and think and process like a human without a large amount of data and examples to show how it should happen. AI is mostly tokenized. So it generative AI, for example, it's returning what is probably makes the most sense for what it was prompted based on all of its training data and set. So in terms of it being able to supplement what you're doing in your day-to-day tasks, that it's amazing for, but we just have to learn how to do that. We have to learn one, how to identify the benefits of that. And then two, how to actually act on that. So a lot of things that you can do some good kind of tips for that are training programs. And we are spending a lot of time and effort and money right now developing training programs specifically for nonprofits about utilization of artificial intelligence, how to do it safely, ethically and efficiently into their organization. Train your staff on how to use these tools. Train your staff on what it is. You don't have to be an AI engineer and know everything there is about AI to benefit from the tool itself. Thank you for that permission because it's a little daunting at times. And it is a large thing, but you should also start small and then kind of scale up. When you do get that buy-in and you get that decision from your organization or from your organization leaders and you start executing on incorporating AI and AI tools start small. Don't set a goal to completely do AI everything on your first try. There are going to be things that you didn't plan that happened. There are going to be instances, AI sometimes is hard for humans to follow the decisions that it makes. And we see this when we're training our models and things, right? It will return a response or return an action. And we're like, ha, that was unexpected. But we're also like, I'm not entirely sure how it got there. And that's kind of the one of the more areas to be cautious about AI because we have to at least have a good understanding of how it's getting to the decisions or how it's getting to the thoughts. I say thoughts, right? We'll put air quotes on those on that it's getting to. And so if you start small and build up you'll be able to also iterate on those and kind of fine tune that. So as unexpected things like that occur you'll be able to address them and account for them in future iterations. And I would say the most important theme, training programs, absolutely essential. And those are included in subscriptions to the non-profits HQ platform as well. Start small scale up, have a plan of attack. Don't just go off and read a Google blog and says, AI does everything. So now it does everything. It's great. But the most important thing I would say is collaboration and knowledge sharing and platforms like the non-profit show are a great place for that. Because as we start bringing in AI and these like high tech things into the non-profit space we can all learn from each other what that experience was adopting that how we implemented it, how we deployed it what tools we used while doing that. And if we share and collaborate with those tools we can all learn from each other learn about how to do it safely how to do it efficiently and how to do it inexpensively. AI can be very expensive. And that's why we have companies focused specifically on that. We spend a lot of money maintaining and training and deploying AI models for our customers and a lot of time doing that. But the benefit of that is organizations especially smaller non-profit organizations are able to sign up and use the benefit of that AI. They're able to bring that into their organization to become more efficient to streamline their processes to automate all of their tasks to do all of these really cool things without having to be experts in the area without having to learn a ton of different computer science terms and foundations. And then we take that and make all of our learnings and things public share it with our community because that's going to be the best way we do this. No organization, no non-profit organization is exactly the same. So the way they bring in tools like AI and other tech the way they use them, the way they deploy them configure them, customize them whatever it is that they're doing is going to be different. So if we can kind of bring all of that information together then we can really bring tech like AI to a prominent space in the non-profit sector and lots of people can benefit from that not just the people working at the organizations but the people that you're serving in your communities. Yeah, the community members really reap the benefits. I want to give a shout out to one of our viewers, Margaret Braz de Poirier. If you've not met her, Zach I would love to make an introduction. She talks a lot about AI as well in LinkedIn but she makes a comment here that says I'm amazed at the number of non-profits not in all capital letters using AI. She's really seen statistics anywhere from only 5% to 30% of non-profits that are using generative AI. And by the way, Zach, she also said I just sent Zach a LinkedIn request so you've got that in your box right now that's the power of the non-profit show and being live. To that point and to what Margaret's saying Zach I'm curious what is often the first AI adoption that you're seeing non-profits on your platform gravitating to? Like what is that one thing that they're like okay for me to start out I'm gonna take this little nugget and I'm gonna implement this. What are you seeing is that first nugget of implementation? Definitely, yeah. So our platform is kind of it's an all-inclusive platform between the tech and the people. So we supplement the operations as well so it's all included there. But what the organizations that we're talking to and the first thing we often hear is what AI that's crazy we're not gonna have it's gonna take over it's gonna steal our data data's gonna leak, right? All of those privacy and security concerns and once we get past those what people are super interested in at least from our experience and talking to our customers is that kind of automation, right? The those more tangible things that you can very visually see and you can notice in your time. You know, I do I spend 10 hours a week generating these reports. Well, now I don't have to do that and I still have those quality reports. So that's what our customers at least for us that's what our customers have been really interested in. But it's also been interesting because you know, when we talk about AI in other areas it's generally a let's do this, let's roll fast let's let's do this. But when we talk about AI with our nonprofit customers and connections and partners it's kind of like, well, that's a little scary it sounds expensive, it sounds hard. And you know, Let's pump the brakes, that's that's what I hear. Exactly. And so we actually as a company had to learn how to talk to other nonprofits and people in that space about AI as well because that's one of the biggest hurdles that we've discovered for this industry. It's like you bring up AI and people think, you know, Skynet people think, you know these big robotic wars that are gonna take over the world and you know, I can't predict the future, right? It's not gonna happen in my lifetime I can pretty much guarantee that but it's like if we use it responsibly and we use it ethically we can do a lot of really good things with it. And I think that's something that makes it worth it. You know, there are risks for using and developing AI but the good to me outweighs those risks. And I think I was rambling there, Jared, sorry. I'm right along there with you. You know, one of the things that and I'm watching the clock and I know we could talk for hours that I am so fascinated and kudos to you and the team for building in nonprofit law and compliance and you know, the ethical side of this into your platform because that is when we think of donors and we think of transparency and we think of, you know how we're using supporters dollars that is so critical, right? And I do think that's and maybe I'm aging myself by saying pump the brakes but I feel like that is probably the biggest reason why a lot of nonprofit professionals and board members will say we're not like we're gonna let somebody else try that first we'll get on the bandwagon in a couple of years. Let's let them play with it before we jump on. So I just again, like kudos to you. Thank you to our mutual connection for connecting us. I'm really curious. So I've not been on your platform what does that look like for nonprofits that are interested? Do you have a trial version? Do you have a walkthrough version? Like what's accessible for us to start dipping our toe into this? Definitely yeah. So you can visit our website and see we're actually deploying a new super fancy cool website in the next few days which breaks things down but you can request a demo that way you can also hit me on LinkedIn and just shoot a message if there's something that is useful for you or for your organization, that's great. So the way we kind of approach this is learning about our organizations scheduling a tailored demo to show them the parts of the platform that they care about or they care most about and then also gathering feedback. We built this thing to be impactful and useful to our customers. So if it's not impactful or useful to a particular customer tell us why, tell us what would make it useful to you and you know what, we'll probably build it. The things like that are really easy to do and it's really that connection that we're creating. The tech is there, it's great the professional services are there, they're great but it's that connection that we're creating with our customers. But yeah, so to kind of dip into that we can get demos done. We've recorded several customized demos and sent them to customers just whatever kind of fits best for the organization. Yeah. Well, Zach, thank you. I also wanna say, you know I really appreciate your passion in this space but overall your professionalism I can see that it's you really you and your team have taken this to heart. Again, you know, you were looking for a place to do more good and to help other people do more good. This seems like a great path for you and so glad to have you in our sector. For those of you watching and listening you've just heard from Zach Brown CEO of nonprofits HQ check out their website that's nonprofitshq.com. I know I'm interested in scheduling, you know a tutorial to learn how this is working. I'm still, you know we're still unpacking all of this AI so glad to have a fellow nerd a fellow nonprofit nerd with me today Zach. Thank you. This was amazing. Thank you so much for the invitation and like I can nerd out on this stuff and talk for hours and hours and hours. So if anybody else wants to continue the conversation definitely let's connect. We can definitely do this. Well, thank you so much. And I wanna say thank you to Julia again she had this brilliant idea almost four years ago now to bring up the nonprofit show as a national live broadcast. So we are going strong every single weekday. I'm Jarrett Ransom nonprofit nerd. Again, huge shout out of gratitude to our amazing partners that allow us to bring in thought leaders like Zach today. Shout out to Bloomerang American nonprofit Academy fundraising Academy at National University nonprofit thought leader your part-time controller staffing boutique nonprofit nerd as well as nonprofit tech talk. Zach we love getting so many amazing leaders in our space to come in and bring conversations. One of the things Julia was worried about early in the show, not this show but when we started was we're gonna run out of topics. Well, guess what? We haven't yet. The topics continue to evolve. So thank you for bringing this version of AI as it continues to advance. And for all of you that have joined us today again thank you. As we sign off today as we do every day we end with the same mantra. And Zach I know you've got a big move coming up. So this one's for you my friend. It's to stay well so you can do well. Thank you for joining us today. We'll see you all back here tomorrow.