 Well, hey there and welcome to the non-profit show. We are so glad that you're spending some time with us today and we are so grateful to have with us. I'm gonna say welcome back to Margaret Brasda-Pourriere, a founder and CEO of Grants for Good. You have been on with us before and I think if I just checked the calendar properly, twice in 22, so it's been a while. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, thanks for having me back. Absolutely. We're an all new AI age. Exactly. You said we didn't talk about AI in 2022, but you are gonna share with us how we can use AI to get more grants and to increase our funding by using AI. So really excited to have your conversation with us today. Before we dive in, I want to remind our viewers and listeners around the globe who we are. So hello to you Julia. Julia C. Patrick is the CEO of the American Non-profit Academy and I'm Jarrett Ransom, your non-profit nerd and CEO of the Raven Group. We are so honored to have the continued support from these amazing partners. You joined us in the Graham Room, you already heard we're marching towards our 1,000th episode which will be in March. So we're just around the corner. So shout out of gratitude to our friends at Bloomerang American Non-profit Academy, non-profit thought leader, staffing boutique, your part-time controller, 180 management group, fundraising academy at National University. Also thank you to JMT Consulting, non-profit nerd and non-profit tech talk. These companies, many of them have been with us on this journey, this four year journey. So grateful for their ongoing support. They've helped us to produce these episodes and you can find them, you can download the app by scanning that QR code and you can find us on broadcast and podcast. So wherever you like to stream your entertainment, go ahead and queue up the non-profit show. So Margaret, I have been following you as you know, on LinkedIn, we're connected there and it's just been so fun to watch your journey not only like in the grants world but how you have fully embraced, welcome and integrated AI. So again, for those watching and listening, Margaret Bras de Poirier is here, founder and CEO of Grants for Good. Welcome back. Thank you, thank you for having me back. It's an exciting time. I'm really looking forward to spending this, these next few minutes, half hour, 20 minutes with you, with you both. Thank you. Yeah, you know, it's a fascinating thing and Jared and I have talked about this a lot about how our sector and our world obviously has changed during these nearly 1,000 episodes. And the things that we talked about in the beginning, you know, it's just, it's been an evolution of conversation. And you mentioned in the green room, you know, the times that you've been with us, we never talked about AI. I mean, this was like, what? And so now all of a sudden, we're drilling down on this topic from everything from a fan, from finance to HR to, it's just a part of our world and why shouldn't it be a part of our grant process? So let's get it, kick it off with, is it easy to learn generative AI? AI, AI? I mean, yeah, right? Yeah, yeah, it's really easy. And just to piggyback on something you just mentioned, Julia, you know, we haven't talked about AI. It's been around for a very long time. And you know that the minute we write an email and it's finishing the sentence for us and you just click that tab, you know, that's AI. It's already working. But what's really shifted was in November, 2022 when the company, San Francisco-based company, OpenAI said, hey, we're gonna make ChatGPT open for all of you to use for free. And I knew eventually it would monetize and they have, but there's still a free version. And that changed everything. It's generative AI. It predicts what words, what comes next, but it does it in a way that I still find completely, I'm just baffled by it. It's amazing what it can do. And is it easy to use? Yeah, it's as easy as setting up a free account. I use two free ones the most frequently. I use ChatGPT. They do have a GPT-4 version for $20 a month, which is worth doing. It's 20 bucks. If you don't like it, you could stop. And the other one is Google's generative AI. Google Bard, B-A-R-D. Yeah, it's super easy to start with. I love that you say this, and I just as a reference, right? I have a 13 year old son who's using ChatGPT and I have parents in their 70s that when last time I was their market, they had so much fun playing with it, right? They wrote poems to one another. They wrote songs. And just like having a playful outlet, I also heard someone say that generative AI is the second version of Mad Libs, right? Where it's like fill in the blank. We need a verb here. We need a noun. We need something fun. Those were fun as a kid. I remember those and they're still around. It's easy. I'm glad you said fun, Jarrett, because it is fun. So I think there's a big fear when I've given a lot of talks about AI, how to apply to fundraising grant writing. And one thing I heard that really struck me was from somebody who felt very overwhelmed at their job and they said, oh, I don't have time to learn one more thing. Yeah. And it's important to understand that this, there is some learning involved, but it's not nearly the learning you curve you have of any other software or platform out there now. And like you said, Jarrett, put something fun in there. I've developed high coup homes just for kicks, for fun. You can find recipes. You can have someone plan your trip to Norway and take a lot of boat trips to the fjords. But for R, you can see what I'm thinking about today. I'm on book for R purposes. It can be an incredible time-saver and assistant to any kind of grant writing and researching funding type of work. So I find it's really helpful for our sector and the sooner nonprofit staff, volunteers, board members, jump on, the better it will be. It'll be easy. Do you don't want to wait for this? Remember when the internet popped up in the early 90s? And I worked, I was right out of grad school and there was a one hour training session available, not a webinar, but a one hour training session on how to use the worldwide web. And I said to my supervisor, I said, I really want to go to this. I think it's going to be big, you know? And here we are. It's the internet. So yeah, we got to jump on this. It's here to stay and it's easy and fun. Well, and it's here to, sorry, Julia, go ahead. I think for me, this introduction and the things that you're talking about, it brings to me to bear in my mind the word mindset, right? Like it's a mindset of how you start to work and approach and manage your workload. And so as opposed to making it task specific, understanding kind of the mindset and moving into it and leaning into it and then figuring out what tasks it's going to assist you with. And so let's get into that because you're talking about some pieces of this grant writing ecosystem that sometimes are extremely arduous, they get frustrating and you're here to tell us how we can introduce AI into that. What does that look like to you? Yeah, yeah, since we're looking at this slide here, I've got to ask our listeners, do you ever sit in front of your computer and you have the simplest thing to do? You just have to write a letter and you don't even know how to start it. You just can't start it. You've written thousands of letters before, but this is one of the ways that AI is helpful is to get right past that writer's block. And I always think of it as my virtual assistant. I'm a small office here at Grants for Good. We've been in business 15 years, but we've stayed focused and small on this topic on purpose. So I don't have an assistant sitting right next to me today, but with AI I do. So sometimes I'll make a list of what do I not want to spend too much time on and see if I can assign that to my AI assistant. And some of these examples are here. If you're involved in grant writing now, you know that one of the very first things you might have to do is write a letter of inquiry, especially to a brand new funder who doesn't know you. You're not familiar with your organization or your work and you want to make a really good impression in about one page or less, right? So ask AI, ask chat GPT or whatever platform you use to write a letter of inquiry to fill in the name of the funder. And then all you want to do in the prompt area, and the prompt is just that it looks like it's one line on your chat GPT, but believe me, you can put a lot of information in there. Then just put in some basic information about your organization's mission, what kind of support you're looking for from the funder and how they can help. You would be amazed within seconds you'll have a letter generated for you. Step two though is reading that so carefully because I have seen some of these letters and they mostly they're great, sometimes they use words like unlocked and unleashed and I don't use those words when I speak or write. So what I do next with any writing generated by AI is I proof very carefully. It's gotta sound like my voice and has to reflect exactly the message I want, but it does save you a lot of time getting started. I mean, three seconds to get that first draft. It is remarkable. Talk to us about grant narratives and what that might look like when you're using AI. So grant narratives, there are so many pieces involved in grant writing. So I have, Jared knows this, I have an online course called All About Grant Writing and it walks you through every single step of a typical grant application. And so grant narratives are things like your need statement, your work plan, your evaluation plan, your smart objectives, your outcomes, your goals. So if those words all sound familiar and you're saying, oh yeah, I know about those. We have to put those together every time we write a grant application or develop a new program, that's where AI can help too. So I like to sort of push the envelope. I keep asking it harder and harder things. I'm like, okay, what can this do and when does the potential completely stop, right? So I asked the other day, I wanted to test this out. I said, develop smart SNARTs and acronyms, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time sensitive. Develop a smart objective for this program. And then I put in something fictional. We are a tutoring program for after school, children, ages, so and so with a focus on STEAM. And let's see what it does. And it generated some pretty spectacular things. And from there, you can go in and put in some metrics like 100% of youth staying in the program for three months or more or whatever the case may be. So AI is great for saving you that time. It just generates that stuff quickly. But in your mind, you have to know, what is your program, your mission? What do you hope to achieve? Who are you serving? But you know all that. People who are doing this work daily, they already have that information in their minds. I love these examples. And I want to add into these examples as you do an LOI letter of inquiry, you do the narratives, you know, Margit, how many grants, and this is fictitious, right? Say X amount of words, X amount of characters and it constrains you into, you know, such a tight box. I've used AI for that. You know, I'll say take this very verbose paragraph, narrow it down to 750 characters, 250 words, whatever those parameters are. I find that that for me is a great first pass at editing. And then as you said, is it our tone and our voice as we've branded our organization and making sure that that's in there. So these are just, I love how you're giving these examples real time because as we all know, non-profit professionals are busy. There's a lot on our plate. So how to get into AI and your task, I love this. Why don't we not want to spend so much time on? What can I ask AI with? And put, make a list, because you'll forget, you'll get back to, I do, I get back to the old habit of, oh, I've got to do this right from the beginning. And then I look at my list, I'm like, maybe not. Maybe this can help. I even have, I had this little post-it note on my computer. It says how can, I don't know if you can see it in the camera, how can AI help? So I keep it stuck to my computer. Not that it's, AI doesn't fix everything. I mean, you really still need to have years of experience. You need to have the information in your mind. You need to have a level of experience to do this well. But AI is there as probably your quickest assistant ever. And you never heard its feelings. I'm always polite to AI though. I'm still saying, please develop. You don't have to say please. No, you do and you set the tone. Before we move off of this concept of looking at tasks, talk to us a little bit more about that research of funders because I think this is an interesting thing. Using it as not just in the narrative as an editor, but actually as a research assistant. What does that look like to you? Yeah, this is an area where you have to be a little more cautious. I teach several webinars on AI just for this reason. And the researching funders is one where you want to use a generative AI platform that is very up to date. And that would be Google Bard because chat GPT works very differently from Google Bard. Google Bard also generates content and is predictive in its technology, but it searches Google. And so that's the one I would recommend. Write that one down for funding search. And you might say, well, Margaret, how is it different from just getting into your favorite search engine and searching for a funder? Or saying, who will fund youth programs in San Diego, California? Well, it is different and it will give you some really great resources. I say, just try it. Put in a prompt in Google Bard and say which foundations are likely to fund youth after-school programs in San Diego, California or name any region. And see what it comes up with. I always test things out first. I try them out in Rochester, New York, where I'm based and I know the philanthropy climate here. So I ask that question and I see, did it give me accurate answers? Right. Most of them are, I would say it's about 80% accurate at this point. There were two that came up, one foundation I know isn't doing grants anymore and the other one not in this region. So there are two that weren't, that are not accurate, but it's a starting point. If you get a list of 10, well, now you've got a way to search those 10 funders and go to their websites and find out more. You just save time. Exactly, you fast-tracked the activity. Julia, remember someone referred to this as being a prompt engineer that we have become engineers of prompting, right? And I love your parameters essentially that you shared, Margaret, you know, and I'm curious, have you also gone in to say like, that fund organizations under three years of an operating budget between X and X, right? Like how can we get truly creative and so almost narrowed into our prompts to get even greater results? You know, I'm glad you asked that. This is something we were talking about in our green room just before we went live and we all agree. Sometimes you have to enter the prompts in a couple of different ways. And just like if there was an assistant sitting next to me and I said, can you please find me 10 foundations that fund after-school youth programs in Rochester? And I got a list. I might want to narrow it to say, please select only foundations that accept unsolicited applications or ones that have funded in the last two years. So you can keep asking more and more specific questions. And here's a fun one. This even goes for writing. Let's say you're writing a letter or a social media post or something. I've used it for social media posts and I have to do heavy editing. I almost never use it for that because I still have to train it better. But usually I get something with 20 different emojis. I don't use a lot of emojis in my social media posts, maybe two or three. So you can say, write me a social media post on this topic and use no more than three emojis and do not use the word unleashed or supercharged, turbocharged, you know, they're favorite words. You can actually filter out those words. So you can order it to do really whatever you want. You can say, write it in the voice of, I don't know, name any famous celebrity if you want or author that you like. So you can have a lot of fun with this. Yeah, I think it's fascinating. You can set tone. You can say, write this as a scholarly paper. Write this as a fun, you know, post. Make this for a business professional tone, right? To me, I think that's very interesting because, you know, tone is different from intent. And that's one of those things that's more sentient too. We know, oh, well, that was the tone with which that was delivered is something a little bit more emotional and something that we don't think we can quantify. But this process is definitely, you know, navigating to that. And I think that's where a lot of people become fearful because it does seem like there's somebody on the other end of that keyboard working with you. I think that is where a lot of the fear stems from is how you have to understand how the technology works, not on a programming side, but you have to understand it is simply predictive based on billions of parameters of learning over time. But the second thing, and I think is a really legitimate concern is about data privacy. And especially when you're searching for funders and any kind of writing you do, I recommend not putting anything into a prompt that has any kind of confidential financial information, you know, any kind of codes or numbers that you would not share with your next door neighbor or your coworker. So putting in things like your nonprofit's mission, great. Talking about your programs, absolutely, because you want that information out there. But just to be on the safe side, I still wouldn't trust the technology with anything really confidential. So, and same with just looking at the code of ethics for our fundraising and grant writing profession, you don't want to put confidential information about funders into those prompts. There isn't a set of eyes watching you, but you really don't quite know yet where that data's going. So that's the caution I wish. 100% market. And I'm so glad you brought that up, of course, as the ethical fundraiser you are, you would bring this up. For me, just for our viewers and listeners, sometimes I'll use X or Y if I'm using names so that I don't put the actual name. I don't put Julia Patrick has donated a million dollars. I'll say X donor, right? Like just keep it anonymous because I know once it generates it, I can fill in Mad Libs style. Yeah. And those... Exactly, exactly. Yep, that's a good idea. I think it's really... And it's funny you mentioned prompt engineering. So I'm such a nerd too. There's the glasses. Obviously. I took an online prompt engineering course. Yeah, I need to get a little tape on my glasses here. I took an online prompt engineering course. It was great. It gave me some real ideas of how to work with the prompts. And I think it's gonna be changing all the time. It's just going to get easier to use. There's a thousand platforms out there now, by the way. There are, and growing. So many businesses are jumping on using, you know, chat AI, generative AI platforms to make it easier for different sectors. Yeah. Margaret, I had someone say, but I came back to them. They're like, I have so much to do. I have to write this, whatever it was. And I said, ask AI to write it. And they said, can I do that? I feel like it's cheating. Yeah, I hear that. What do you say to that, right? I mean, I know what I said, but how do you respond to someone that feels like they're cheating? I want to hear what you said, but I'll address it too. For me, you know, in your prompt, you still have to put your own information in your prompt. And so it's moving your words around, you know, or it's giving you ideas. So I don't feel, unless it is plagiarizing and taking word for word, somebody else's material. And there are issues of plagiarism in fields such as, I think, screenwriting and novels. I'm not in that field, I can't speak to it. But I know in ours, if you enter some of your own information in there, I think it's okay to do. Yeah. Yeah, and I simply said, you're not in school, you're a non-profit professional, you're using this for efficiency matters, right? Like it's okay, this is your first draft. Yeah, so I love that. Let's talk about- It would be like cheating by using the internet to search sources or citations. Like that's not, you know, you need to use technology at its highest ability. That's right. In an ethical fashion, absolutely. And I would add to that, having been in publishing for 30 years and managing editors and writers. The thing of this is, is that in that realm, there are other people looking at this and monitoring it, and you wouldn't just take something and cut and paste. I mean, you said this right within the first five minutes of our conversation today, is that you still have that responsible mindset of editing, of fact-checking, of making sure that it aligns with your tone. So if you're thinking that this is just a cut and paste thing, it really is not necessarily going to always be that for you. And then I think, to your point, is it cheating or not making it your own? And I think that can get a little dicey. Because as this platform begins to take on more and more data points, the intersection of information is changing. I mean, every 60 seconds, this platform is changing because of the volume of what's going into it, right? It really is all the time. Yeah, so I mean, what it was doing and providing you yesterday is not the same. Like if you took the same prompt and you put it in on a Monday and then you use that same prompt on a Friday, you're going to see some variance, right? I've done exactly that. I've tried the same prompt a month later and gotten very different results. Yeah, it really does change a lot. It does change a lot and it is changing a lot. And I think that that's kind of one of those things. You said something really magical and that is when you understand what the process is and how this is working, you can become a better user, right? Yeah. And I think that's all predictive technology. It's great. It's amazing. Well, in our last couple of minutes, Margaret, walk us through the reality, right? Realistic and fundamental time savings. What does that look like? Yeah, I mean, for me, I urge people to do this. I just had a phone call. I do some coaching and consulting with nonprofits. I had a phone call with someone I've known a long time and she has been a grant writer for decades. So she knows how to write grants. No problem there. But she mentioned being a little annoyed with having to cut and paste and then reduce things to word count. And Jared, just like you said earlier today is put in that segment of the grant narrative and ask chat GBT to reduce it to 250 words or less. And you can go further and say, do not eliminate any quantifiable data that I have entered. Or if there's something you really want to keep, you tell it, you want to keep that. So you can save time by doing that. You can save time by starting a document, whether it's a letter, a case statement. Maybe it's a thank you letter to a donor. Maybe it's annual appeal letters in the fundraising realm. So just starting new documents, it's time saving. And also the example I gave with funding search in the very olden days, I used to take me so many hours to comb through a database. And I would receive two or 300 funders that would fit with what I was asking for. And all 300 of those were not a good fit. So one by one I would go through. And this is where I love using AI to at least start to narrow the field and save time doing that. So important, I'm sure you're of the age and remember this too, going to the library, logging into the systems, multiple systems, opening up this thick book, right? Like, oh my gosh, the hoops that we've jumped through. As we pull up your contact information, Margett, I have to ask the elephant in the room question. Do we need professional grant writers now that we have AI? I love that question. Let's talk for another half hour. Yeah, I mean, cause like, do we just scratch that from our budget? We don't need this person anymore. I would say no, but what I do love about this is that this is a tool to help build some equity among people who are not trained in grant writing, who may not have all the time, or even let's say if English is not your first language, this can be a really helpful tool to write very strong content. It does help level the playing field when used properly. I think you still need grant professionals because you have to know what the process is. It's a very nuanced process. It's not a matter of filling out a form and sending in and say, here, show us the money. You know, it never works that way. And you do need to know really how to find funders, make those relationships stick. There's a lot more to know, but I would say that I think more and more people can do this grant writing on their own. And frankly, I think that's fantastic. I love it. If I'm in a position where I eventually work myself out of a job and other people are empowered, I'm gonna be pretty happy because I'll go skiing more when there's snow and I'll find other things to do. There's so much else we can do with nonprofits today. But I think it's a helpful tool. It won't replace people, but it is very helpful. Yeah, I agree. Well, we're not ready to let you go yet. All right, I'll stick around. I love it. You gotta stick around, Margie Brasda-Poyer, founder and CEO of Grants For Good. Check out her website, Grants Number Four Good, G-O-O-D.com. And you'll learn more about what things are going on, what she's talking about. You do a lot of training and it's been just marvelous to have you come on and put this whole discussion in context and so that we can have a look at this. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy, been joined today by the nonprofit nurse herself, Jared R. Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group. Again, we have amazing supporters and as Jared mentioned at the top of the show, most of these folks have been with us since day one and we're now finishing up year three. So these folks have been along for an amazing ride and they include Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Nonprofit Thought Leader, Staffing Boutique, Your Part-Time Controller, 180 Management Group, Fundraising Academy at National University, JMT Consulting, Nonprofit Nerd and Nonprofit Tech Talk. Again, they've been with us. They continue to support us and as we like to really think about this, they support the nonprofit sector in our mission. So it's really magical to have them with us. Jared, I'm gonna let you sign us off today, my friend. Yeah, thank you, Margaret. It's always great to have you. Let's definitely get you back to talk about more. There's so much more to this but as we end every episode, including the two you were on in 2022, we like to remind everyone to stay well so you can do well. Thanks everybody, see you back tomorrow.