Get Your Board on Board: Leading AI Conversations with Your Stakeholders

ANNOUNCER. The key to digital fundraising success is an online donation form that converts a website visitor to a donor. DonorPerfect Online Forms increase conversions in several ways, such as enabling nonprofits to brand their forms to match their website using their logo, both colors, Read More

ANNOUNCER. The key to digital fundraising success is an online donation form that converts a website visitor to a donor. DonorPerfect Online Forms increase conversions in several ways, such as enabling nonprofits to brand their forms to match their website using their logo, both colors, photos and videos. This makes donors feel secure and helps build trust in the donation process. Another way to increase conversions and average gift size is with forms that provide suggested giving levels. These recommendations are also adjusted to appropriate dollar amounts for monthly giving, which is a proven donor retention strategy. Payment options like PayPal and Venmo also boost conversions by making donations quicker and easier, increasing donor trust with proven safe technology. Another key to digital fundraising is a fast, automated acknowledgement process. DonorPerfect online forms allow you to customize your confirmation pages and automate receipts for immediate, personalized acknowledgement to show gratitude for every gift. Digital fundraising is an ongoing process, so to encourage donor retention, regular communication via email, social media and other digital means is crucial. DonorPerfect automates this process by ensuring all information collected flows directly into your DonorPerfect CRM transactions are organized in the appropriate donor record for additional acknowledgement, identifiable and campaign reporting and tagged for inclusion in future targeted solicitations. Learn more about how DonorPerfect can meet your unique needs by speaking with Your Account Manager or attending a product demonstration webinar.
You with DonorPerfect, it’s easy to raise more. Our fundraising system simplifies every aspect of your work, community fundraising, organizational success, donor engagement, the giving experience and revenue growth. Nonprofits raise 25% more in their first year with us, and they don’t stop there. 93% of our clients stay with us to keep increasing their revenue and efficiency. DonorPerfect, life changing, work made easy. You
welcome. The key to digital fundraising success is an online donation form that converts a website visitor to a donor. DonorPerfect online forms increase conversions in several ways, such as enabling nonprofits to brand their forms to match their website using their logo, both colors, photos and videos. This makes donors feel secure and helps build trust in the donation process. Another way to increase conversions and average gift size is with forms that provide suggested giving levels. These recommendations are also adjusted to appropriate dollar amounts for monthly giving, which is a proven donor retention strategy, payment options like PayPal and Venmo also boost conversions by making donations quicker and easier, increasing donor trust with proven safe technology. Another key to digital fundraising is a fast, automated acknowledgement process. DonorPerfect online forms allow you to customize your confirmation pages and automate receipts for immediate, personalized acknowledgement to show gratitude for every gift. Digital fundraising is an ongoing process, so to encourage donor retention, regular communication via email, social media and other digital means is crucial. DonorPerfect automates this process by ensuring all information collected flows directly into your DonorPerfect CRM transactions are organized in the appropriate donor record for additional acknowledgement, identifiable and campaign reporting and tagged for inclusion in future targeted solicitations. Learn more about how DonorPerfect can meet your unique needs by speaking with your account manager or attending a product demonstration webinar.
You. Sarah, hi everyone. My name is Sarah, and I’m a senior Training Specialist for DonorPerfect. And welcome to Joe’s session. Get your board on board leading AI conversations with your stakeholders. Here’s a little bit of information about Joe. He is a technology leader and marine veteran with over a decade of experience in cloud solutions, strategy development and technical consulting, he currently partners with nonprofits and purpose driven organization to help them modernize through Azure AI and data driven innovation. His goal is to Align Technology with meaningful outcomes that amplify mission and impact. Before I give it away to him to talk to you, I just want to give you some quick housekeeping items. You can download today’s presentation from the details section to the right of the presenters window. Please submit any questions you have in the Q and A tab so we can address them during the session. And one more reminder, all sessions are being recorded and will be available on the DonorPerfect website after the conference,
and here you go. Cool. Thank you, Sarah, let’s get into it here. All right.
Good morning, good afternoon, maybe Good evening, everyone. Thank you for tuning in, and thank you DonorPerfect for the opportunity. My name is Joe Scanlan, and I’m an Azure specialist on the Microsoft Tech for social impact team, and I’m excited to be here, because over the next 25 minutes or so, we are going to get into how to get your board on board and how to have effective conversations on AI with your board members and stakeholders. Some of the things we’re going to hit on, we’ll first set the stage on who Microsoft is and what we do on the tech for social impact team. Then we’ll cut over to the current state of the nonprofit sector and hit on some specific AI use cases. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not a huge fan of just pie in the sky ideas. I want you to walk away from this presentation with some specific ideas that you might consider implementing across your organization, or just some food for thought, and then we’ll close on strategy. So value alignment, use case considerations and team alignment, starting with who we are at Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more and on the tech for social impact team, really what we’re trying to do is we want to provide the best technology at affordable prices to help nonprofits drive their impact. Here’s a quick snapshot of what our team has accomplished in the past 12 months, we’ve we’ve offered nearly $5 billion in grants, discounted software and services. This includes discounted Microsoft 365 licenses, discounted copilot licenses, free Azure credits and discounted power platform and dynamics licenses. We’ve also collectively donated more than $250 million as a company. And this one, I think, is really cool, because for every $1 an employee donates at Microsoft to charity or nonprofit of their choosing, Microsoft matches that dollar. So to get to two 50 million employees donated about 125 million, and Microsoft matched every dollar of that so and collectively, over the past 12 months, we’ve supported nearly 400,000 nonprofits in driving mission impact through Microsoft solutions. But we are not alone in this crazy world, and there are forces outside of our control that we all have to adapt to. So starting with economic pressures, there are things like tariffs and supply chain disruptions that we’ve seen have significant impacts on making financial decisions and investments. Then there’s these giant waves of demographic shifts that we’re going to realize over the next 10 or 20 years. I want you to consider like, think about the developed economies like United States, Canada, Europe and China, they’ve grown to be powerhouses, but the population. Populations are aging, and they’re having less children. Compare that with the entire continent of Africa, where the average age is 18 years old. They are leapfrogging in terms of technology adoption, completely leapfrogging landlines and going straight to 5g and AI. And then there’s also Southern Asia, where the population is incredibly young, so this is those are going to have impacts on workforce development, further adding to the chaos there’s nation states and bad actors attacking targeting our elections, hospitals and critical infrastructure that millions of people depend on, making cybersecurity and data governance more important than ever, but thankfully, there’s a growing ecosystem of tech innovators and venture capitalists who are leaning into the tech for good initiative. So let’s zoom in from the macro to the micro. I’m coming at you from Denver, Colorado. I’m not going to pretend to know your organization better than you do, but here’s some of the ones that we’ve seen affect nonprofits at large. From an organizational standpoint, nonprofits are having increased difficulty with generating funds and revenue, further adding to that, there are challenges with retaining skilled employees and preventing burnout, with constantly having to do more with the same or less, and with the rate of change we’re all living in how technology is changing, and all the signals and data we have to process on a daily basis being able to make informed, data driven decisions is more important now than ever too. So let me make the case for investing in AI. Through a study performed last year, it was found that for every $1 a company invests in generative AI, the return on investment was $3.70 and what went into that, you might wonder, it was these five drivers. Now this is not an exhaustive list, but these were the five big ones, starting with mission alignment. We found that nonprofits who used AI were able to leverage the latest data to tailor their services and interact more closely with the communities they serve. Same goes for strategic programming, tailoring the deliverables and using the latest data on hand to make informed decisions. Of course, there’s operational efficiency, using AI to automate repetitive, manual tasks like summarizing financial reports, creating PowerPoints, or maybe even recap, using AI to recap a meeting that you or a teammate couldn’t attend. We’ll dig into how some nonprofits have used AI to accelerate fundraising and connect more closely with their donors. And then lastly, as data becomes more central to all of our operations, protecting it is crucial. So here are some specific examples I wanted to share with you for fundraising. Now, keep in mind, this is just for fundraising. There are examples of AI use cases across all departments for HR, employee onboarding, technical support, business development, sales, you name it. I mean, really, it’s up to your requirements and creativity, where you might implement AI, but here’s some specific ones for fundraising, and you’re able to download this deck, so I’m not going to read through all of these. There’s a lot of words here, but I’ll focus in on the middle one. What if your organization, your team, could leverage AI to augment with the entire fundraising life cycle, everything from donor outreach to research and reporting on impact. How much time would that save your team, and how much better might you be able to connect with your donors? The data shows us promising signs. Going back to that $3.70 for every dollar you invest in AI, here’s some of the more general ways that nonprofits are using AI at large. The big one is to augment staff talent. It’s not quite replacing, but it’s augmenting what we do on a daily basis. So easy ones are summarizing meetings, using it to get have the collective intelligence of your data ecosystem to make more informed decisions, of course, with your donors. I’ll get into some specific real world examples of how nonprofits are using. AI to boost fundraising, so I won’t spoil that one quite yet. And then for illuminating data, part of getting the most out of AI is having it contextually aware of all of the data you have. I’m talking physical documents on hand. You might have multiple types of physical documents, you might have multiple dusty servers tucked away in a closet somewhere. You might also have a cloud presence, maybe in Microsoft Azure, maybe in snowflake AWS. The reality is, getting the most out of AI and having tailored experiences based on your data, requires modernizing all of that and unifying your data into a single, accessible location. So here’s some specific examples I want to highlight. These are some nonprofits that are using AI today to better engage their donors. I’m actually going to focus in on Team Rubicon because I love what they do. I’m a veteran of the United States Marines, and I love what Team Rubicon does to empower veterans to support things like disaster relief. Basically what Team Rubicon did is they brought together their dynamics, CRM data, and paired that with Microsoft co pilot AI to build stronger relationships, relationships with their donors, and the outcome was a significant increase in their marketing campaigns and revenue generation. So
I want to take a quick pause here, because I know I’ve hit you with a ton of information already. What I want you to do right now take out your phone or follow that link on your computer. What this is, is your takeaway document for developing an AI strategy and governance policy. Now, I totally get it. There’s a bunch of people tuned into this call right now, and there are those of you who are on the advanced spectrum of AI, who have already unified their data. They’re governing it, securing it, you’re maybe you’re even using agentic AI, and you’re just iterating at this point for you all, congratulations. You guys are crushing it. I still recommend taking a look at this worksheet. For those of you on the other end of the spectrum who are just getting started and haven’t yet formalized a policy on AI usage within your organization or just within your board of directors, please check out this worksheet. This is one of those things that’ll help you get past that writer’s block and ensure your board is on board. So I’ll pause here for 20 or so seconds to give you an opportunity to download that worksheet, and I’ll take a quick sip of water. You
okay, hopefully you got it now. So we hear it all the time lately, and you’ve heard it from me already. Technology is evolving so rapidly, and we’re hearing of all these interesting use cases around AI, how it’s augmenting our workforce, how it’s giving us these data driven insights that we’ve never quite experienced before. But I want to hammer home for you all listening and when you go to speak with your leadership team and getting get your board on board, remember that technology and AI, they are just one piece of the puzzle. You also need your people aligned and processes in place that support all of this. If you miss and neglect just one of these areas, you’re setting yourself up for failure. So starting with consideration one, get your team and your board on the same page as you build out your tech policy, or maybe those who have existing tech policies, you might be due for a refresh to ensure your leadership team is aligned. Here’s some considerations for that, for those of you just getting started or early in the journey today, wanting, like with an interest in AI, and wanting to transform your business with it, I encourage you to meet your organization where it is today, not where you think it should be in the future, 1224, months from now, but where it is today. Because often the most difficult part is getting started. You might hear of all these great ideas and use cases leveraging agentic AI to accomplish all these autonomous tasks, and that’s really cool. But to get there, that’s far that’s the far end of the spectrum. To get there, you must. Unify your data for the AI to even be contextually aware of that. And then maybe a great starting point after that, that we’ve seen for a ton of organizations, is co pilot for Microsoft 365 just starting to sprinkle in AI across your modern work and productivity apps like integrating it into systems of how you interact with internal team meetings and board meetings, using it to transcribe a meeting to give you insights so you’re not just constantly taking notes, you’re able to have more effective and meaningful conversations.
Second point,
the reality is, all of you are going to have a spectrum of AI expertise across your teams, there’s going to be some folks who have used chat GPT from the beginning. Maybe they’re also using llama fee flux name your AI. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are going to be folks who’ve been cautious who haven’t really explored how to use AI in their day to day work lives, recognize that you’re going to have to get all these people on the same page through training and all that involved. And last one here, it is crucial for you all to provide guardrails on what AI is allowed in your organization and what is not allowed. So a specific example, there’s obvious reasons why you might not want to integrate your customer data with the Chinese deep seek large language model, even though that LLM is available and it might be cheaper than than metas llama or co pilot. There are secure like from a security standpoint, that’s up to you to decide, but you do need to make a decision on what is allowed and what is not allowed, otherwise, your team is just going to go off, and your data might get exposed and fed into an LLM that’s trained using your critical customer data. But know this by like by going with Microsoft AI solutions, these six principles are baked into everything we provide, from co pilot to fabric for data analytics and AI foundry, we bake in accountability, responsibility, equity, reliability, non discrimination, transparency and trust. And what I want to hammer home is why copilot and Microsoft AI solutions are so popular across nonprofits and businesses across the world is that your data always remains, your data, no matter the prompt or file data Excel spreadsheet you share with co pilot or Microsoft AI, none of that is ever used to train the back end large language model or AI system? None of it. And want to reiterate, AI is super exciting. It’s getting more intelligent by the day, but you use it in service of your mission. It’s not here to replace human expertise, while it can give you great insights and save your team a ton of time, it does not take place of human expertise, leading into consideration two, put a frame on it and build your use cases, Starting with proof of concepts to pilots to eventual upgrades into production environments, as you lay out your vision of how AI might be able to transform your organization that might be with funding, I’m working with an organization Right now that’s using computer vision, using video to monitor sustainable farming practices. I’ve worked with organizations who’ve built tech support bots and knowledge databases. Again, the list goes on, but you must start small. Distill it into actionable use cases and how to get there. Really, it’s comes with three areas. Consider impact, how will a specific type of AI either large language model, there’s multimodal apps. So think consider AI isn’t just a single sense, as in input text output text, like a co pilot, can also sense it. Can also use computer vision. You can have document intelligence to help with maybe you have multiple physical documents across the country, across the globe, with different types and variations of them. Document intelligence can help centralize all that in an autonomous way. I. Can also help with translation services. There’s a ton of use cases, but align it with what your organization was founded to achieve. And then how does it fit within manpower and budget, within the near term, within the next six to 12 to 24 months, and what level of effort is required in change, in making this change, consideration three call security and get your data in order. I hit on it before, but I’m sure we’ve all experienced some degree of AI hallucinations. So say, for example, you into a chat GPT or Microsoft co pilot. You’re looking to get research into a topic, be it research on a competitor, expanding into a new market, maybe it’s even building out a recipe to cook for dinner. I’ve experienced it where the AI can hallucinate a little bit and it gives you, it returns a response that makes no sense, or it’s just straight up non factual that’s typically in earlier versions of AI, I’ll admit, and it’s getting better. It’s not perfect today, but it’s continually getting better. But having highly tailored AI systems comes with making them aware of your data, and oftentimes organizations wanting to take advantage of the latest features and solutions with AI, their data is scattered across multiple on premises, databases or sites. Maybe you have print facilities. You might have multiple physical forms that people are filling out for shipping or receiving. Maybe you have someone on your team who’s filling out a manual Excel spreadsheet on a weekly basis. Or you might be writing data to multiple databases, either on prem in snowflake or Microsoft Azure. What I’m getting at is the data must be unified. It must be aware of each other, so that you can plug the AI into it to give you tailored, insight, driven results. So here’s the general life cycle to follow for that, starting with data access. Who in your organization can access your data, those paper forms, the servers, the databases, all that, who can access it across all of those different mediums, and how is it access where? Where is it located? Then moving to data, low data collection. How is data being written into your databases? Is it is it manual? Is someone writing into the Excel spreadsheet? Do you have sensors deployed in a warehouse or connected to a certain API that’s automatically writing data to snowflake or a SQL database in Azure? There’s a ton of different options here, but understand how is it being collected? Okay, then the next step, once you have an understanding of how your data is being gathered, how are you integrating it to make informed decisions, and how are you integrating it with AI? I’m not going to pepper you with with products, but fabric for data analytics is a great solution for this on the Microsoft stack. You may or may not have heard of it, but try and integrate your data into a single, accessible location. Of course, you’re going to need to secure it, govern it, apply policies. Maybe you need to be SOC, two compliant, or GDPR compliant, or HIPAA, what have you. But have a method for how you’re going to integrate your data with AI systems and monitoring, maybe using Power BI for report output with your board members or external stakeholders, and then the two long term options. How are you monitoring that data for changes over time? How are you securing it, governing it as you would expect? We’ve got solutions for this across the Microsoft stack, so defend, for cloud purview, for data governance, and of course, how are you cleansing and storing and archiving that data over time when you may not need it anymore? Here’s some additional considerations for tech strategy. Trust me, I totally get it might not be a highly technical audience here, but some things you need to consider once you have identified what your vision is and what are your use cases that you want to target, be it co pilot, computer vision, document intelligence, what level of work and change is required in your IT, environment and staff to support fulfilling that vision, what kind of maintenance might be required, what level of training, what amount of training is required for your users to understand your tools and AI in general. And lastly, have a plan for if something goes wrong. I’m not I’m not talking about Skynet and your autonomous a. Agents taking over your environment. That’s not happening in the field, but do have a contingency plan when things don’t go according to plan? Okay, we got five minutes left. I want to leave a little bit of time for Q and A, so I’ll close out on recapping a few main things. Technology is just one piece of the puzzle. You need your people aligned and processes in place that support all of this. Here’s your last chance. If you want to download that QR code or go to that link, highly recommend you check out that worksheet. I’ll give you another 10 seconds right now.
Okay, time’s up. Next steps. Here’s some handy links I want to share with you, and then we’ll cut over to Q and A that first link. If you are a nonprofit tuning in, please check out that first link to explore the latest grants and discounted software available to you today. I’m talking discounted, like upwards of 75% discounted Microsoft 365, licensing, co pilot dynamics, power platform, Power BI and a decent amount of an Azure credit grant. That second link there that’s a bundle of goods with some additional worksheets and consulting videos that you can share with your board of directors to further define your strategy and governance policy. And the last one, self serve at your service. Ai training, cloud training offered to profits using Microsoft solutions. So follow that link if you need to upskill your team on AI in general, and co pilot, Azure, Microsoft, 365, all of that is there at your service, and that’s all I got for you. So I’ll pause here. We got three minutes left for Q and A, so I’m open.
Thank you so much. That was really good. One question that came up is, do you have a breakdown of what all these AI programs do, like fabric preview? Like is that on one of the links that you shared?
So it is
we have so a link I would recommend you check out is aka.ms/c A, F, A, I. What that stands for is cloud adoption framework for AI. What I didn’t want to do on this presentation is pepper you with product, this product that. But to break it down, Maria Sanders, fat, think of fabric as your unified platform for data analytics. This connects your Excel spreadsheets, your SQL databases, frankly, any kind of database. You can have structured data, you can have unstructured data, throw some pictures in there, but that is your think of that as your single spot to store all of your business data so that you can plug and play it into the latest co pilot agents, or even non Microsoft AI models like metas, llama or or even grok or what have you.
Thank you. That’s very good. Yeah, could you use AI to clean up the data. That’s another question that came up.
Yes, yeah,
we can. You can use AI to clean the data, and actually, that’s in fabric as well. It’s part of a process known as extract, transform and load. You might see that as an ETL data pipeline process, but that’s all part of it. If you have unstructured or kind of messy data coming from, frankly, whatever source we can help you, like, if you don’t have a data engineer or data scientist on hand, I mean, you need to that support for expertise. We have resources within the Microsoft ecosystem, within our partner ecosystem, who can help with that, but totally we have features built into our products, namely in fabric and Azure Data Factory that do just that.
Yeah, just that URL you gave before. If you could repeat that, I think we’ll put it in the chat quickly. Yes,
aka, yeah, so it’s aka.ms/c,
A, F, A, I,
cloud adoption framework. AI and cloud adoption framework, if you are like AI is just one element of this tech modernization. We have a general cloud adoption framework for if you are just beginning your journey from on prem into the cloud, it walks through that whole roadmap as well.
Okay, awesome. Well, thank you so much. If you missed part of this, or you wanted to watch it again to get some of those links again, the resource is still here in the Detail. If you want to download it, and the session is recorded, and everything will be available on the site after the conference. And up next, on stage one, we have Robbie Healy stay the course, individual giving tactics for changing times. And on stage two, Matthew Montoya, from constant contact with from story to support our marketing powers, nonprofit, wrote so we’ll see you soon.
Cool. Thank you, Sarah, thank you DonorPerfect, and thank you all for tuning in. My name is Joe Scanlon. I’m on the tech for social impact team specializing in Azure. Please connect with me on LinkedIn. If you have any additional questions or want to talk more, I’m happy to connect with you and have that conversation. So thank you all the
the requirement of the.