#10 - Targeted Messaging Mastery: Harness AI to say the right things to the right people (AI series Part 2)

Discover the transformative power of artificial intelligence as it integrates with the philanthropic mission of nonprofits. Justin Price joins us to unravel the enigma of AI's vast capabilities and its potential to maintain the human touch in outreach. We delve into the paradox of AI's god-like omnipresence and how nonprofit leaders can harness this technology to do more with limited resources, ensuring their communications resonate deeply with their communities.

In our conversation, we break down how customizing Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) to reflect the core values and missions of nonprofits and churches can lead to groundbreaking engagement strategies. We tackle the exciting frontier of AI in pro-life organizations, dscussing the advent of chatbots for on-the-spot assistance and digital medical services that redefine accessibility in the post-COVID era. Stay tuned as we also tease a crucial dialogue on ethical fundraising practices, an unmissable topic for nonprofits eager to embrace AI responsibly.

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Transcript

Heredes: 0:09

Hey, welcome back to the nonprofit Renaissance. The conversation continues, man. We are just, we're being more human, colin, and I know that's difficult for Well, it's good for you. It is. It's difficult for a guy like you, though that you know that's so. How can I say this Robotic?

Collin: 0:28

It's artificial and intelligent, intelligent, yeah, artificially intelligent, or those two separate it depends how you see it the comma is it a space?

Heredes: 0:38

Is it a forward slash?

Collin: 0:39

I'm not artificial. I'll tell you that I am all natural.

Heredes: 0:44

And we'll be right back after this break from our sponsor. Hey, we're back with Justin Price. Justin, we kick things off talking about the importance of AI.

Collin: 0:53

Yeah, this is part two in a series, by the way. So this is. It might have been broken up as far as our episodes go, but we're continuing that. Welcome back, Thank you.

Justin: 1:01

I know we left it kind of with. We know that we're kind of creating a God with AI and what are we supposed to do with that? You know?

Heredes: 1:10

In capital, g, little G, god, it's filling a void, it's accelerating things. It's all knowing, it's all present.

Collin: 1:16

There's some of you that your heart's beating, your heart's racing a little bit right now, Say, wait what. You're that language like wait what? What in the world?

Heredes: 1:22

And in the context of, you know, our agency serves nonprofits, so our listeners are either C-suite leaders or the leading businesses that support and serve nonprofits. So in that world, Justin, what's the impact? What's the overlap? Is there a place?

Justin: 1:34

Yeah, there's some super applicable stuff. I'd love to get into answering some very like applicable questions of AI. I think talking about this future dystopian world or even talking about, like, what kind of crazy possibilities can happen over the next couple of years is where a lot of the conversation gets lost on CEOs who are trying to do something today, and so if we could try to spend this couple of minutes here together talking about what are we going to do today as nonprofit leaders to utilize this technology, not what's in development, not where we're going to be in a couple of years, but we got to start Right now. 70% Ernst Young put out a great report 70% of CEOs are investing into artificial intelligence or machine learning tools for their companies and their leading, which means that the majority of our culture today that is, digital globally is going to be affected by more and more AI driven human experiences, meaning they should have better and better experiences. The data should be able to help your overall shopping and should be able to help your overall communication, and so let's talk about what that means for some nonprofits that are communication based. Let's talk about what it means for nonprofits who are trying to fundraise in this super crazy time Economically.

Justin: 3:06

You know again not to go dark horse on this, but economically I heard somebody say that we are definitely in the worst economic time since the Great Depression and in some ways we're in a Great Depression that we're not calling a Great Depression. And so, as nonprofits, you know it's not easy. We are hanging on to the donor dollars that we have, but those dollars are worth less and less and less. We are trying to do more with less every day and that's not really a new story for most nonprofits. It's not even a new story for really great for profits that are doing world changing things. So creating more with less is something that it's a problem we've been solving, at first for nonprofits for a long time, putting in good systems using technology. As we've developed from just a traditional creative agency to a marketing and to a marketing technologies company and to now to focusing in on AI integration and solving those problems using AI. For a lot of other nonprofits, it's been a really cool transformation of how to get more with less.

Heredes: 4:15

Justin, you've been working on, you know, doing some R&D, obviously not an early adopter like you said, but an adopter and been in the space for a long time now. You know, and we'll get into some of the fundraising on the next episode Because, because there is a transfer of wealth happening although it's the Great Depression 2.0, there's a transfer of wealth that's coming in the 30 trillion of dollars generationally, right From boomers to millennials, that the money's there. So nonprofits looking to engage, to activate those resources. There are ways to ethically do that, to actually cast the vision, and how does AI play into that? So we'll get into that, probably in the next episode. For today, to answer your question, to go back to the right now, not the what if? Engagement, what are we doing today About volunteer engagement, community engagement? How can AI be used to improve community engagement and outreach for the nonprofit of our listeners today?

Justin: 5:08

Well, with most nonprofits, we have two groups of people we're talking to. One is the donor base that helps support and fund it. The other one is the program base. So this is the people that the program is intended to reach. If you're a church, that might be like are really like we're trying to reach people who don't know God. If we're donors, we're looking for people who are bought into that mission.

Justin: 5:29

Two very different messages, right, you're not gonna be putting out a message to one of them saying can you give to us when you don't even know God? So very usually very different calls, different people overall. That's pretty true for almost every nonprofit. And the one thing that's consistent there is excellence. We'll always attract excellence. So if you, whichever way you do engage with either group, we have to do it the very best we can.

Justin: 6:00

And this ship is sailing. We're already experiencing, we already are being, we are so fatigued with bad technology because we have all been the original test case for technology for the last 20 years. We've been the original test case since dial-up, internet, and with every single piece of this as it develops, we are attention span, our willingness, our patience with bad technology gets smaller and smaller as we have more of it in our lives, and so what I'm saying for most nonprofits, applying early on today to either one of those organizations, is starting to use AI to create better human experience. And if you could just say, hey, ai is this big magic box and everyone's talking about it and there's so many different facets of it. It is a massive beast, right, but what are we going to do? We're going to start with just seeking out how to create better human experiences, to be as excellent as we possibly can afford. We may not.

Justin: 6:57

So most organizations, large organizations, fortune 500s they're hiring development teams today. Right, they are hiring full on marketing technologists to utilize this to communicate. If your organization is going like oh I can't hire a team like that, I hardly even have one marketing director, one communications director or a small team of I definitely can't start to pay these half million dollar salaries. You can hire people to start to build the tools that your team can run, and it's there today. So we're already doing this and basically, what it would look like in layman's forms is like you would take your large language model like a chat GBT Most people are familiar with that now and you go like I've used it. It's cool, but you haven't started to even touch the power of what it has. But an architect who could create a really great prompt can start to use it really, really well. And if you can start to create a full custom GPT and you can load that GPT with a ton of information about your organization, one of the easiest things you can start to do to create an excellent experience for both is accurate information loaded in can be spit out accurately through a chat bot. So that's probably your easiest thing is like you can create great customer service and communication. You can engage really really well. That's probably the number one usage that we're applying today and people right now and those are getting better the more that they are engaged and the more that over time, as those get engaged, get smarter with giving the right answers to people the right way. But it's a very human experience. It's a really great way to solve.

Justin: 8:49

I don't know about 75% of the questions that people want answered in a really convenient way and, as you're a nonprofit, we work with a lot of large nonprofits. We work with some small ones, but a lot of the large ones that are. They have a lot of information and they may have 10 segments. Church may say, well, yeah, we have parents of preschoolers, we have parents of elementary schoolers, we have parents of high school middle schoolers, we have college students, we have adults that are single, we have married adults without kids, we have married adults with kids. All of them have different needs and they all have different communities.

Justin: 9:27

A lot of the organizations we work with might want to send a different message to all of them, and so you can start to take a human-styled information delivery system, like a chat bot that can be very human with the correct information, and start to do segmentation and personalization really really well, not to be fake, not to try to trick anybody, but to just create a better experience. A great experience would be like stop emailing me or texting me about something that's not relevant to me. So what do I do? I turn off the text or the email because I'm tired of my inbox being full, or you're respectful and you don't send me anything except for four or five times a year, and the reality is like there's a better way and this is a really really good way to do it. That comes back to the second half. I don't have any questions there before I go to the second half of that, but that's the chat bot.

Heredes: 10:41

Yeah, the chat.

Heredes: 10:42

Let's break this down for listeners because I know we've been working on this, we've been diving, calling myself diving into deep into one is there's a chat GPT element of it, which is the chat is the conversational. I think most people nowadays are treating it like a Google search. They start this, it's the new Google search which is at its foundational level. It's entry. That's like the entry but leaves the actual GPT part which stands for generative pre-trained transformer. Generative pre-trained transformer. The chat element is just that's a conversational piece.

Heredes: 11:15

What we've been able to do in working for our clients, for the non-profits, for the churches, is Actually training that GPT for you, creating one for you, a GPT but you know, a transformer, that what happens in practical terms. This is where it kind of gets architectural and geeky and development. It's actually feeding in the values, the DNA of the persona, the audience, who you're trying to reach, the history, given it fully, that back end, that backbone, so that GPT is intelligent now with who you are, what you're trying to do. So at that point, when you then feed it, when you start talking to it, it'll actually create for you Intelligent, you know results based on who you are, what you're trying to do. So, for example, we're working on one for for one of our clients, that is, if they need to develop a creative series or a creative concept or a creative campaign. It's a GPT that actually has all the values, all the mission, has the goals of the organization for the next decade or so when they prompting, you know, looking at doing this campaign during this season for this type of result and it'll kind of communicate back to you based on the not just generic, not if you just Google this or chat, but with a smart, intelligent and and self-generating right because the machine learning it keeps teaching itself based on.

Heredes: 12:28

And the cool thing is that that's a custom, that's a custom GPT for that organization that only improves over time. That's exciting to see that be put to work for good For campaigns that are actually effective and efficient and available. And it's new technology, right, prompt architects and Are new one to the agency, to what we're working and development and the experts we're engaging with. But it's extremely, extremely relevant in accelerating, you know, sometimes hours and hours and hours of tedious work and R&D that takes you past, you know, irrelevant holes that you know can cause in a lot of inefficiency. Yeah.

Collin: 13:04

Well, what I love is it frees you up to be the expert in the thing that you actually need to be the expert in. You know, and you can rely on people like us to be experts in and what we want to be an expert in. But then you know, you also create an on-ramp for people to come in and and maybe taste that expertise that you have. And I mean, there's there's so many ways for you to engage your community, engage the people that that, that that you're, what are, your donor base, whatever that is like. There's so many ways to do that, but you don't have to be the expert for it. The expert for building that, like yeah and now wait.

Heredes: 13:40

I just obviously this is in some ways positioning ourselves for this, to engage and because we're passionate about the causes and the values of our listeners and those we're serving, don't sit on the sidelines waiting for the right. In some ways, engage, you know an expert, engage in agency, engage someone that's gonna help. Yeah, you get there to get there faster and get there now to not miss out on what's up. Justin tells about this. You sit on several boards of several organizations, but some specifically that to me are close, you know, to my heart. Some of the pro-life organizations that you serve you sit on and that our agency also Talks us about the impact you've seen there and what's happening there.

Justin: 14:19

Well, I think that's a great example of the chatbot Um integration. So we can load it with a conversation, we can have that that conversation and we can get somebody to a nurse right away. This conversation is so powerful that the board had a kind of an emergency meeting a couple of weeks ago and the director of the board Left that meeting. You know, he came in kind of blind, blind side. We had a major donor who said hey, some of the largest evangelical organizations in the world, evangelism explosion with cliff Bible translators, the Jesus film I got think they might call that the Jesus project a few of them had come in and and showed this donor how they are using AI to do exponentially more. And that donor called, called me up and said hey, justin, you know, I think it's time that we we pushed through one of our conversations and the budgeting for that was hey, I think we need to start investing into some more digital staff. And so, like you know, with a board where I'm definitely On the younger side of the the board and that's probably not gonna be, you know, uncommon for most elder boards or for most nonprofit boards that they have older people who are not necessarily like getting their hands dirty with this cutting-edge technology at this point. But we had a. We had a great conversation about how you know, basically like the technology is here where we can serve people with a digital clinic first, and we had been looking for properties, we had been looking for land for a couple of different things that we had wanted to do within this board for years, and the door just kept getting shut. And this this guy, one of them, one of the most wise men that I know incredibly successful entrepreneurs built multiple businesses, sold them. It gives almost everything he makes away. He's like you know, all I can say is that maybe God keeps closing these doors because we're supposed to be doing something that's exponentially a lot bigger than the footprint of a building or a piece, a parcel of land, and the only thing I can think of it would be digital. But the digital thing hasn't been very good.

Justin: 16:45

Hipaa compliance is a big problem as far as clinics go when you get into medical services, and so we're just now breaking through a potential opportunity in which we can do lead generation with, like, a virtual clinic and then we can actually help get people into a physical clinic. We are breaking through technology barriers that really have been slow and resistant in all of this within medical since COVID, and so that breakthrough for HIPAA compliance is opening up the doors for some pretty incredible things, and so one of the ways they're able to use this is to go hey, we can create, we can serve anybody 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with a full virtual clinic, and then we can have standing by nurses. Now we've been working on this for a couple of years. The game changer this is a new technology to be able to have telemedicine. The game changer, though, is that we can now service.

Justin: 17:44

So the bottleneck was training, developing and coaching, also being able to counsel those nurses through the challenging job of being a virtual clinic nurse.

Justin: 17:58

It's a very limited amount of nurses that can actually handle that job.

Justin: 18:01

It's a very difficult position to be in when you're talking to somebody who is calling in wanting an abortion, and so these pro-life clinics are very much bottlenecked with staffing, and so if you could now eliminate answer questions and help give a great experience, by the way, like the abortion community is doing this and spending hundreds of millions of dollars doing this, so this isn't like something we have an option to not to like, just stick our heads in the sand, and that's the case for, I think, for a lot of nonprofits.

Justin: 18:35

But we've got to say, hey, we now have the technology where we may have a bottleneck with staffing, with nurse staffing and staffing these kind of nurses. But if we could lighten their load with things and make it so that one nurse could actually serve 10 people better than that one nurse could have served one person, we probably need to stop bearing our heads. If that's the possibility, and even if it's not there today, it might be there tomorrow. If there is even the potential that it's gonna be at that level within the next three to six months, which there very much is that potential then now, as a board, the conversation we're having is how irresponsible are we to not be spending time talking about this and investing into this All?

Heredes: 19:24

right, so that you know we're gonna cue the violin here because that's pretty, that's heavy heavy Geez man. Welcome to the nom, Are you okay? No, I don't know if I'm okay. We got counselors on staff. Well, no, just, and I agree, and it's challenging for those who are diving into or feel behind cause now it's like I can rebel, so we'll screw this. I'm too far behind, so I'm not, or that you can point out all the bad things that are happening, right?

Justin: 19:52

We're also creating our own gut in AI, right? So you can point at that and say, well then, we have to run far away from that. Correct what's?

Heredes: 20:00

the cost of that Correct, and I would say yeah, and so I'm challenged by it, also challenging it and making sure our listeners that we're wrestling with it, that we're wrestling with it but not sitting like a still duck on the sides, and I think I've told enough. Talk to friends and my wife is it? It's here to make us better, if we allow it. If you've ever used spell check on your phone or on a computer, you've used AI, okay, and the first time you corrected that word you felt dumb but you got it. The second time is like dang, I missed it again the third time, guess what? You spelled it correctly because AI helped you get there.

Heredes: 20:33

And I think there's an element of that today. I can't help us go further, grow faster, and that's the challenge of us positioning and placing these things in the things that we're passionate about, the things that we wake up in the morning. So I appreciate that challenge and I hope our listener does as well. Any final thoughts before we wrap up Colin, we've got we wanna talk data we wanna talk about, and it's the currency of today, right Data and the information that the world has on you and the touchpoints. Any final thoughts, justin?

Justin: 20:57

Yeah Well, it is heavy, you know, and you you're bringing up the pro-life conversation it adds, obviously. It adds like the biggest amount of weight. There's probably not a more controversial topic we could have attached it to. But if we're not willing to have those kind of conversations and we're not willing to take the time to consider heavy things and I kind of question like what are we doing? You're correct, right?

Heredes: 21:18

It's not a walk in the park here. We're not just having fun. Yeah, now you should have fun while you're doing it, but it's gotta solve some problems.

Collin: 21:25

Well, I mean, if the problems you're trying to solve are how to write better blog posts, then you can have that conversation over there. But we're gonna try to solve these big problems.

Justin: 21:32

We're trying to change the world and as an agency, we've committed ourselves to pushing the boundaries, you know, and to coming alongside of people who also feel convicted and called to make changes with what is today considered status quo and says I think there's something more, you know.

Justin: 21:48

On a softer note, a great organization like man Up and Go, you know, yeah shout out, it's like Patros, like creating content for men to figure out how to integrate into the adoption services side of things a very scary, very like women driven thing right now.

Justin: 22:08

But these kids are missing out on men For them to be able to create content, for them to be able to engage, for them to be able to utilize this stuff.

Justin: 22:19

On the opposite side of the spectrum, no one would argue that orphans deserve to have manly input, you know, and that they deserve to have some sort of mentorship by men and not just only be raised by women just because they're foster kids, because they didn't have parents, and so what Jeff and man Up and Go are doing, you could start to apply this to incredible, world-changing things, and none of these things are easy to solve, or else they would be done.

Justin: 22:47

And so, as an agency, we've set it out to say that we're not willing to phone it in and just write blogs, that we're gonna try to solve the hardest problems. We're gonna try to do those, and so we'll continue to have these conversations. We're dedicated and we don't have it all perfect and we'll make mistakes along the way. I think that's part of trailblazing is that you don't always cut the perfect straight path that you would have had you known everything. But somebody has to do this hard work, and we're dedicated to it, so we're gonna continue to do it until we're called to something else, Listen and we have a choice.

Heredes: 23:20

You can sit back, complain and watch it, or you can man Up and Go Right, or you can create and contribute right and create solutions that are actually gonna move forward. And AI is there to accelerate, to help and to relieve, to create that margin for you to be more human. So we'll be back on another episode.

Justin: 23:38

This is only half of it. Right here, I mean just talking about becoming human, connecting to your audiences, creating, you know, information systems and flows and personalization. This is half of it. Let's go talk about, you know, the deeper dive, the value side of this thing with data.

Collin: 23:53

On the next episode. Open eye out. I'll be go further, grow faster. See you next time.

Outro: 23:59

Thanks again for listening to the nonprofit Renaissance. We hope it ignites a Renaissance in you and helps you go further and grow faster. Be sure to share, rate and subscribe, and if you'd like to recommend or be a guest on our show, send us an email at podcastatfirstcreativecom.