AI, fundraising, and you with Nejeed Kassam

12/06/21 • 37 min

Small Nonprofit: Fundraising Tips, Leadership Strategies, and Community-Centric Solutions

AI is one of those buzzwords that has recently taken over people's minds. We imagine AI as a futuristic, thrilling, and scary opportunity. But we don't always recognize how it affects us or our work. The cool thing is that AI is being brought into our sector and has a lot of potentials to help organizations leverage their data to do more focused work or analyze and find new opportunities.

In today’s podcast, our guest, Nejeed Kassam, Lawyer, CEO and Founder of Keela, an impact technology company, talks about AI and how it helps small nonprofits manage their donors, mobilize resources, and raise more money.

Myths that Nejeed wants us to walk away from:

AI will replace your job as a fundraiser. Nobody's coming for your jobs. You can't automate fundraising. That's not realistic. What you can do is allow folks to be less burnt out, allow them to prioritize more effectively, allow them to see patterns and focus their work in different ways.
Spending time on data has no benefits for your organization. Quality data has many benefits for organizations. Aside from compliance, data helps organizations to prepare for donor meetings, and then to use it for reporting and analytics.

Nejeed’s thoughts around AI and Fundraising

AI predictions help drive decision-making. Using patterns from data that you have collected will help drive your decision-making. Data can tell your organization a story about your donors that is not recognizable when we don’t see the big data picture. It can also help you identify ask levels or make decisions about where you spend your time and energy.
Forecasting helps fundraisers. Understanding forecasting can help you understand your organization’s programming realities. It can understand whether you’re on track for where you want to be. You can make decisions when you have an idea of where you're going. It also helps identify when to ask for support, how much to ask for, and more.
Benchmarking for fundraising. Data helps your organization to measure efficacy and focus on thinking about how you are doing relative to your goals. Being able to check yourself, being able to hold yourself as an organization and as a fundraiser accountable is really valuable because then you can lean on all these data points in these predictive analytics and know where you really need to dig in and not.

Favorite Quotes from Today’s Episode

“No, you can't automate fundraising. That's not realistic. What you can do is allow folks to be less burnt out, allow them to prioritize more effectively, allow them to see patterns and, um, focus their work in different ways because of the AI ultimately the effective use of artificial intelligence and fundraising is going to be because it’s deployed appropriately and then the fundraisers can take that knowledge and make decisions and steward better and build stronger relationships.”

Resources from this Episode

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Myths that Nejeed wants us to walk away from:

AI will replace your job as a fundraiser. Nobody's coming for your jobs. You can't automate fundraising. That's not realistic. What you can do is allow folks to be less burnt out, allow them to prioritize more effectively, allow them to see patterns and focus their work in different ways.
Spending time on data has no benefits for your organization. Quality data has many benefits for organizations. Aside from compliance, data helps organizations to prepare for donor meetings, and then to use it for reporting and analytics.

Nejeed’s thoughts around AI and Fundraising

AI predictions help drive decision-making. Using patterns from data that you have collected will help drive your decision-making. Data can tell your organization a story about your donors that is not recognizable when we don’t see the big data picture. It can also help you identify ask levels or make decisions about where you spend your time and energy.
Forecasting helps fundraisers. Understanding forecasting can help you understand your organization’s programming realities. It can understand whether you’re on track for where you want to be. You can make decisions when you have an idea of where you're going. It also helps identify when to ask for support, how much to ask for, and more.
Benchmarking for fundraising. Data helps your organization to measure efficacy and focus on thinking about how you are doing relative to your goals. Being able to check yourself, being able to hold yourself as an organization and as a fundraiser accountable is really valuable because then you can lean on all these data points in these predictive analytics and know where you really need to dig in and not.

Favorite Quotes from Today’s Episode

Resources from this Episode

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Previous Episode

a primer on design thinking with Betty Xie

Have you ever heard the term design thinking thrown around whether in our sector or in the business world and you've thought, what are they talking about? What is that such a buzzword? But there's actually a lot of really cool stuff happening around design thinking and the approach that it has to problem-solving, which is exactly what today's podcast is about, how we can apply design thinking to our fundraising and our work.

Our guest for today’s episode is our colleague at The Good Partnership, Betty Xie, a fundraiser, filmmaker, and Coach for creatives. She studied Strategic Foresight, Innovation and Design at OCAD and brought that to our work.

Myths that Betty wants us to walk away from:

Design Thinking can't be applied in fundraising. At the core of design thinking is a process of problem-solving that is focused on a human-centric, problem-solving process. In the fundraising space, empathizing with the user is the key. This means understanding your donors and funders’ needs, reaching out to them, and getting feedback.
You need to have a perfect pitch deck to raise more money. Following the process of design thinking, at the most minimum prototype, it’s just like passing an idea or some kind of model that doesn’t go for the most perfect state and move forward with it.

The Stages of Design Thinking Process

Empathize with the user - In the nonprofit’s case, this could be our beneficiaries, the people that we serve, or our donors.
Framing the problem - Defining what exactly is the problem that we try to solve.
Ideate and design a solution - Once you have an idea of a solution, instead of going with the perfect solution, you will come up with a prototype and a prototype doesn't need to be physical. In a context of an organization, the prototype can be an idea that you're testing or a server or program.
Testing and Iterating - Testing the prototype to see what works, what doesn't work, and then bring it back, have an honest conversation of other feedback, and try again and again.

Favorite Quotes from today’s episode

Empathize with the user is key. And in the fundraising space, that means really understanding your donors and funders’ need. I just think that it's very common to not spend enough time staying in that space and trying to reach out and get feedback.

Resources from this episode

Betty Xie LinkedIn
Lead to Create
The Good Partnership

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Next Episode

creating space to breathe with Kim Dechaine

Have you ever felt overwhelmed, like giving up? Or maybe just really burnt out?
You are not alone! Nonprofit employees are always at risk of burnout. Pre-pandemic, our work was already demanding. And now the pandemic has left us even more stressed and with no capacity to deal with any more ups and downs.
In this episode, Kim Dechaine, Founder of Inner Powered Leaders, will discuss how we can change our mindset, and prevent and overcome burnout at work.
Myths that Kim wants us to walk away from:

Being busy and overwhelmed is normal. We have been told over the years that being busy and getting many things done is a good thing. But these are just the expectations of our society, especially in our sector. In reality, we need to listen to our body, and we need to take a break from work, slow down and take care of ourselves to prevent burning out.
We can’t control burnout. In order to find balanced energy, we need to have self-leadership which is learning to control our thoughts, feelings, and actions. We can have more balance and connection when we slow down, practice mindfulness, compassion, and gratitude.

Kim’s thoughts around Burnout

Mindfulness: Slowing down our minds and being quiet allows us to choose more of our energies. We can choose more creativity and flow. We can listen to what our body is telling us. Mindfulness helps us to focus on one thing at a time and we can train ourselves to be mindful by doing breathing exercises.
Compassion: Stepping into another person’s shoes. It is looking at their situation from their perspective without judgment. We need to practice breathing and quieting our minds first, which allows us to choose how we are going to react, what action we should take, and how we can look at a situation from someone else's perspective.
Practice Gratitude: Kim suggests practicing gratitude in three ways. First, by writing down three things that you are grateful for every day. This doesn’t have to be massive, we can find it with the small things. Second, saying you’re grateful right when the moment happens. Lastly, when you feel like you are in a difficult moment, you can pause for a moment and choose gratitude instead of reacting in a situation. Gratitude helps us to shift our perspective.

Favorite Quotes from Today’s Episode

“We have been taught this from a very young age that actually being busy and overwhelmed is normal. And it makes us a better person because we're doing more because we are, you know, look at how much work she gets done. Look at how the time, oh, look who spends the longest at work. Right. And it's almost like we applaud those actions and we cannot do that. And honestly, the only way we can change burnout is each of us taking control and deciding we're going to change this. We're going to change the outlook of society and the expectations.”
Resources from this Episode

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