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Nonprofit Leadership Podcast
Can AI Enhance Rather Than Replace Empathy?
00:28:07
Sam Fankuchen In this compelling episode of the Nonprofit Leadership Podcast, host Rob Harter sits down with Sam Fankuchen, the CEO and founder of Golden, a volunteer and donor engagement platform revolutionizing the way nonprofits operate.
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- [00:02]
A
This is Dr. Rob Harder with the Nonprofit Leadership podcast, Making youg World Better. What does it take to be an effective nonprofit leader today? What are the biggest challenges? What are the biggest obstacles? How should nonprofits fundraise in an economy that is constantly changing? All these reasons combined led me to start this show. And it's my hope that through this series, people can learn not only what it takes to be an effective nonprofit organization, but to hear from effective leaders who are. Who are successfully making a positive impact in their communities. We hope you enjoy the show as together we hear how they are making their world better. Hello everybody, and thanks for tuning in to the show today. I'm Rob Harder, your host for the Nonprofit Leadership Podcast. So glad you're part of this show today. It's really going to be an interesting conversation. We're going to be talking about a couple of key issues that I know are on your mind all the time. On the one hand, it's volunteers and. And the other, technology. And this conversation will cover where do these two overlap? And to do that, I have a guest, and my guest's name is Sam Thankuchin. Sam Thankuchin is the CEO and founder of golden and Golden's, an organization he started quite a while ago. And it really seeks to do this. It seeks to help your organization, your nonprofit organization, to move volunteers from becoming just volunteers into lifelong donors. And the way they do that is by leveraging analytics and fundraising AI tools that both optimize donor engagement and maximize fundraising outcomes. So that's their goal. And so one of the things I'll end up talking to Sam about is the debate surrounding the role of technology, especially AI now, which is everywhere. So one of the questions I asked Sam is what role does he think technology should play in fostering human connection and community service? For example, does he think that technology can enhance rather than replace empathy? Or how about is AI a proper tool to replace staff members, even? It's really interesting conversation when it comes to the overlap again between the growing role of technology and the ongoing role of human interaction. You're going to really enjoy hearing from Sam. He has so much knowledge on this topic and he works with government organizations, universities, and nonprofit organizations. As always, thanks for tuning in. Now, onto the show. This podcast is sponsored by DonorBox Donor Box, helping you help others with the best donation forms in the business. Well, welcome to the Nonprofit Leadership Podcast. I have Sam Van Kuchen here. And Sam, thank you so much. First of all, to take time out of your busy schedule, I know you do a lot of things for this social impact sector. So thanks Sam for being on the show today.
- [02:42]
B
Such a pleasure. Rob, can't wait for the conversation.
- [02:45]
A
I am too. I'm excited. As we kind of talked before we hit record, there's lots to talk about and I know you could talk about a lot of things for a period of time because this just comes out of who you are, knowing your background. It's really impressive how much experience you've had. A wide range of organizations and companies that you've worked for, universities as well. So I think always good. I like to give people a little bit of the background of my guest story and how you got into this work that you're doing and particularly Golden. We'll talk about your company that you lead right now called Golden. So yeah, maybe talk about that powerful story because as I've been told, your company golden really was born from a deeply personal experience that emerged after the 911 experience. So talk about that origin story and how has that shaped your mission and values and the mission and values of Golden.
- [03:33]
B
Very happy to do that. I grew up quite fortunate in many ways in Southern California, living in a town quite near the beach. And I had an idyllic childhood filled with kinds of memories that children value. And at some point I went to actually at high school. I went to a brand new high school in Southern California my freshman year. And at the end of my freshman year my parents were concerned and I somewhat agreed with them that I might outgrow the opportunities available to me in a brand new high school. And so I agreed to transfer to a school that was several hundred years old on the east coast. And my parents and three siblings flew out to Boston to move me into this other high school. My sophomore year and the night before school started, we were all going to go out to dinner and I felt like I should just get settled in. And so I told him, thanks for the offer, but maybe I'll see you tomorrow. And I'm just going to focus on going to class. And in the morning I woke up and I walked over to the building where classes were supposed to be held. And when I got there it was chained shut at the front door and at a very low altitude in a very ominous way above us I could hear a formation of fighter jets flying over the campus. And instead of going into class the first day, we had bit of a false start and we were instead walked to the auditorium and the whole school got together and we started to hear the news and unpack the news about the events related to September 11th and my entire immediate family was scheduled on American Airlines Flight 11 back to Los Angeles. And so for three days I was under the impression that I lost my entire immediate family. In addition to all of the other news we were processing in ways, all of us were affected and I was quite closely affected in other ways as well. And when the cell phone reception came back up, I learned that they went standby the night before because we didn't go out to dinner. So I had gone through the whole emotional experience of beginning to process those circumstances and I understood what those feelings are for everybody else who didn't have a freak turn of events the way I did. And it took me a very long time to process all those feelings. I was not able to put my finger on it. And I've been in other trauma since. And maybe those listening who work in field where there's trauma and have seen this with others who go through it or have gone through their own events, understand the concept in a moment you may have any number of different highly emotional feelings, or you may not know exactly what to do and you're taking one step at a time or you're just waiting for the next thing to happen and it's not fully sinking in. It took me a long time to process all of that. But as I began to, what I observed was in an environment like the one I was in high school, particularly high pressure high school, there was a lot of pressure on my classmates to perform, to work hard or go to a good college or impress other people. And I was surrounded by peers who I sensed were going through the motions in life and not necessarily following their dreams the way that my friends from home did, the ones who didn't know anything else than going to the beach and hanging out with friends and doing kid things. And I saw many of them volunteering, I would hear the feedback, oh, you know, check that off my list or now I can relax and focus on my life instead of somebody else's life. Or I'd hear all these things or felt like punishment or it was, wasn't well organized or I just don't understand why I was doing the things I was doing. And that's not really a fair assessment of volunteering overall, but that's what I saw as a 16 year old.
- [07:40]
A
Thank you so much for sharing a bit of your story. I can't imagine the roller coaster of emotions you felt at that moment when you first heard about 911 and your family. So that right there, thank you again for opening up a little bit with Us and with my listeners.
- [07:52]
B
Thank you.
- [07:53]
A
As you think about now broadening the idea of leadership for social impact sector organizations, when it comes to the personal narrative that helps shape a person's leadership style, how they approach the leadership in their organization, how do you think personal narratives really influence effective nonprofit leadership from your experience there?
- [08:13]
B
Where My Mind Goes has a lot to do with my graduate research on a master's program. After discovering the things that we just spoke about from the perspective of the participant, I thought it would be important to understand the perspective of the organizer, that is the people who are listening to this podcast. And so I studied a thousand different organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area and how they recruit and manage and re engage supporters. And over the course of doing that, I started to see different versions of programs that did certain things well at the time. And I wrote wrote this in 2008, 2009. At that time, I saw organizations that did an excellent job of contextualizing and storytelling the mission, the purpose, the sense of being for their organization, and how that understanding of needs translates to programs. I saw organizations that had really effective program design where a participant would come, they would have a clear understanding of what they're going to do, they'd perform, or they'd understand their performance and they would do more of it or do it differently, and they would have a clear sense of input and output. And then I also saw organizations that created a sense of belonging to among their supporters, and different kinds of supporters gravitated to these organizations for different reasons. I could be very clear about which organizations they were, and times have changed a little bit, but maybe all of us can think of programs that do each of those things well from that understanding. When we went to go create digital products to make this experience easier for professionals who recruit and screen and schedule and track and convert volunteers to donors and do all these other motions, and for people who are thinking about how to get involved and becoming involved and staying involved. We knew we didn't just want to have screens and applications and products that did these. We wanted to design the products in such a way to originate higher quality of content than had previously been available, that was more personalized to participants and organizers that would yield higher engagement, more effective results, and better viral growth of the great work being done in the cases where it's done right. And to do that, we had to build a bunch of frameworks around our understanding of what successful performance looks like to start to train people to design programs in a way that drives that kind of result and to train the eye of the user to find things that speak to them and then also to start training the technology to reinforce positive outcomes rather than just letting everybody continue to do what may or may not work, or they may or may not have visibility or skills to understand how to look at what works and what doesn't work Now.
- [11:12]
A
Well said. And I think golden. Let's talk about that for my listeners. The company that you run now is golden. And one of the things you do is you provide technology to help social impact leaders, nonprofits, better connect with volunteers and donors. And along the way you've seen some shifts in how people are wanting to get involved, how they're getting involved, the practical way of doing that. So maybe you could speak to that. What are you seeing in terms of how things are changing, in terms of people plugging in and then also supporting their favorite nonprofits?
- [11:40]
B
Yeah, let's cite an extreme example because it's easier to explain in a really extreme setting. And then we'll go back to the mainstream setting. This year I've spent a lot of time deep in the field of disaster relief for a number of reasons. One is there are more disasters where we live in a world where the understanding that natural or unnatural disasters could occur at any moment in time and nobody is immune to them. Two, I just went through the Los Angeles wildfires. Our company is based in Los Angeles. We have distributed team members around the country, but a lot of us are in Los Angeles. I live in Los Angeles. We left the office, we left home while operating the response efforts for State of California government, Buddhist Sioux Chief foundation and Salvation army and other programs. And so I had a 360 degree view of what it is like to need volunteers to be a volunteer to run these programs in moments of extreme crisis. And of course all of us lived through Covid and all kinds of other natural disasters and other things. And you in settings like that, learn what is truly make or break important to programs delivering against their promise. One of them is being hyper specific about identifying what resources you might be able to provide through your programs, items, your network. And then another is understanding who your ancillary partners would be for the kinds of things that needy populations may come to you to receive but you are not set up to give. However, you may know somebody who's well aligned and you might be able to direct them there faster, not just eventually, because if you are on your own and you've lost everything and you've lost your ability to produce anything because your life has come to a standstill, you don't just want flyers and things to Google and phone numbers to call. You want to set your life back in motion quickly. And so having programs that are designed to meet the need or to understand what the need is in order to redirect immediately are useful. The other thing that disaster relief operators often will share is that there is often a second disaster after a disaster, which is you may have a plan and you may have something set up to respond, but if the resources that become available or the lack of resources don't match the need, then you have a second logistical nightmare to deal with. And I've heard extreme examples of this. For example, when Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, there was an influx of support from the southern U.S. big truckloads of materials coming to help victims, but nobody was set up to receive truckloads of clothing and food. And so they got turned away. And this is going to sound familiar to disaster relief organizers in the audience. Sometimes these are referred to as SUVs or spontaneous, unaffiliated volunteers, people who just show up because they think the moment has called and it can be helpful or you may be log jamming the pathways that exist for delivering services. So for an organizer understanding that you always have a door open and you can direct people to that door so you don't turn away resources that are valuable and you don't make people with the best intentions feel like they're not good enough, but you can start to standardize the unpredictable, those kinds of things transfer from disaster to regular settings.
- [15:21]
A
We'll be right back. Are you looking for an easy and effective way to boost your nonprofit's donations? Well, look no further than Donorbox, the online fundraising platform that streamlines your fundraising efforts, maximizes donations and simplifies giving for your supporters. With Donorbox, you can create beautiful donation forms, accept digital wallet payments, track donations, and send auto receipts. And the best part, there are no setup or monthly fees and no long term contracts required. So what are you waiting for? Visit donorbox.org today to get started. That is www.donorbox.org. okay, so there's a lot of debate right now about the use of technology, specifically AI. You know, how can you utilize AI for good? Is it good in the first place? And you end up using quite a bit of technology tools that you encourage social impact leaders to use, including AI. So what role do you think technology should play in fostering human connection specifically and community service? In other words, how can it enhance really is the goal, rather than replace.
- [16:31]
B
Empathy as an example, a profound question with many layers. The short answer in my view, is that AI is an inevitability. This isn't a question about whether or not it's going to exist and how we should use it. It is fully here. And the question is now that it is here, how does it advance the best parts of what your organization does or could do? And how might you responsibly understand what it is capable of doing so that in the appropriate instances you can make it available in ways that can deliver that value? And there are more ways than we could cover in a podcast, some very immediate off the shelf ways, other ways that organizations should start to think about over time. And so I'll give a few examples of the basics. Yeah, okay. The very basic levels of AI are what most people know today as consumer facing interfaces for large language models or LLMs. That would be something like ChatGPT, Claude Gro, Meta, Gemini, stuff like that. And those tools have different relative capabilities and they change every time there's a new version release. But generally CHAT GPT is universally capable of doing a variety of research and packaging tasks. Claude is very effective at understanding how to frame situation in a human way and communicate it appropriately. Gemini can do very adept things with visuals and information, even VO3, which is the video generation version of Google's tools, excellent at spinning up videos if you need to do that. Meta quite good at user research. Grok quite good at current information. So it depends on what sort of tasks you have to know, where to go and then how to frame it. But a very good exercise is just understanding how to give very clear prompts or instructions to an LLM and see what it comes back with. Even if you're not putting it in a certain process that you're running, even if you're not giving it any hard information, which you certainly can do. But that's where you have to be really careful about information that you're feeding these models. Just understanding what they're capable of doing is the most important first step. So that you don't do things that should go to AI, and you do position AI to do the things much more quickly, accurately, robustly than a human being can do. The second step is if certain things you do with AI, like that the consumer AI, become repeatable, then you should start thinking about automating things that you do on a regular basis, using the correct tools in the correct safe ways, with the correct permission from everybody who is involved in these circumstances. We have separate policies about AI. A lot of forward thinking technologies do, but ethical AI is really Important. The Human Centered AI Lab at Stanford, which we've been very lucky to do multi year research with, has done an excellent job of documenting a lot of what these ethical protocols should be. But it's still an ongoing conversation and you should apply whatever principles you apply in the real world or in other digital domains, like if you have privacy policies or data processing agreements, then these are things that port over into the world of AI once you've automated the things. And by the way, golden software does this for the standard workflows of engaging volunteers, converting them to donors, optimizing their donations, enriching their data with robust profile information, securely and compliantly, those kinds of things. The right workflow tools will help you do. And you don't need to recreate the wheel on it. You just go to the right partner who offers them for the work you're doing and you trust them to do the research because it's kind of a heavy lift.
- [20:41]
A
Well, again, there's so much there. You're right, this could be a conversation we can continue on because there's so many applications to AI and how to incorporate them. And I like what you're saying too. Using AI for good, that's really, to me, the goal. And you're right, it's not. If AI is going to get here and be involved in your organization, it's already here. How do we use it for good? I think that really is the question to get around all leaders. So back to then, the combination maybe where the place where tech comes together with volunteering and a lot of what you're doing there at Golden. I'm curious what excites you the most about the future of volunteerism combined with civic tech? And when it comes to social impact leaders, what should they be paying attention to right now?
- [21:21]
B
Rather than go as deep as I have with some of the other questions, maybe I'll hit you with a smattering of ideas in case any of them resonate. One is automation of complicated processes and just making them natural, straightforward, transparent, instantaneous, universal, portable. All the things that we value from the services that we consider best in class. Those are available today, obviously from golden and from our partners and from people we just admire elsewhere. It's a great time to adopt turnkey services or to start building things even on your own, if you want to. There's a lot of vibe coding tools that will allow you to stand up websites and apps pretty quickly. You can watch some YouTube videos and learn how they work in a few minutes. It's not hard, it's definitely a weekend project for, for people who are inclined to do it. Second is breaking down the silos between the nonprofit sector and the other entities we depend on in other sectors. 20 years ago when I was in school, there was a notion that it's either us or them, the nonprofit sector, or people in sectors with different priorities. And that's just not the case. We live in version of the world where we depend on collaboration with each other and for specialization. And there are things that the nonprofit sector can do exceptionally well. And even as somebody looking at all the change that's happening in the government in the US and abroad, and everything's being shaken up. And just as a quick aside, I mean, golden supports a lot of programs that depended on AmeriCorps, FEMA, USAID, healthcare funding, university funding, variety of other things that are getting shaken up. And so there are some people out there who are do not know how to react or they're just reacting strongly. The fact of the matter is there can be corrections at any time for any reason. But to be able to do the work we want to do in the nonprofit sector or in any other sector, business sector, as a social enterprise founder, or in the government sector on behalf of many of the clients we work with, or higher ed or healthcare, you need to understand your strengths and partners and have ongoing collaborative relationships. Not ones where somebody funds a project, you turn around a deliverable in a year. Not ones where somebody demands how the project's done and you conform to those demands. A world where there is trust and safe appropriate collaboration so that you can reach innovative solutions on the ground level, or at the policy level, or anywhere in between. That is super exciting. The other thing that's exciting is putting the human being at the center of all this. Finally, technology does that instead of the institution. And now you can understand who people are and work with them to their full potential as a volunteer or donor and use AI to help you get there. You can start to take credit for the work your organization is doing across a variety of different pockets of operations or programs. And you can compile and synthesize that information and maybe even collaborate with somebody who wanted to do more but didn't have the capacity to do more. Those kinds of things are so cool. And anytime I hear somebody share a strong opinion, it's probably well formed about how difficult some situation has become. We try and understand and listen and understand how to unblock a situation like that. It's usually a signal for okay, there's some pain, maybe we can get more specific go deeper, understand better, look at a population that was overlooked, release a feature that offers a lot of value. Something like that.
- [24:49]
A
Thanks for sharing that. I think my listeners may want to find out a little bit more about golden because I know golden has so many different tools. You provide all kinds of nonprofit organizations. So maybe if people want to connect with golden, find out more about golden and maybe connect with you personally. Where would you send them?
- [25:03]
B
Thanks for asking. Please go to goldenvolunteer.com or if you happen to be involved in either AmeriCorps, USAID, the kinds of programs I mentioned, you can check out USAIDRelief.org, ameriCorpsRelief.org and some other resources to see. I'm not sure if you are aware of this Rob, but we made a $500 million software commitment. Wow. Unblocked organizations who had funding or programs disrupted by changes in federal or global funding. And I think we're at a turning point where a lot of folks are going to get unblocked. But in the meantime, if they want to set programs in motion and reduce costs and start to build a volunteer to donor pipeline, that would be a great place to start, especially if you've been exposed to any of those changes. I should say. Also feel free to reach out to us. We're on all the different social media channels we offer for anyone who's not familiar with Golden. We provide free and enterprise scale tools to recruit, screen, schedule, track, re, engage, convert volunteers to donors. Doesn't matter what sector you're in, you could be in government, healthcare, higher ed, corporate social responsibility, nonprofit disaster relief, mutual aid, it doesn't matter. There's usually some version of software for anyone and if we don't have it, our partnerships team will help you find other capable folks because these tools should be a baseline for whatever other program you're running. And we have a sincere commitment to empower others like us who show up to work every day asking what's possible. And there are much more is possible today than even I know about. But happy to facilitate a conversation where we can well it's been so fascinating.
- [26:52]
A
Again this whole world technology and AI and really maximizing the benefits of AI to automate processes, particularly those that just take a lot of time and yet at the same time being really aware to never lose that human touch. As we started our whole conversation about the personal narrative that prompted you to do what you're doing now. I love that blend that you bring to the table when it comes to the social impact sector so thanks again Sam for being on the show and sharing your insights.
- [27:16]
B
And thanks to your community for facilitating the conversation.
- [27:20]
A
Hey friends. Well, I wanted you to know that this podcast can be found on itunes, Spotify, Amazon, Google Podcasts, and wherever you listen to other podcasts. I also want to encourage you to like and subscribe and share this podcast with others. This will actually help us get this great content out to more nonprofit leaders just like you. You can also join the nonprofit Leadership Podcast community, find other resources and interviews of past guests, all on my website, nonprofit leadershippodcast.org well, thanks again for listening and until next time, keep making your world better. This podcast is sponsored by DonorBox, DonorBox, helping you help others with the best donation forms in the business.