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Rhea Wong
Hey you, it's Rhea Wong. If you're listening to nonprofit Load On, I'm pretty sure that you'd love my weekly newsletter. Every Tuesday morning you get updates on the newest podcast episodes and then interspersed we have fun special invitations for newsletter subscribers only and fundraising inspo because I know what it feels like to be in the trenches alone. On top of that, you get cute dog photos. Best of all, it is free. So what are you waiting for? Head over to riawong.com now to sign up. Foreign welcome to nonprofit Lowdown. I'm your host, Rhea Wong. Hey podcast listeners, Rhea Wong with you once again with Nonprofit Lowdown. Today I'm very excited. We have a special guest, my friend and former student Amri Price. He is the co founder and managing director of alliance for Europe. So we don't often have folks from outside the US on on the podcast. So I'm excited to invite Amri and also big topics we're talking about preserving democracy in Europe and otherwise. So Amri, welcome to the show.
Amri Price
Thank you very much, Rhea. It's a pleasure to be here.
Rhea Wong
So Amri, I first of all, thank you for the work that you're doing, so necessary, especially now. But tell us a little bit about alliance for Europe and what it is you're doing and why it matters so much right now.
Amri Price
So thank you for having me. And likewise, thank you for the work that you're doing and helping nonprofits fundraise and get over some of the humps that we face in our work. I think that's extremely important for the entire sector. My appreciation as a preamble and then why does it matter? I think that some of what we're seeing in the United States right now is an illustration of why it matters. We have people literally disappearing off the streets and being bundled off apparently to to these unnamed prisons in faraway places. And that's an extremely concerning situation. It's the kind of thing that happens when you tumble down the slope towards an autocratic regime when your democracy stops functioning. It maybe is an extreme illustration, but it's something that is viscerally compelling, I think for any human being. None of us wants to walk down the street and be thrown into the back of a van and disappear, never see a lawyer or our family ever again. And arguably the entire reason that the United States as a country was founded was exactly for this not to happen. This is why you have a United States Constitution, why you have a Bill of Rights in the United States, why due process is a phrase that we actually know from American legal drama and all of that. And now that much more importantly. And it's also why in Europe we built the European Union coming out out of the Second World War, coming out of. And also dealing with the experience of Soviet authoritarianism and totalitarianism where people were actually bundled into backs of vehicles and were shipped off to gulags and to concentration camps. And it's something that we never want to experience again. And democracy is multi layered. There is citizen participation, there is, there is election integrity. There is now a lot of technology that is involved in all of these things. But at the end of the day, what it comes down to is, can I live my life the way I want to? Can I secure that livelihood for my children and my family? Can I say what I want, can I follow the career path I want and can I make sure to do that while holding my leaders accountable if they mess my life up, essentially? So that's what it comes down to, I think, and that's why it matters, especially now.
Rhea Wong
There's so much to say here. But it's funny, back in January, I was in Mexico actually, because I just needed a break from America and I was having dinner with a Serbian friend who observed, oh, I've seen this playbook before. I know exactly how this is going to go. First it's misinformation, then it's undermining of the judiciary, then it's using the law as a weapon. And we're seeing this all play out in real time in the US and it's quite terrible. Terrifying. Talk a little bit about the work of alliance for Europe, because I know one of the aspects of your work was during the last European elections, fighting misinformation. What have you been up to since?
Amri Price
So, yeah, I'm happy to take us through some of the work that we've been doing. I think what you started off with there, quoting this Serbian friend very much explains some of the work that alliance for Europe is doing. This is a playbook, this attack against democracy. It's something that authoritarian leaders and wannabe dictators around the world and the oligarchs around them are using very methodically, an alliance for Europe. We set out to essentially run the playbook for democracy and run the playbook to counter this autocracy and the sort of collapse into it. What we do essentially comes down to two sides of a coin or two cylinders of an engine. Essentially we collect digital intelligence, we analyze what we see in the information space, space countering disinformation operations. We then use that intelligence and that understanding of the information space to run citizen activation campaigns, and whether it's voter turnout campaigns or advocacy campaigns or citizen participation campaigns, we want to move the needle and kind of shift the ecosystem forward. So on the one hand, there is a bit of a defensive game. We now have a network of about 51 organizations across Europe and a little bit beyond with about 220 researchers that are analyzing the information space, tracking these influence operations or disinformation operations that are often run by Russian government affiliated actors or Chinese or Iranian affiliated actors. And we essentially find those, we report them to the authorities, we see what are the kind of narratives and stories that are being told, what are the tactics that are being used. And then we make recommendations for communication actions, for policy actions, and we drive campaigns in order to counter those operations. So that's how the machine is working at the moment. We have quite a large network of partners that we've built up over time. Some of the novelty of what we've done is to borrow from the cybersecurity field some best practices that are used, for example, to prevent your bank account being hacked. We've taken some of those best practices and applied them to how to stop an influence operation. And that approach that we advocated actually became pretty widely adopted. So it's something that now the European Union is using as an approach and NATO and previously under Biden, the US Administration had also used it. That's something that we have been promoting essentially and maybe just as a bottom line, what we're advocating is a whole of society approach to democracy, defense. So civil society and nonprofits, yes, but also media, academia, business and beyond.
Rhea Wong
You know, I love it. Yeah, it's a full body contact sport here. One thing that you said was used a lot of things, but one of the things was playing defense. And I know what is challenging about this is the misinformation campaign morphs, it evolves, and you're always playing catch up. And so I'm curious, from your perspective, what are the pivots that you had to make at alliance for Europe to continue to be effective in the work you do?
Amri Price
Yeah, I think that running a nonprofit organization, especially these days and in Europe, in the European ecosystem, is not an easy task. And the funding landscape, the sort of, the institutional landscape is certainly challenging. And this has been very widely reported. I remember sitting in a, in a session of the European Fundamental Rights Agency, which is this kind of EU affiliated agency, which looks at, as the name suggests, fundamental rights. This was back in 2017, I think, and they were Talking about how the lack of core funding for civil society in Europe is dire and this is an urgent threat to democracy and the rule of law. And that was back eight years ago maybe, and, and the situation has only gotten worse sense, I think we have had to as an organization try and pivot to see what works and what doesn't and essentially how we can put one foot after another. So when we started out back in 2018, 19, we wanted to build all kinds of collaboration networks and platforms. Building an open source platform to be able to get nonprofits to collaborate, to build up relationships, and then to be able provide campaign data and social media listening data to campaigners and to organizations. And running platforms and running tech operations is very costly. And it's just something that funders were not willing to do. Building infrastructure in general is something that on the democratic side of the field, funders, at least in Europe, they just, the experience has shown us that they just don't really want to do it. The foundations maybe want to build their own kind of platform for their own grantees, or they might want to test or build a pilot or whatever. But as we spent a lot of time and energy building up a couple of different platforms, in fact, not just one, but then it was great. So we've built this thing now, we've tried it. Now you, good luck guys. Figuring out how to take it from here. We've done our part. And so then we've had to pivot away from that infrastructure building, which was the thing that was lacking and the thing, the gap we wanted to fill originally towards really putting ourselves out there and really doing the hands on work to get delivered. And originally we saw ourselves as being much more behind the scenes as supporters, facilitators. We intentionally made ourselves very broad tent and very transparent in our branding and wanted to be there to facilitate others and put others in the forefront. But very soon, or maybe a couple of years of frustrating fundraising, we found that no, we really had to have a prominent own brand. We had to be able to show funders like this is what we were doing. And the sort of complicated story of we built some infrastructure, we helped some people, those people then ended up doing this and this. That was too complicated and it was getting lost in the ether. We really struggled to tell that story. So we really had to put our face out there in a way that we didn't originally anticipate. Yeah, that's one of the adventures we went along on.
Rhea Wong
Actually. Let's do a little pit stop here because I found it very Interesting. I spent some time on your website and your brand is very strong. Your visual look is very strong. And I'm curious about what is the power of brand when it comes to fundraising and when it comes to bringing partners into the work.
Amri Price
Just the fact that you say that our brand is strong. You have no idea how long and we have. It has taken us to iterate and try and position things. And if I look at our website now, there's probably like 18 things that I immediately would want to change, and I guess that's the experience of anyone. But there is a weight that lifts off my shoulders when you say, oh, you have a strong brand, I'm like, oh, really? Okay. It's like when you're in the tunnel of chipping away, building for a while, and, yeah, it's hard to see it after you've spent so much time doing it. But I think I could say, like, all the different textbook things about, like, why a brand matters and all that. I think it would be much more authentic if I give you a bit of a lowdown of our own experience of branding in our space and what we're doing. I think that at the end of the day, human beings need an emotional connection, and it's what you find. What it's whether you go and buy shoes or whether you decide to donate to someone, whether you decide to give money on the street to someone who comes up to you and asks you for money, or whether you're deciding what job to apply for or whether to accept a job offer. Like, it's all the decisions that we make at the end of the day come down to the gut feeling. And it's a little bit difficult with the kind of people that you're fundraising from. Whether it's individuals, foundations, institutions. It doesn't really matter because often the process is very cerebral and intellectual and people think that they are. Or the entire structure is such that you're making a rational, quote, unquote decision. But I think a lot of these people that are making, maybe some of them will recognize that, no, I'm actually going with my gut. At the end of the day, it's like the Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who put down thinking fast and slow. So the fast thinking happens at the gut level, and then you rationalize it with. With the slow thinking, trying to explain your own intuitive decision. And at the end of the day, that's. That's what it's about. And it's about having the trust, that sort of intuitive attraction or that intuitive relationship is, and especially when we're talking about something like democracy, where it's not necessarily very clear why it matters, where it is, it's quite abstract, and it's hard to put a face on it. And people might care about it at the intellectual level, but then if I have to decide what to do with my funding, whether I need to support people in, let's say, and at the start of the pandemic, I need to get some respiratory machines to Burkina Faso or I need to donate money to this abstract democracy. Cause then, yeah, you just have that tough decision, and then you go with the one that sort of hits you harder in the gut and maybe rightfully, I don't know.
Rhea Wong
Yeah. Amri, I think you hit upon the challenge that a lot of the policy organizations that I talk to feel is the big challenge, because there's no, I think when we first started, no puppy dog. Right. It's not such a clear impact if I fund this and this many kids get fed or this many puppies live or whatever it is. So how have you been able to solve that? Because the other thing that is interesting about what you say is democracy writ large is an abstract concept, and yet it affects everybody. Right. The fact that you can walk down the street and not, like you say, get bundled into the back of a truck because you said something against the government is a big deal. We take it for granted that this is just a freedom that we enjoy. And so I guess my question here is, how do you make this big idea, this big policy idea, or this concept of misinformation or supporting democracy real for people such that they feel a sense of urgency about it?
Amri Price
Yeah, I think that, yeah, this has really been our big challenge as an organization also, because, again, going back originally, we intentionally made our brand sort of transparent and very broad and so on. So, yeah. And we've called it like the panda problem. You don't see a panda, and it's hard to. It's hard to point at something. In a way, Donald Trump has made this a lot easier because he's a very vivid face that people recognize. And also the situation in Ukraine, which is very close geographically and psychologically for a lot of Europeans, has also made this much more real and vivid and has meant that it's easier to explain to people why this matters immediately in their lives, because also they're seeing an influx of Ukrainian refugees that are escaping this murderous authoritarian regime in Russia. And so, in a way, that has helped. I think we've tried to do two things. On the one hand, finding ways to tell that sort of compelling story by maybe relating to the experience, let's say, of Ukrainian refugees. If we did a campaign that sort of countered disinformation against Ukraine, we tried to make that very vivid or relating to the experience of individual campaigners and activists. Greta Thunberg is one very familiar activist. You can like her or dislike or agree with her, disagree with her, etc. She's very recognizable, and there are others like that. And really trying to give that story sometimes of individual campaigners and personalize it as much as possible. And at the same time, going back to the sort of cerebral intellectual side of it, also trying to give that number of, like, for every euro you give us, we can do X amount of campaigning. We. We've had this percent of engagement on this amount of campaign budget and therefore, and really showing those calculations. And I think that also introduces a level of trust of, okay, these people know what they're doing. They've crunched the numbers on something. I'm not sure what these numbers mean, but they have some numbers. Like, it's that sort of reassurance that, okay, like, these guys have calculated stuff. And then the other component, which is maybe an intellectual component, but that inspires trust, is to try and simplify the story as much as possible. So we had a theory of change that was we do this and then we do that, and then we do this and then we do that. And if you're just listening, I'm making a shape of a staircase with my hands. There are too many steps, basically, and like, jumping from one to the other is too much. So maybe we know what we're doing, but it sounds complicated. And then trying to simplify that, to say, no, there are just two steps. We do this and then than that. Yep, end of story. That's easier. So finding a way to frame and explain what you're doing in a way that really gets to people. And we're far from finished on this. We're still very much on the road.
Rhea Wong
Yeah, look, I think most problems are communication problems. And I think for someone like yourself, who's so steeped in the expertise and the policy, you have what I call the curse of too much knowledge. Like, it's very easy for someone like yourself. This happens to a lot of founders. It happened to me to get very into the weeds of the details. And most people really need the high level. Not to say that people are dumb, but people are busy, right. And they. They shy away from complexity. And if it's too hard to understand, it's Easier for them to walk away. I double click on everything that you just said about how do you simplify it such that it's easily understood quickly? And I do think sometimes there is this tendency to think that it's dumbing it down or I'm treating my audience like they're stupid or something like this. I think you're doing your audience a favor by helping them to on ramp in a way that feels accessible.
Amri Price
No, absolutely. And I think, I think Albert Einstein said, and inserting an Einstein quote is a bit, maybe a bit corny, but he said at some point if you can't explain something to a four year old, you don't understand it well enough. So I think there it's making something simple and clear and easy to understand is not dumbing it down. It actually requires a lot more smarts to be able to deliver it. And at the end of the day, again, this is a very human condition. It's part of being human. If someone's blabbering at you with a lot of policy details, you're just not going to relate. And if someone gives you a compelling message that has an emotional hook to it, you're just going to get it much easier and much better. And yeah, I think, yeah, the whole experience of fundraising can be extremely frustrating. When you do it day in, day out, you, you fail a lot more often than you succeed and so on and so forth. And especially because I've also helped set up a lot of different initiatives or supported a lot of initiatives coming off the ground and people come in with a huge amount of enthusiasm. Usually they've done something corporate before and they think that just raising some money from somewhere for their non profit, their nonprofit pet project is going to be easy. And then they come in, they run for about two, three months trying to set this thing up and then they see that it's really difficult and the money isn't coming in and then it's all like the wind goes out, the sales go down and so on. So I think yeah, to do this you really have to, to, to be willing to bite the bullet and grit and bear it in a way. But I think also if you're a salesperson and you're selling any kind of product, if you're like selling washing liquid or whatever, you're also going to hear no a lot of the time. And if you're a footballer, you're going to miss most of the shots you take. And if you are an a startup person pitching to investors, you're also going to Hear no a lot. It's part of the process, it's part of living it. And you just need to develop the psychology to not let it burn you out. In a way.
Rhea Wong
Yeah, yeah. I think easier said than done. I think one of the things that I've that's been helpful for me is to realize it's not personal. Like they're not saying, great, I don't like you or Ria, I don't like you. They're just saying this is not for me right now, for whatever reason. And in a way I actually prefer no because then I don't waste my time anymore. To me it's more frustrating with the maybe you're like, is there hope? Should I keep going? Should I not? Versus no. I'm like, cool, now I know. Next.
Amri Price
Yeah. I think there is a freshness to direct honesty. I think in a way there is. There is a lot. There are a lot of people with a genuine interest. But then it's hard to gauge are you interested? But just intellectually and maybe you didn't realize what it would actually take to make a contribution. Were you interested in. I just didn't convince you or you know, or the organization didn't convince you. Do you have feedback? If I had to give suggestions to potential donors, whether it's a foundation or an individual or whatever is just give clear feedback. So if something turned you off, at least say what that is so that organization can learn. That's about it.
Rhea Wong
I would say.
Amri Price
You can't always choose these things.
Rhea Wong
People are going to do what they're going to do. Okay, I've got three last questions for you. This is such an interesting conversation, but what do you think the role of AI is going to play as it directly relates to your work? Because I see your work as being at the nexus of digital policy and democracy. And so I'm just really curious. How are you thinking about the impact of AI?
Amri Price
Yeah, I follow your newsletters and posts and things quite a lot. So I know you're also. You have a lot of suggestions on using AI tools in day to day work. It's something that we've also looked at quite a bit and trying to implement and see how can we become more efficient with AI. I have to say that I'm personally usually a bit of a late adopter on these things. I kind of wait to see what all the cool kids are doing and then I decide which way I'm going to go. It's something that I don't know even with Pokemon cards in high School or middle school. It was like that. But yeah, no, I think organizationally obviously these tools can make a huge difference in like the administrative burden that you have. I think the challenge is to pick the right tools because there's just such a wealth of tools on the market and you can go with this, you could go with that. So I think for your day to day work, just like choosing a set of tools wisely and then really deploying them is very useful. At the same time I think that using AI tools so can also produce a lot of mediocrity because it's just, it spits out all kinds of stuff that you feed into it and you have to have the sharp eyes and the desire to produce excellent results rather than just passing something off to make sure that what the AI gives you is actually really excellent and right and good for you and so on. And I'm just a bit worried about having a generation of people that sort of park their brains at the door in some way on summarizing content, understanding certain things, etc. But then essentially I think also people were saying this at the advent of the calculator or any piece of technology and then. Yeah, and then I feel like maybe there is a wider societal angle between AI and democracy that I can also get into beyond the sort of.
Rhea Wong
Yeah, I think that was, that, that was more my question which maybe wasn't phrased properly because I'm also very aware of the fact that AI is creating. The technology creates deep fakes, it creates the ability to produce big social media at scale. It you have these predictive analytics like I, I think we have this amazing tool which in the wrong hands can be used for anti democratic purposes. So I guess I'm curious and maybe if that's. You have to think about it more totally fair.
Amri Price
No, no. And I'm happy to answer no, no. We talk about this all the time and we work on this all the time. So I'm happy to delve into the those aspects of it. I think that what we've been seeing is more and more AI being used in these disinformation operations, for example, so just huge amounts of content being kind of spat out online by Russian government affiliated operations and and so on. You're seeing like a journalist called written 6,500 articles in the last three days and they only post between these hours, etc. Etc. And there's a lot of search engine optimization going on there. There is a lot of just putting out content and these information operations basically are entire ecosystems. They Are there. It's not just this piece of fake news and that bit of fake news, but it's entire news outlets, it's channels, it's automated content production. And then it is also real life human influencers that are hired to promote certain bits of content. So there's a real sort of human and machine synergy driving this giant autocracy machine, autocracy promotion machine. And I think that is something that we need to reflect on in democratic media. If you want to actually consume journalism, because you want to know what's actually happening in the world, that's a challenge we need to face. Because you're macheting through a whole load of just twisted bullcrap, if I could call it that. And so making sure that you have social media platforms and news platforms that can say, okay, this is a certain media standard that we're meeting here. And it's not about. This is not about censorship, it's about defending free speech from an avalanche of dictatorship bullshit. It's basically if your side that is trying to collapse democracy is flooding the Zone with shit. And that's literally what they're saying, because that's the threat. They're flooding the Zone with shit. And all the rest of us are just, excuse my imagery here, but we're gargling shits a lot of the time and you can't express yourself when you have, when you're flooded in this way. So we just need to basically create ecosystems where we have good information and there ways of essentially using AI tools. And this is part of what we do is using these cybersecurity methods where you have ways of categorizing disinformation tactics and have ways of categorizing actors and channels. We can actually structure our data in a much more robust way and we can use AI tools to then understand the data and act against it and mobilize the community of defenders against this kind of phenomena. Again, in defense of free speech and sanity. So I think in the future we're going to see this kind of online battle, AI counter AI. It's going to be like Robot wars online. And I think in some cyber spaces that's already happening. But yeah, I think essentially AI has a lot of positive potential and a lot of potential harm. We need it to enhance human capacity and make human beings more free, make human beings more of themselves and make sure that AI does not make us dependent, does not make us addicted, does not make us subjugated to some all seeing type situation.
Rhea Wong
Yeah, yeah. In my pessimistic days, I think we're headed towards like the Matrix and Westworld. And then in my optimistic days, I think all the robots will free us up to just make art and hang out with each other. So I hope that's true. But I'm worried that we're going to end up in the Matrix. Okay, last question for me. And I know this is like self serving, so you'll have to forgive me, but Amrit, you're incredibly strategic about how you're fundraising. I know that you fundraise in Europe, which is a bit of a different context. So talk to me about when we first started working together, where were you and what was the result of working with me in my program?
Amri Price
Yeah, I think you're right to highlight this difference between Europe and the United States. And I think also within Europe there are some cultural differences and different situations there. I think that in Europe you have much more of the welfare state that takes care of certain things. So that there is less of this kind of huge philanthropy culture that exists in the US because people have in mind, okay, there's society and the state out there that are supposed to do certain things. So there are a lot of family offices, there are some foundations, there is this not. But it's just smaller scale, I would say, than the US and a slightly different approach. I think where we really benefited from working with you, seeing the work you were doing and the course that I did with you, is to be able to systematize some of it it and put a label and a name on some of the things that we were experiencing. So I think the fact that you start your method out from mindset, you know, and understanding like what is your fundraising mindset is really important because indeed a lot of people in the non profit space, they didn't go into it because they want to make money. They didn't go into it because they want to get rich, that they want to give themselves to save the world or something. And so it's hard for them to relate properly to money sometimes. And that's a challenge. So I think addressing that psychological element is really important. And then the storytelling component is extremely important. And everything we talked about now in terms of emotional hooks and making sure that your audience actually understands what the hell you just said and that kind of thing is really important. And then I think that the aspect that we really benefited from was just to be able to systematize what we're doing to. Because I think going into it there is just, you feel such a passion and such a fire for what you're doing that you say, okay, I'm just going to go in there and talk to these people and. Yeah, and then they'll just be that. And I'm a talented, persuasive, charismatic kind of person, so I'm sure that they'll just like me and they'll just.
Rhea Wong
The checks will just come rain down.
Amri Price
They'll just happen. And. And I've seen a lot of brilliant, talented people go in and do that, and it just doesn't pan out that way usually. Yeah. Unless some very specific circumstances. But, yeah, I think being able to be systematic to make sure that you have a process, to make sure that you actually check if your process works and you're methodical about it. I think those are the things that we really benefited from. And we're still working at it. I think we're still nowhere near as successful as we should be. Like, we're still struggling with making sure that a lot of this actually works. I think we've really been able to hammer a lot of the process into place, but we just. We're still making sure that we're getting the right results and so on and so. Yeah. But also just having the reality check of, it's not me, I'm not stupid. I need to have these pieces in place. And here there's this group of people and this person that's experienced a lot of what I've experienced, and look, now she has some smart things to say. I think that's. That's really helpful to convince you that you're not crazy, you know, yourself.
Rhea Wong
Yeah. No, and it can be such a lonely job, too, if you're the only one fundraising in your organization. You're like, I have these ideas. I don't know who to talk to. I don't know if there's a good idea, bad idea. And I think the real value of the program for me is also having a group of people that you can talk through things with. Not just myself. I don't know everything in the world, but having a group of smart people who are working through the similar issues seems to be a real benefit. Okay, last question. I know I keep saying, last question. Can you point to any direct results that you've seen from a result of working with me? Anything that you feel like, oh, yeah, was like, would not maybe have been possible prior to working with me.
Amri Price
I think there has been, yeah, as you say, like an. An element of sanity, an element of process that we've integrated and.
Rhea Wong
Yeah.
Amri Price
Essentially being able to. To have a machine that works through. We have a CRM, we use HubSpot, there are lots of tools that the one we use, we quite like it. We have an outreach machine. We've tried to standardize our approach in some ways. Again I think we still need to get a lot better at it. And this is not. And again for the people going in kind of starry eyed and, and very idealistic about it, you think ah, but I mean this is so corporate or something but in fact you have to be organized in order to be in any way sane. Otherwise you in the beginning you chase up a lot of these personal relationships and we were lucky to have some personal relationships through our co founders and so on and their co founders relationships but after a while you just can't. It's just not sustainable. So I think yet the result that we've had working with you has just been building a sustainable system and that has brought some results. It needs to bring more results let's say. But we're still chipping away at it. But yeah, that's what I would say. And I think that at the end of the day if you're running a shoe shop or a shoe factory, you need to make sure that you have machines producing the product and you have a marketing team like selling the product and all of this. And if you're running a non profit at the end of the day you're not making a profit it but you are selling a vision of the world that is a better world than what you have now. And you need to make sure that on the one hand you're selling the vision so you have the marketing team and then that you're actually delivering that social impact which is the shoes of the product. So you need you. It takes a while to realize this but you are actually producing something into the world that you need to quote unquote sell in. In a very similar way people need to get what the product is like how are you making the world better? And they need to believe your marketing to be able to buy into it. Yeah, and there's nothing dishonest or unreal about that. It's. That's the reality of how human beings work.
Rhea Wong
Yeah, I was thinking about that quote from James Clear about you. You fall to the. What is it? You don't fail because of how your level of preparation, level of system. Yeah, it's all about having a system and just a way to organize yourself and think through and move your prospects through a structure. Amrie, thank you so much for all you do for taking the time to chat with us. I'm going to make sure to put your information in the show notes if folks want to get in touch with you, want to learn more about all the very important work you're doing for alliance for Europe. And good luck to you friend.
Amri Price
Thank you very much. Thank you, Rio.
Rhea Wong
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Podcast Summary: Nonprofit Lowdown Episode #343
Title: Defending Democracy + Raising Money for Policy with Amri Price
Host: Rhea Wong
Guest: Amri Price, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Alliance for Europe
Release Date: June 23, 2025
In this episode of Nonprofit Lowdown, host Rhea Wong welcomes Amri Price, the co-founder and managing director of Alliance for Europe. Amri outlines the organization's mission to combat the rise of autocratic regimes by preserving democratic institutions and fostering citizen participation.
Amri Price [01:23]: "Democracy is multi-layered. There is citizen participation, election integrity, and a lot of technology involved. At the end of the day, it comes down to can I live my life the way I want to?"
Amri emphasizes the critical state of democracy both in the United States and Europe. He draws parallels between current events and historical instances of authoritarianism, highlighting the importance of democratic safeguards like the U.S. Constitution and the European Union's founding principles.
Amri Price [02:00]: "None of us wants to walk down the street and be thrown into the back of a van and disappear... this is why we have the United States Constitution."
A significant portion of the discussion focuses on fighting misinformation, especially in the context of the last European elections. Amri explains how Alliance for Europe employs digital intelligence to identify and counter disinformation campaigns orchestrated by state-affiliated actors.
Amri Price [04:31]: "We collect digital intelligence, analyze the information space, counter disinformation operations, and run citizen activation campaigns to shift the ecosystem forward."
He highlights the organization's innovative approach of borrowing cybersecurity best practices to thwart influence operations, a method now adopted by the European Union and NATO.
Amri candidly discusses the difficulties faced by Alliance for Europe, particularly regarding funding and the European nonprofit landscape. He shares insights into the organization's strategic pivots from building collaborative platforms to focusing on hands-on campaigning and developing a prominent brand to attract funders.
Amri Price [07:49]: "Running a nonprofit, especially in Europe, is not easy. We've had to pivot from infrastructure building to hands-on work because funders were not willing to support costly platforms."
Rhea praises the strong branding of Alliance for Europe, prompting Amri to delve into the importance of emotional connections in fundraising. He emphasizes that effective branding isn't about dumbing down messages but about making them accessible and relatable.
Amri Price [11:35]: "Human beings need an emotional connection. It's about having the trust and intuitive attraction, especially when talking about something as abstract as democracy."
Addressing the challenge of making an abstract concept like democracy tangible, Amri explains strategies to convey urgency. He draws connections between current events, such as the situation in Ukraine, and the broader fight against authoritarianism to make the cause more relatable and urgent for supporters.
Amri Price [15:43]: "Relating to the experience of Ukrainian refugees has made the abstract concept of democracy more vivid and real for people."
The conversation shifts to the realities of fundraising, with both Rhea and Amri acknowledging the persistence required to succeed. Amri shares the psychological resilience needed to handle frequent rejections and the importance of maintaining a systematic approach to fundraising.
Amri Price [22:04]: "Fundraising can be extremely frustrating. You fail a lot more often than you succeed, and you need to develop the psychology to not let it burn you out."
When discussing the impact of AI, Amri expresses both optimism and concern. He notes AI's potential to streamline administrative tasks within nonprofits but warns against its misuse in disinformation campaigns. Amri envisions a future where AI aids in countering propaganda, likening it to "Robot wars online."
Amri Price [25:46]: "AI has a lot of positive potential and a lot of potential harm. We need it to enhance human capacity and ensure it does not make us dependent or subjugated."
In the latter part of the episode, Amri reflects on his collaboration with Rhea Wong's programs. He credits her expertise in fundraising strategies and mindset shifts for helping Alliance for Europe systematize their approach and develop sustainable fundraising processes.
Amri Price [32:58]: "Working with Rhea has helped us systematize our fundraising approach, making our processes more sustainable and effective."
Rhea wraps up the episode by highlighting the symbiotic relationship between effective fundraising and impactful social initiatives. She underscores the necessity of selling a compelling vision to drive nonprofit success, echoing themes discussed throughout the conversation.
Rhea Wong [37:08]: "You need to sell a vision of a better world while ensuring you're delivering that social impact—much like running a business with both production and marketing teams."
Amri expresses gratitude for the support and concludes with optimism for Alliance for Europe's continued efforts to defend democracy.
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