Brooke Richie Babbage (0:00)

I know you're not working as hard as you are in your nonprofit to stay small and keep struggling. You want to have real impact, spark change, and lead a team that feels like it's moving forward with purpose. But to do that you need a strategy and a roadmap. I have a new quiz to help you. Take two minutes, answer six questions and get a simple custom roadmap that tells you exactly what to focus on next so you can grow your nonprofit without chaos. Go to brookrichybabbage.com gameplan I know you're not working as hard as you are in your nonprofit to stay small and keep struggling. You want to have real impact, spark change, and lead a team that feels like it's moving forward with purpose. But to do that, you need a strategy and a roadmap. I have a new quiz to help you. Take two minutes, answer six questions and get a simple custom roadmap that tells you exactly what to focus on next so you can grow your nonprofit without chaos. Go to brooke richiebabbage.com gameplan.

Brooke Richie Babbage (1:08)

Hi, welcome to the Nonprofit Mastermind podcast where every week I do a deep dive into the strategies and mindset behind launching, scaling and leading a high impact nonprofit. I'm your host, Brooke Richie Babbage Working to make the world a more just and beautiful place is messy, complex, heart wrenching and ultimately deeply joyful and fulfilling work. And none of us can do it alone. That's why I started this podcast, this Mastermind Community, to hold space for and share the learnings and the questions and the grapplings and the actual concrete strategies that allow us to move our social impact work forward together. So welcome to the Mastermind. I'm so glad you're here. So I'm going to talk about one of my current favorite topics right now and that is chatgpt. Those of you who are also on my newsletter list, my leadership forward 321 have seen me write about this. I've also written about this on LinkedIn how I'm really a little bit late to the party on AI generally, but definitely ChatGPT. It has not been that I wasn't interested in it. I think intellectually and even ethically I find AI and where it's going to be a really interesting and important topic for conversation, for discussion, for exploration. I think where I really struggled was professionally and practically and really in my heart. I'm a pragmatist. My brain almost always goes to thoughts of okay, but what are we going to do with this information? Really what was coming up for me was I just don't have time to play around and explore and figure out if and how this tool can be helpful to me. I believed that it could be, but I just didn't really have the time to figure out concrete ways that I could use a tool like ChatGPT in my life in any meaningful way, in any meaningful, practical way. And then a few weeks ago, I was listening to one of the business podcasts that I listened to, and it's a podcast I've been listening to for, like, 12 years. I really like this guy, and most importantly, I trust him and sort of how he's grown his business and how he thinks about his time in his business. And he basically articulated the same thing. He was like, look, I'm late to the game with ChatGPT. I have a really good friend and colleague sort of in the business world, and he's really into ChatGPT. And one time we had lunch a couple weeks ago, and he walked me through three concrete ways I could use ChatGPT, and I'm going to share those with you. And that's what he did on the podcast. And it's like something clicked. This, like, light bulb went off, and I just decided I was going to try those really concrete ideas. They had to do with sort of customer avatars and research and. And the floodgates opened. So while I'm late to the party on Chat gbt, because other folks have been playing around with CHAT GBT for months, and for me, it's been about two weeks, I am really, really on board. And the reason that I'm really on board and the reason I've been writing about it and why I am talking with you about it today in this podcast, is that, practically speaking, just looking at ChatGPT, not even getting into the other AI tools that I've started to explore around designing presentations and building websites and crafting images, I'm not even going to get into those today. Just looking at ChatGPT, which is a language structuring tool, you can save hours of time and get ideas and inspiration and support that costs nothing. And for the organizational leaders that I work with primarily in the startup space and those organizations in my accelerator that are growing their organizations, right, they're under a million dollars and they are growing their teams, they're building their boards, they're crafting and finalizing their strategic vision. There is a lot on their plates, and even something as simple as crafting a welcome sequence for new donors, while so critical to their fundraising Thinking about doing that and the hour, two hours that it will take to write the right content, structure the tags in your email service provider, set everything up, connected to your CRM. All of that, that feels overwhelming. To the folks that I work with crafting an MoU for a new partnership, thinking of blog titles and podcast topics, that's overwhelming. And ChatGPT was all of that. So that's why I'm talking about ChatGPT, because when it comes down to it, it's a very powerful tool that can save you money, that can save you time, and that can actually help you move the work of your organization forward much master in really concrete ways very easily. And whenever I come across a tool like that that I know can benefit the leaders I work with, I am really excited to get that tool into their hands and to help them use it. So that's why I'm talking about this with you guys today. And specifically, I want to talk about how you can begin to incorporate ChatGPT into your workflow to not only speed up how long it takes for you to get things done, but also to spark your creativity in what you're doing. I want to focus on the how. Just as an example, ChatGPT might spit out something for you that you didn't even think about, and you're like, oh, that's a great idea. I was trying to think of a presentation topic, this speech I have to give, or this workshop I have to run. I was trying to think of a title, and I literally would never have thought of that. So I want to elaborate on that piece. I want to start there. You might not have thought about that going into. If you're writing an email or a presentation, or even drafting a meeting agenda, whatever it might be. The Sparking creativity piece is something I think a lot of people when they're thinking about ChatGPT, they kind of miss out on. So I want to start there and then go to, you know, the actual content that it can create. Most people that I talk to, myself included, have thought about ChatGPT, if they've thought about it at all. I'm going to put in a prompt and then chatgpt is going to spit something out, right? That's how we talk about it. Put in the right prompt, and we'll get content back. Then I'm going to fix it up a little bit, I'm going to copy that content, I'm going to paste it, and I'm going to move on. A lot of people are using ChatGPT that way, and I'm going to talk about how to do that. And as I've talked about in my newsletter and in some of my LinkedIn posts, you can totally do that. It's great as an idea starter. It gets you going. What I really encourage though, is to actually use ChatGPT as like a thought partner, a hyper creative thought partner that has access to way more resources and information than you do. And then add your own flavor, add your own examples and stories and build on it. So if you haven't started playing around with ChatGPT, I would actually recommend starting there. Getting your juices flowing in some area where you are feeling stuck, where you have to produce content and you're feeling stuck, spend a little bit of time learning how to ask it questions. That's what we call prompts. I'm going to talk more about that here. So before I go on, I just want to say that I got so excited about ChatGPT that I actually created this Quick Start bundle specifically for the nonprofit sector. I listened to that podcast, the floodgates open, I came home, I spent like three days playing around with prompts and sort of just playing and figuring out, hey, what happens if I put this in and hey, can it write this email for me? Could it write this blog post for me? Could it improve on my writing here? It's basically a combination of prompts. It's a mini training, mini video training about how to get started with ChatGPT 50 plus model prompts that you can cut and paste right into ChatGPT in areas like fundraising, marketing, web web development, setting agendas, time management, and sort of tried to go really broad. And then also a guide about how to build prompts, right? How to teach ChatGPT to be the tool that you want it to be. So it's all inside the quick start nonprofit quickstart bundle. And you can get that@richiebabbage.com backslash nonprofit chatgpt bundle. So if you are just getting started with chatgpt and you can hear the excitement in my voice about how practical a tool this is, I highly recommend picking up the bundle richiebabbage.com backslash nonprofit chatgpt bundle okay, so let me keep going. Setting the right priorities and goals and focusing on the right activities is the only way to make sure that you're not wasting time and money as you grow. That clarity is what we do inside the next level nonprofit. You get a step by step growth plan for how to grow your budget, build a strong team, and increase your impact in the next 12 months. Plus you get expert guidance, thought, partnership coaching and hands on support to execute. From professional development for your team to discounts on work with incredible consultants. Apply and let's see if we can help you build a stronger organization in the next year. Brooke Ritchiebabbabbage.com Backslash Next Level Nonprofit Setting the right priorities and goals and focusing on the right activities is the only way to make sure that you're not wasting time and money as you grow. That clarity is what we do. Inside the Next level nonprofit you get a step by step growth plan for how to grow your budget, build a strong team, and increase your impact in the next 12 months. Plus you get expert guidance, thought, partnership coaching and hands on support to execute. From professional development for your team to discounts on work with incredible consultants. Apply and let's see if we can help you build a stronger organization in the next year. Brooke Ritchie Babbage.com Next Level Nonprofit I want to start with a list of things that you can think about using ChatGPT4. So think about things like generating blog post titles, presentation outlines for speeches or presentations or workshops. You have to do presentation content. What should my slides say? Titles for programs, descriptions of programs, social media Captions, partnership agreements, MOUs with organizational partners, emails to your board, emails to your donors, website content. The list goes on and on. In the bundle that I mentioned, I actually organize the sort of vault or catalog of prompts into these buckets. Right? What are some prompts that you can use if you're writing emails? If you're doing fundraising research, that's another one. I don't recommend using ChatGPT to research specific people for two reasons. One, it sometimes gets details wrong. And so if you're going to have to sort of go back and check, you might as well just have a human do that. So I wouldn't recommend doing sort of individual person research. The second sort of reason not to do research of individual people is chatgpt at this point only goes up to 2021 or anything. After 2021 you won't have access to and most people's lives have changed a lot since 2021, so that's the second reason not to do that. But research about foundations, research about corporations, businesses, Absolutely. Sort of pipeline, top of funnel research. You can just take hours off of that research using ChatGPT. You can also think about fundraising research around donor avatars or donor profiles. So the list of what you can use ChatGPT for is massive. And in the bundle I've organized the prompts according to that list. So I want to dig down just a bit and highlight just a few use cases here so it starts to seem practical for you. And let's start with fundraising, since that's often where people's minds go. So as you start to think about your fundraising workflow, the first thing I recommend is starting with the end goal in mind. What's the thing you're trying to achieve? Do you want to explore donor Personas? Do you want to write an email to your list? Do you want to craft a newsletter series that's really engaging and gets people to actually take some action? Are you launching a new program? Do you want to write social media? This is a big one. So one of the other programs I run is the Launch Lab and it's just for startups. And a lot of the conversations that I have with the leaders in the Launch Lab is around how to find staff to do things like meaningful social media engagement. So you have a number of organizations that are either on LinkedIn or Instagram. There are a lot of folks that are in those two places and they just don't have time to sort of be there and show up in a way that turns those resources or turns those platforms into powerful top of funnel vehicles, right? Ways to attract the right people into your ecosystem, which is primarily how you should be thinking about social media. They don't have time to do that. So when you talk about a tool that can draft a month's worth of social media posts in your writing style, based on your mission, aimed at your ideal donor avatars, that's hours of work, very, very powerful. And then you pair that with one of the many AI tools that identifies and can even create visuals for you. And you can have an entire social media posting calendar done in under an hour. So just to highlight sort of what is your end goal, right? Social media posts, emails, etc. Now, once you know your end goal, then you can work with ChatGPT to get there. And I would encourage thinking about ChatGPT as like a junior member of your team. It can be a junior copywriter or a junior development associate. And by junior, I don't mean less skilled. One of the powerful things about GPT is that you can actually tell it. You are an expert copywriter, you are an expert, expert grant writer. You can make it far more of an expert than you are. By junior I mean, it will take your direction. It's not going to own anything, but it will execute wonderfully. So think about having this sort of expert, junior level person on your team. So you have this end goal and you're going to work with ChatGPT, this sort of junior team member with worlds of expertise to get there. The next thing that's really exciting to know is that ChatGPT will learn as you go along, the more context and information you give it, the better results you'll get from your prompts. So I highlight that here because one of the things that we want to do right alongside the prompting of ChatGPT is give it information at the front end, sort of train it at the front end. It's almost like onboarding this junior person at the front end so that as you give it future prompts, it's drawing on what you've already told it. So 50 prompts later you can say, for the mission of the organization I've described to you, for the donor profiles that you've identified, draft an email sequence, right? And you could have laid out your mission and had them help you. I had ChatGPT help you identify donor profiles three days before and 50 prompts ago. But it retains that information. And that learning feature is really powerful. You can also use it to learn your writing style. So if you are going to be using ChatGPT again with the end goal in mind of drafting email sequences or drafting year end appeal letters, you can say, hey chatgpt. And one thing that I've noticed I've done a couple times that I'll just highlight. I talk to ChatGPT like it's a person, which you do not have to do. I find that I do. I say please. I say, great. I say, that's awesome. I like that. Could you please? I'm going to do that and pay it no mind. I'm talking about ChatGPT, not a person or a group of people. Okay? So you can say, hey ChatGPT. Here are three examples of really effective emails that I have written that reflect my writing style. And you plug in those emails, just cut and paste. Now write a series of emails to donors that would be really excited in this part of our mission. And you've already, you know, given it your mission statement. This part of our mission, write a series of emails to donors that would be really excited about that part of our mission using this writing style. And it will learn your writing style. So this learning piece is really important and I want you to keep that in mind because you're not starting from scratch, so you're building as you go. So you have your end goal. You're going to work with ChatGPT. You're going to train it and teach it as you go. You're going to give it context up front. So what does this look like in. In practice? Let's say you want to launch a new monthly donor program. Okay. Start with hey chatgpt, I run a nonprofit in Blank City. Here's the mission. And you literally cut and paste your mission. You can add your mission and vision. You can add. You can say these are the values of our organization. Then you say we're launching a new monthly donor program. And if you have a description of the objectives of the monthly donor program, you put that here. Right? We're launching a new monthly donor program in order to raise blank amount over the next year. Now, here's the prompt. What are three examples of donor avatars that would be most interested in this kind of monthly donor program for an organization with our mission, vision and values? And ChatGPT will give you three donor avatars. Describe them, what they care about, why they're interested in your mission, how you might communicate with them. Once you get that result, you can build on it. You can go deeper. Great. Thanks, ChatGPT. The first one, first donor avatar is really interesting. What might get in the way of that donor avatar giving to our organization? What are five specific points of confusion or concern that that donor avatar might have about what we've shared? So you notice a couple things here I'm building. I don't have to restate the mission. I can refer specific specifically to we liked donor avatar one or I like all of those donor avatars. What are specific points of confusion or concern that they might have and it will spell it out by donor avatar. You can also zero in on one. I also find it to be particularly effective to give constraints. What are five specific points? Can you give three examples, et cetera? You can continue to expand on those results. This is the executive summary of our current strategic plan. It outlines our vision, priorities, goals and core activities. Based on this, write an email sequence of five emails that invite donor avatar number one to join the monthly giving program. Over the course of the sequence, I want you to address the points of confusion identified above. I want you to describe our work in a compelling way and include a clear call to action. That's the prompt. Then you're going to get five emails. Now, ChatGPT has a few word limits that are really easy to get around. You can, as you're feeding it context, you have a limit on what you can put in and that's about 3,000 words. But you can start a new chat thread and say, continue to build on the previous chat and just keep adding context. Right? So because it learns, you don't have to start from scratch. You don't have to fit everything in in the chat that you're feeding it. So if your executive summary of your strategic plan, for example, your mission, vision, values, and description of programs are more than 3,000 words, you can just break that up into chats. Similarly, it'll cut itself off after about 500 words that it is giving you. If you see it do that. Just say, continue on your previous response and it'll just keep going. Now, let's say you really like the emails, but they sound too stiff. You can say, rewrite the emails and make them sound more casual and fun. You could say, rewrite the emails and write them as if you're talking to a sixth grader. You could say, write the emails and make them sound less casual and more serious. You can say, rewrite the email and include more examples of blank, blank, and blank. You can go back and forth with this ChatGPT content you've been given. Now, to wrap up our email sequence, you have five emails that are aimed at specific donor avatars that you really like. It addresses their concerns and points of confusion. It's compelling. It shares information about your work and your monthly donor campaign that you're inviting them into. It includes clear calls to action. Now you can say, okay, ChatGPT, give me 15 subject lines for the emails that would make my audience want to open those emails. So you have the email written. It's generating your 15 subject option line options for you, and you can say, I really like number 2 and number 15. Give me 10 variations on those two email subject lines and you can continue to drill down. So it's taken me a number of minutes to walk through this, but those prompts actually did that series of prompts to see what I would get on behalf of the student that I'm working with. That entire thing took me seven minutes. That's an entire email sequence in seven minutes that they can then plug right into their email service provider. I was very, very excited about that. Okay. Another use case that I love for nonprofits and this is revamping a homepage or a donation page. I actually just did a whole training inside my accelerator all about how to translate your strategic plan into content for your homepage and your donation page to make them really compelling. So I've been thinking a lot about revamping nonprofit websites so that they are actually inviting and attracting to the right people. So you can use the same information we've been talking. You're talking about your mission, your strategic plan. Or you can feed it the text from your current homepage and ask it to improve on that language. Let's say you start from scratch. You can say, hey, ChatGPT, you are an expert fundraising copywriter with 20 years of experience writing copy that raises millions of dollars for small social justice nonprofits. We are a small social justice nonprofit in Blank City. Here is our mission. So then you would say, using the information about our mission, et cetera, whatever you've shared, write copy for a new donation page. You could also say write copy for a new donation page that appeals to the donor avatars above, because remember, it remembers the donor avatars that you have identified above or that it has identified above. You could also just leave it at right. A donation page. Right. Just a plain donation page. You could also not give it your mission and your vision. You can just describe, this is what our organization does. It doesn't have to be fancy. And then you'll just continue to tweak what ChatGPT gives you. When you get the content back, it will outline happy. For a new donation page, you can say, make it more bold, make it bolder, make it more compelling. You could say, model it after X, Y and Z. Nonprofit, right? Charity, Water, Invisible Children. You can go back and forth with ChatGPT to get what you want. You can take the language that it has given you. Say, great, that's great copy. Thank you. Thanks, chatgpt. Now give me the structure for a donation page using this copy so that I know exactly what order to put things in and include headlines or headers in between each section so you can actually have it structure as almost like a wireframe. Your donation page for you. You can ask it for recommendations based on this copy. Where should I input or insert pictures? What kind of imagery could I use on this page to best reflect what's being described? This is going back to the point I made at the very beginning about sort of sparking your creativity. Okay. Third, use case presentations and other types of content. So let's say you have to give a presentation, you have to do a workshop, and you are just stumped. You're like, I don't really have time to sit and draft this whole presentation outline. You can literally say, chatgpt, here is a past presentation that I've done, or here is an article that I've written or series of emails that I've written on this topic. What are five topics that I could base My presentation on you could not feed it any of that content or context and say, I have to give a presentation about blank. The audience is made up of A, B and C, and my goal or objective for the presentation is X, Y and Z. What are five possible presentation topics that I could present on and then drill down in the same way that I talked about with the donor avatars, the emails? You could say, I really like presentation topic 1. Give me five other examples just like that one. Once you have a topic, you can say, draft an outline for a 20 slide or 50 minute depending on the parameters you want to give it presentation about that topic. You can have it draft the outline. You can have it draft the slide content. You can have it recommend images for your slide, layouts for your slide. There are so many use cases for ChatGPT. I could spend hours doing this. I just today prompted ChatGPT to draft a model partnership agreement for a friend whose organization is partnering with another organization and they needed a template for how to structure this sort of unique program agreement that they're entering into. Basically the prompt was, my organization is a nonprofit and we're entering into an agreement with this other nonprofit to do blank work, draft an agreement that covers ownership of ip, payment structure, revenue sharing, sharing of audience lists, sort of all of the things that they were struggling around how to structure. It was really helpful. I mean, that was again, hours of work that was saved just by having ChatGPT come up with, with this template. So like I said, I could spend hours doing this. I won't. I wanted to cover three use cases with you so that you could, I don't know, just start thinking about how you might plug into ChatGPT in your own work and in your own life. We talked about fundraising and donor avatar research, messaging to your donors, crafting emails all the way from idea to subject line. We talked about web content, homepage, donation page. That Same flow with ChatGPT works for marketing materials. I talked about a homepage and a donation page. It can be fundraising materials as well, right? A one pager works the same way. We talked about presentations and workshops. You can think about content in this third use case as blog posts, an outline for a series of blog posts, an outline for a series of newsletter or email content that goes out to our newsletter list. Our newsletter list is made up of people who are described in this way, you know, draft an outline of emails to them about A, B and C. Right? So thinking really broadly about content and then finally, just the example I gave about practical things like mous I've seen people say, here are the seven things I have to get done today. I eat lunch for half an hour in the middle of the day and I go for a run at the end of the day. Craft a plan for my day. Here are the objectives for a meeting. Here's who's going to be in the meeting. Craft a draft agenda. So there are these practical ways as well. Like I said, I pulled a lot of this together in really concrete ways. The model prompts, the how to Build prompts, the how to train ChatGPT, and the short video training about how to get started into my nonprofit Quick start bundle. And one more time, you can get that@richiebabbage.com backs nonprofit chatgpt bundle. I'm probably going to talk about this again at some point. I just think it's such a cool and useful tool and I want to lower the barriers to entry. For any of you listening who have thought, yeah, I'm not really sure about this tool. Seems a little overwhelming. Seems like there's a lot. Trust me, I was there with you. I get it. And hopefully this little sort of presentation today was helpful in jump starting your thinking about how you might be able to integrate the tool into your life and into your workflow. I definitely encourage you to check out the Quick Start guide and I will see you back here next week for more Mastermind. Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of the Nonprofit Mastermind podcast. If you liked this podcast, I would also love for you to subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you think that what we talk about here could benefit another leader in your life, please share with your friends. Finally, if you'd like more leadership in your life, you can sign up for my weekly 5 minute read Leadership Forward 321 newsletter. I send articles, resources and inspiration every week curated around a leadership theme to help you lead your nonprofit better. You can sign up@richiebabbage.com Leadership Forward 321 that's it for this week. Thank you for joining me and I'll see you back here next week for More Mastermind.