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Julia Campbell
Hello, and welcome to Nonprofit Nation. I'm your host, Julia Campbell.
Brad Caldana
Campbell.
Julia Campbell
And I'm going to sit down with nonprofit industry experts, fundraisers, marketers, and everyone in between to get real and discuss what it takes to build that movement that you've been dreaming of. I created the Nonprofit Nation podcast to share practical wisdom and strategies to help you confidently find your voice, definitively grow your audience, and effectively build your movement. If you're a nonprofit newbie or an experienced professional who's looking to get more vis, reach more people, and create even more impact, then you're in the right place. Let's get started.
Hi, everyone. This is Julia Campbell. This is Nonprofit Nation. Thanks so much for joining us today. Now, the question that we're asking and the challenge that we're addressing, nonprofits are producing more digital content than ever. It seems like emails and social posts and website updates and advocacy campaigns and text campaigns. But from what I have seen, many practitioners still feel like their work doesn't add up to a cohesive strategy. So in this episode, I'm going to speak with digital strategist Brad Caldana about how nonprofits can move from sort of executing scattered digital and AI tactics to leading with a clear strategic plan. Brad and I have known each other for quite a few years. I don't think ever met in person, though. I think we've just mostly lived in the digital world with each other. So happy to have you here, Brad.
Brad Caldana
Yeah, yeah. Thanks everyone. Yeah, there's someone now with the Instagram handle. She has great stuff around digital for political campaigns. You're extremely online friend, and it's funny having all of these online friends, right? People who I talk to via Zoom. We collaborate. There are folks also I collaborate and have done trainings with for years now that we've not met in person, which is pretty wild. But you still have these deep relationships because of all of this modern technology.
Julia Campbell
Well, you do a lot of digital summits and you know, I love virtual summits. So yeah, let's just tell people your website sort of from the beginning. So if they want to learn more about all the summits that you do.
Brad Caldana
Yeah. The center for Digital Strategy, we host a few different summits throughout the year. Our current format is two digital strategy summits throughout the year. Those either happen in a one week format or we're experimenting with sometimes now as a two week, multi day a week to make it more accessible. This idea, you know, one of the things I've realized is like we keep trying to replicate in person summits online and they don't have to have the exact same format that like actually fewer sessions over more days makes it more accessible to more people. And so we're experimenting with that. And in 2024, we introduced the AI for nonprofits and advocacy summits. And those actually happen every four months. And so last one was just last month. Next one will happen I think in late July or August. I joke all the time and I say we could really host this every month. But it would also be so much changes, so much changes. But it would also be overwhelming for all of us speakers and everyone. Right. So we're trying to do them every four months or so, bringing in different speakers, covering a really wide range of all of the things AI for nonprofits and advocacy. And the digital strategy summits are really similar. All things digital strategy, fundraising, advocacy, engagement, analytics, digital, social, really just to give people really a really accessible platform. And the content goes from beginner 101 to much more advanced kind of director level content. So we've got a little bit of something for everyone in the summits.
Julia Campbell
Oh, I love that. I know that you've spent more than 20 years at this intersection technology, you know, organizing social impact. So what first drew you into digital strategy work for nonprofits and advocacy orgs?
Brad Caldana
It was really just kind of an intersection of passion. I had been working, really just an intersection of passions. I had been on the board of an environmental nonprofit in Miami beach. And you know, my free time was organizing different advocacy things from film screenings around, you know, kind of social justice, civil rights issues. And I was also doing some freelance video and writing content for a travel and tourism blog when I was living in Miami and took a job as a field organizer on the 2008 Obama campaign. And in working in the field. One of the things I always say is really funny. I was talking to the new media director then and I asked them if they were using Twitter at all. And they were like, no, I've never heard of it. And the new media directors were really focused on the online platform, which is called Maibo. Those of you who might remember, those of you knew it was just, it was a pretty groundbreaking online platform for organizing events. And a little bit was a carryover from the Howard Dean kind of technology that they had built. And they were really focused on that and kind of content and less on the emerging social media platforms. And I was like, yeah, I know that, you know, nationally Barack Obama is technically on it. I'm like, I don't really know if it'll be applicable to campaigns. I mean, maybe someday Twitter.
Julia Campbell
Remember when Twitter was Twitter? I miss those days.
Brad Caldana
Yeah. And this first is, you know, gave rise to someone who took the Oval Office. Right. Because of their Twitter personality Persona. Right. Like crazy. So, yeah. So stayed in that space for a really long time. Went from working in the field to working at the DNC doing state new media strategy, and then hosted one of the first trainings I did there was Twitter for organizing. It was an interesting, like, two part step of like, oh. And I stuck around in that space for a really long time. I was the digital training director for the 2012 campaign. Helped work on the battleground state strategies and really a big focus on, you know, how do we train and mentor all of the state digital directors and staff? How do we help field staff understand digital? And also building out some training programs for volunteers. How do we help them scale out their own understanding of digital for more impact?
Julia Campbell
Absolutely. I love that you worked. You played a key role in digital trading for the Obama 2012 presidential campaign. Huge fan of Barack Obama over here. But what lessons from that campaign kind of still apply to nonprofit digital strategy today? Well, what can we take away from that?
Brad Caldana
Yeah, there are several really key things to think about. One is, is the investment in training and skills. You know, when we were hiring state digital directors, most people didn't have the background of being director. They had been in digital marketing, maybe that focused, you know, mostly on content or, you know, maybe they did, they ran email somewhere or maybe they were managing some part of a digital campaign at that time, but maybe, you know, probably hadn't spent a lot of time with digital ads or whatever. Right. And so to fully give them autonomy, they needed to know all of these other things. Right. And I think that actually holds true for Digital leadership today, too, that like most people who you might promote in your organization aren't going to have a holistic strategy view. They're going to have learned a niche that they are really strong in, whether that is creative content, social media, maybe advertising, maybe email. And it's a different set of skills to actually build out a holistic digital program. Right? And so I think there's a huge, huge piece of that. And we, and I, I was super fortunate that we had in HQ there were about 200 people on the digital team, a big email department, ads analytics folks working on the website. There were another 200 people in the States, and there were like 200 people working on the tech side of things, right? A whole different department doing, building the deep infrastructure, the infrastructural side of the website and the different apps that we were using. And so I was able to tap into the people in those different departments and help translate that to the people working in the states, right? And also help translate what the people in the states needed and what people doing field organizing and advocacy needed, which was, which is different because a lot of the folks, you know, who were coming in and doing ads analytics, whatever it was, they weren't coming from the nonprofit space, they're coming from the corporate space. Right. And so, you know, there are things lost in translation there that are mission critical. Right. I think while there's a lot of overlap to what campaigns, nonprofits, you know, mission driven orgs do and companies, there are also some really big gaps right. In, you know, stewardship and relationship is really different. Right. And so, you know, I think some of those things still hold really true. So the really big takeaway is the training, like helping upskill people. The thing that kind of goes along with that is holistic strategy. So having an actual strategy that thinks through the sum of the parts and a piece I always go to in my, like, foundational training, but in all of my training is like having really, and this is the strategic part too, having really clear organizational goals that you're then translating to your programs. Because a lot of times in digital strategy, folks get lost on tactics versus the big picture goals. And so, you know, in the Obama campaign, it was pretty simple. Does this get us, does this clearly get us votes? Does it get, does it get us money or volunteers? All of which at the end are to get votes? Right? You almost think of the other two as, as, you know, superseding that. Does this, does this get us more votes? And that would actually come up in questions, right? Like, I was literally, we were talking about Google, and I was like, ah, we got to get on there.
Julia Campbell
Oh, my gosh. Google.
Brad Caldana
Yeah.
Julia Campbell
Last from the past, those of you
Brad Caldana
don't remember, it was Google's attempt at one of their many attempts at a social media platform that failed. And they did a deep dive with a intern. You know, we came up with, you know, kind of our break, our analysis of it, and the. The digital director and the senior digital director at the time asked me. They're like, can you help us translate and understand how does this actually get us votes or volunteers? Right. And if we can't do that, then it's a waste of our time. Yeah, I think that's true with all organizational digital. Right. Like, is the thing we're doing clearly translating to our actual goals, and if not, then, you know, something's got to change.
Julia Campbell
Totally. I agree with you. I love that you. You emphasize, like, moving from tactics to strategy, because that's a lot of what I teach, because it's sort of like, oh, posting an Instagram reel, that's a tactic. That's not a strategy. That is hopefully a tactic that will get you to your goal. But being strategic means having that sort of North Star that you. Everything is tied to. And I think with social media especially, it's challenging because oftentimes social media posts don't have that red line kind of roi, return on investment. So it might be building trust, it's building leadership. But I think building followers, building awareness, building website traffic, all of that is going to be leading to your organizational goals, whether they be increased volunteers, increased donations, in the case of a political campaign, you know, increasing votes. I love the focus that you have from tactics to strategy. So let's kind of shift over to AI. I've had a lot of podcasts on AI for nonprofits. I just was at the afp, the association for Fundraising Professionals International Conference, and there were several sessions on AI. But the issue. The issue at the conference was that you not supposed to go outside the presentation software, so you can't go on the Internet and actually do a demonstration. So I was thinking that's just so representative of our sector. Like, we want to talk about AI in this philosophical sense and do a bunch of slide deck, present a bunch of information, but we're not actually showing people, you know, so, like, where do you see the biggest opportunities for nonprofits right now in this space?
Brad Caldana
So we actually ran an AI for Nonprofits and Advocacy cohort last fall. We were hoping to get it running again. We will get it Running again. I had some personal health issues for the last few months and so otherwise there would have been another AI cohort. And much of what we do in the AI summit is actually a lot of it is here is how you do. And that's a, that's a big part of what I've always done in our digital strategy summits as well. Is always kind of lean on that with speakers too. Is, is. Some of it is always theoretical. Some, some stuff needs to be theoretical. How can we show people how, how to do the thing, right? And so, you know, folks who are just getting started, I, you know, I honestly think that the thing I teach on in this is, is workflows. Is there a workflow that you go through every day that you can figure out how to incorporate AI to make it more efficient? And for those of you who don't, you know, the, it's funny because also the phrase workflow is not always super clear, right? Workflow is the set of steps that you do to do a thing, right? And so, you know, in email your workflow might be, you know, conception of, you know, what is it that we need to send. And then it's ideally the targeting up front, right? So like who are we targeting with this email campaign? What is it that we're trying to do then? The content, right? We have to produce the content, we have to work through edits and approvals and then we have to send it and then we have to analyze it ideally afterwards as well, right? Think there's a couple of steps in there. A lot of orgs still aren't doing enough analysis on the back end, right? And so if we're thinking about those, the workflow and I think in orgs too, that some folks are good at using the phrase SOPs stand standard operating procedures. It's another name for workflow, right? It's like, what are the steps we take to get there? And I'll just give you that example, right? So step one is like, okay, we're starting this campaign. It is a little divergent depending on how your organization handles, tracks, maintains data. In order to say like step one, do not put your organization's data in ChatGPT or any of the other LLMs that you can use AI assisted analysis, you should not put your supporters private info and email this data into one of those. Right? But it's happening. And so in this workflow, though, ideally, you know, most ideal is we've got a data system where we can like ask the AI, like who would be great targets for this fundraising campaign or to volunteer to host these events or like come to our whatever, you know, when we don't have that, we use other ways to do data. But step two is like, okay, based on what we know about our people. Could you help me get started with a draft? One of the things I've really loved about AI and I think there's a really strong correlation of folks who work in digital content and have adhd. The more I've talked about having ADHD and a lot of us elder millennials and even younger millennials getting diagnosed as an adult, I hate hang out a whole bunch of us in digital content. And I think it's, I think to me it's also, you know, I'm not very adhd. I'm about to go off on another topic. I won't do that. But having adhd, helping me kickstart the draft of the email, super helpful. So I'm not, you might hear this phrase human in the loop a lot, right. And so I don't want it to draft the whole thing, but I'm going to give it some content and it can even be as simple as like, here's our landing page for the event. Can you do a first draft of, you know, invite for this event? And that just helps my brain look at it and like, oh great, here's what I want to change because that's not how we format our emails. And here, you know, on the higher levels there's training and things you can do to your AI to help it understand. And look at the emails you normally send, right? Like, oh, I want it to look more like this event email we sent before. And so, and then, you know, you can, folks always get stuck on subject lines to test, right? And you can say, hey, give me a couple great subject lines. And even if it gives you five and you only use two and there's two you, but it helps you kickstart those thoughts. Right now you've got an email. You know, I think for a lot of folks the getting started process process really is like 30 minutes to an hour. And so it's like, oh, you've, you've taken the getting started from 30 minutes to an hour, right? People are kind of like, you know, they're like trying to work through that first paragraph and overthinking it. You've turned that into a two minute process and so you've cut that out. And then, you know, you get it out there, you send it out into the world. Even if it's just that one email. But some of these platforms, and especially like my friends at Change Agent who theirs is specifically built for nonprofits and advocacy, its AI will actually say, hey, was this supposed to be part of like a multi email series? Because we could draft for you the next three emails in the series or hey, do you need landing page copy or social copy to help go along with this? And so it's about that efficient time saving in those workflows is the best place to get started.
Julia Campbell
Right? I think the time saving, I think where nonprofits get stuck here is that they think of, they just think of the tactics first. They're like oh, I'm strapped, I just want to get on AI or I just want to. I need to send an email, I need to write a blog post, I need to post an Instagram reel. How can we be more strategic? Like what are the biggest strategic mistakes you think organizations are making around AI and digital? And how can we pull it all together so that we are. We're making sure that we're all on the same page at our organization?
Brad Caldana
Biggest mistakes in digital AI and digital AI I think I'm going to break those into three answers. The biggest mistake in digital is not having actual holistic digital strategy, meaning an organizational wide strategy that is thinking about and I talk about the three pillars strategy, capacity and infrastructure and developing a holistic organizational strategy and then a by campaign or department strategies that interlink right. I think we still have a lot of organizational disconnects building out the actual capacity we need to lead on those strategies. I think a lot of orgs it is truly, I think a lot of orgs are still underfunded in the right places in digital, which is a hard thing to say without going super deep. But it's really understanding well, if these are our strategic goals, how do we have the internal and or external. I think for most orgs it really is the best strategy is a balance of internal and external capacity to send emails, to update your website, to do all of the things you want to do and then infrastructure. I break that into a number of things. But I think we don't think enough about as like our CRM, our email platform as actual organizational infrastructure. And we think about just like this other thing, but it is a part of a modern organization's infrastructure. It is how you fundraise, manage relationships and build an online presence that is it is no longer abstract. I think sometimes people still think of like online and digital as abstract as, as separate from our standard lives. But it's not. It is a daily Part of our lives and a daily. Part of like how we interact with the world. Right. And so those pieces and the other thing I encourage people to think about as infrastructure is your social media presence, your email list. Right. And those I break into owned and loaned. Right. Your email, your, your SMS list, you have a lot more control over. I think of those as owned. Right. It's, it's a way you can, it's permission based.
Julia Campbell
Yeah, and yeah, exactly.
Brad Caldana
It's more intimate and, and the loaned being the social. Because you never know how social platforms are going to change. Right. And it's less like Twitter.
Julia Campbell
Right?
Brad Caldana
Yeah. Rip Seriously. But it's part of your infrastructure, right? You, you can't, you, you'd have the best strategy in the world but if you don't have the reach, an infrastructure and capacity to do it, then you're not going to get, you're not going to create the impact you want that actually impacts your organizational goals. Right. So I think there is all that to say the fine point, a holistic, complete organizational digital strategy that informs and leads and then creating strategies by campaigns and goals that actually aligned to the goals and missions. Right. As opposed to tactical where we're just like, oh, we will do X thing because we need to do X thing. So I think that's the biggest downfall there, the AI downfalls. I think number one is not having a plan policy strategy to just start using it now. I think a lot of folks are held up in. I now see organizations who have been talking about policies for a year and there's an issue there with what they call AI shadow use or shadow AI where people are using AI and no one else in the org knows about it. They're using without guardrails because there's not a policy. And so, you know, the policy should be simple and adaptable. In the last summit, one of the leaders who talks about AI policy and she, you know, this whole session is like an AI policy in 90 minutes. In this session it needs to be a guardrail. And AI is going to keep changing so much that if you are meeting once a month as an organization to discuss your a policy, you're going to keep being confused about what it should be and that stopping the work from happening. And my theory, I think a lot of the folks who are actually doing AI is that like you need a simple policy, guardrails, it should match your data policy. Lots of orgs don't have a true data policy. So it's good to have a get one. Right. And so yeah, there's a lot of
Julia Campbell
silos and they should all be sort of working together.
Brad Caldana
Yeah. And so just getting healthy guardrails set up and ways for people to report and share their AI use. Right. And so that way you can see how they're using it. People can be talking about it and I think just opening up the permissions and culture to say, to say that we're orgs. It's weird. Some orgs are like still asking how they're going to adopt AI, but AI has adopted them. It doesn't matter. You, like we've passed that point because like if you're using the Google Suite or Microsoft, like most orgs are using one of the two of those.
Julia Campbell
Right.
Brad Caldana
AI is built in. It is built in and people are like, it's just there asking and answering questions for you. And so instead of like the question being are we going to use it? It's a question of how are we going to use it and what are the guardrails? And you know, like one of them is super simple, is like no personal data. Right. You're never putting these things in these unimproved tools. You know, two is like reporting the tools you are using and like sharing that back because it's, it's also hard for an org to create policies and guardrails without knowing what the tools are doing, what data it's accessing, what info is going there. And so, you know, it's, it's really that, it's, it's the, the big mistake is not having quick, quick transparent policies to allow people to adopt it.
Julia Campbell
What do you think about the debate I've been hearing where some non profits think that if you are using an AI tool to craft content that you need to disclose it. For me, I think that, I don't know, kind of on the fence, I guess it depends. But you know, I help organizations craft social media content. So do I get credit for that? Like, I don't need the credit for that. Fundraising consultants help write direct mail pieces all the time. Do you need to disclose that? I don't know. What are your thoughts on that?
Brad Caldana
That's my thought and that's what I've heard other people say as well, is like, did you ever credit a ghostwriter? Right. Like how many?
Julia Campbell
Like I've been a hired grant writer. I was a hired grant writer for years when I started my business.
Brad Caldana
Yeah. And you know, there were kind of the like lightweight AI tools. And it's funny, I think some of these companies had to relabel and rebrand that their platform form actually was AI after the LLMs took off. But like, Grammarly, folks have been using Grammarly for a while. For a while now, Grammarly has been able to help you write paragraphs. And no one was citing Grammarly as like having helped them write a paragraph. It's an assisted tool. It's a ghostwriter. It's a. Whatever it is. And so I do not think that is necessary because just as you said, you have all these consultants and different people writing for other people. We didn't cite them. And so, you know, I don't think that that's necessary.
Julia Campbell
I know the only time I would say is, like, if you have a statistic, like, make sure you're citing the source.
Brad Caldana
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Factual documents and information you're pulling from somewhere else. Yes, right. And even if AI is helping you pull in stats and statistics, you should still cite the original source material and double check it for sure.
Julia Campbell
Check it. Oh, so a fun story about using ChatGPT. My family and I just went on vacation to LA in San Francisco for spring break and we were looking at the Hollywood, you know, walk of stars. And we're asking where all the specific stars were. And Chachi PT was giving us like walking directions and exactly where they were. And my son is a huge fan of John Williams, the composer. And we asked him, we figured John Williams had a star. So we asked, where's the John Williams star? And ChatGPT kept telling us this one place across from the Roosevelt Hotel. This one place across from the Roosevelt Hotel. We looked around a little over 30 minutes and I wrote back and I said, look, are you sure that this is where it is? And they said, oh, actually, John Williams doesn't have a star. Like 99% of the stars were correct, but that 1% of the time. So that's why you do always have to fact check, you know, make sure that, you know, the sources are cited correctly.
Brad Caldana
But yeah. Were you using audio for it at all?
Julia Campbell
I was using audio.
Brad Caldana
Audio is actually even worse with facts.
Julia Campbell
Really?
Brad Caldana
And it doesn't tell time. Well, you know, all of LLMs is their prediction engine. They are looking at everything that all of the data it can find, it has been trained on before and what is most likely to happen. Right. And I know that can be confusing for folks, but, but it's, you know, when you ask it to like, help me write this email, what it's crazy. Neural networks are doing is, you know, one of them is. And, you know, tricky to explain, but, like, basically inside of these LLMs, right? The large language model, which is the backbone of ChatGPT, Claude Change Agent, there are all of these, what they call nodes that are trained on information and the nodes talk to each other to help output. The thing crazy thing is we do not know what happens inside of a node. We only can see the output and you can train it and kind of give it parameters. And so when you're writing it's like one node is essentially saying like, oh, I know what an email is and another one is saying, oh, I understand what a fundraising, you know, a nonprofit email. And I know this thing, and I know this thing and I know this thing. And they somehow talk to each other and spit out the thing for you and write it. Right? And you know that's also what our brain does, right? Like we don't think about that process, but we think about all those things and we put it together. The voice, for whatever reason is even more. And I've seen it do both of these things. It is trying to suggest what it thinks should happen and then it goes into a self reinforcing loop. That's what you saw where it wanted
Julia Campbell
to make me happy.
Brad Caldana
It wanted to make you happy, but then it kept reinforcing itself that it's right.
Julia Campbell
Right.
Brad Caldana
There are these great videos on like someone asking about it, about time. And someone will be like, I just ran a mile. Or you know, hey, chatgpt, time me. I am gonna go run a mile and give me the time when I'm back. And that, you know, the person waited 30 seconds and said I'm back. And they're like, great job, you ran a 10 minute mile. And the person's like, I've only been gone for 30 seconds. How's it possible? It's like Chad, he's like, there's no way you ran that long, right? And so it's, it's, it's this weird prediction engine thing. And so yeah, like it is incredibly important that we always say human in the loop, right? And so it's great assistant. It's great at helping, it's great at organizing, producing things and speeding up processes. And you still need to stay incredibly in the loop.
Julia Campbell
Human in the loop. I love that. That should be the title of your book.
Brad Caldana
Yeah. You know, I've been contemplating the folks who might know it. I wrote a book called the Digital Plan, which is essentially a framework for digital strategy. And I've been thinking about one basically a new version of basically digital strategy in the AI era. And I guess that's it. It's human in the loop Digital strategy in the AI era.
Julia Campbell
I love that. I could see that at an airport and picking it up and buying it. That's sort of what I'm thinking of. I can see that title. This has been fantastic. Where can people find your book? Where can they find out more about your summits and sort of connect with you on socials?
Brad Caldana
Yeah. Centerfordigitalstrategy.com is the, is the main place you can find repository.
Julia Campbell
The repository.
Brad Caldana
The like the repository.
Julia Campbell
I should say.
Brad Caldana
Yeah. The book, the Digital Plan is is on Amazon. I don't link to it as much. It is. It's funny, it's a couple years old. All of the strategic things kind of hold the same and hold true. Like people still tell me they're like, oh yeah, I got the book recently. I'm like oh my God. I keep thinking I want to get a new version out there. But a lot of it is like the core things I talked about in the beginning. It's like the goals, strategy, infrastructure, you know, and I could talk for hours on each each of the subjects. But yeah, I'm thinking about working on the new version of the book and we definitely have some new stuff coming out on Substack and potentially podcast to talk more about AI and nonprofits and really more of the practical. That's kind of my thing throughout. Like you said, people need to see the how and so my, my passion is really showing the how. Here's how you do it, here's how you think about this. Here's how you create that change with digital and AI.
Julia Campbell
Thanks for coming on, for sharing your insights, for sharing your practical strategies for how we can implement it and I will put all the links in the show note and hopefully we will connect again soon.
Brad Caldana
Awesome. Sounds great. Foreign.
Julia Campbell
Thank you for tuning into my show and for listening all the way to the end. If you really enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast app and you'll get new episodes downloaded as soon as they come out. I would love if you left me a rating or a review because this tells you other people that my podcast is worth listening to and then me and my guests can reach even more earbuds and create even more impact. So that's pretty much it. I'll be back soon with a brand new episode, but until then you can find me on Instagram @JuliaCampbell77. Keep changing the world you non profit unicorn.
Brad Caldana
Sa.
Date: May 20, 2026
Host: Julia Campbell
Guest: Brad Caldana, Digital Strategist
Julia Campbell sits down with Brad Caldana—digital strategist and founder of the Center for Digital Strategy—to explore how nonprofits can move beyond scattered digital and AI tactics to become truly strategic organizations. The conversation covers the evolution of digital strategy in the nonprofit sector, lessons from political campaigns, the realities and possibilities of AI adoption, and practical steps for building sustainable, holistic digital frameworks.
Timestamps: 02:10 – 03:12
Timestamps: 03:12 – 04:56
Timestamps: 04:56 – 07:47
Timestamps: 07:47 – 12:27
Timestamps: 12:27 – 14:21
Timestamps: 14:21 – 19:35
Timestamps: 19:35 – 24:38
Timestamps: 24:38 – 26:08
Timestamps: 26:08 – 27:46
Timestamps: 27:46 – 31:44
On the need for strategy over busywork:
"Folks get lost on tactics versus the big picture goals." (Brad, 09:55)
On AI integration:
"AI is just there, asking and answering questions for you… the question isn’t are we going to use it, it’s how are we going to use it and what are the guardrails?" (Brad, 25:17)
On owned vs. loaned platforms:
"Your email, your SMS list, you have a lot more control over. I think of those as owned... You never know how social platforms are going to change." (Brad, 22:25)
On fact-checking AI:
"Even if AI is helping you pull in stats and statistics, you should still cite the original source material and double check it for sure." (Brad, 27:46)
On the core of digital strategy:
"A holistic, complete organizational digital strategy that informs and leads—then creating strategies by campaigns and goals that actually align to the missions." (Brad, 23:01)
This episode is packed with unfiltered advice, practical frameworks, and reassuring reminders that strategy—not tech for tech’s sake—is the driver of nonprofit impact in the AI era. Brad Caldana’s “human in the loop” approach is a call for measured adoption, clear policies, and centering mission and people at the heart of digital transformation.