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Nonprofit AI: NotebookLM, What is AI Hygiene

• Community IT Innovators • Season 7 • Episode 22

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0:00 | 21:02

How can nonprofits move past the efficiency plateau to find real strategic value in AI? In this midweek check-in, Carolyn Woodard discusses statistics from the 2026 Nonprofit AI Adoption Report from Virtuous and Fundraising AI, which reveals that while 92% of nonprofits are using AI, only 7% see a major strategic impact on their mission.

The episode also explores the concept of AI hygiene and why cleaning up your digital files for humans is the first step. Carolyn also discussed Google NotebookLM, a "walled off" library that you can create from your own resources, restricting your AI tool to just your own documents and data. 

Carolyn also highlights the community-led governance model of AI Ready RVA and reminds nonprofit leaders that they do not need a computer science degree to lead an AI-ready organization. Instead, they need a clear mission, clean data, and commitment.

Key Resources Included

  • 2026 Nonprofit AI Adoption Report (Virtuous/Fundraising AI).
  • 92% of nonprofits surveyed are individually using AI tools for productivity and efficiency vs 7% that report they are using AI as a teammate for transformation.
  • Data hygiene: cleaning your data and keeping it clean. 
  • AI hygiene: Preparing your data and data architecture so that AI tools can return the best outputs quickly, without multiple prompts and investigation into accuracy.  
  • NotebookLM. A tool within Google Gemini that can create a "walled off" library that AI will search within. Using vetted resources can help the AI be more trustworthy and return better outputs. 
  • AI Ready RVA - a cohort model for local resources and networking to help manage the learning and funding for pilot programs and events.


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Carolyn Woodard

Hello and welcome to the Community IT Innovators Midweek Nonprofit AI podcast check-in. My name is Carolyn Woodard. I'm your host, and I'm not an AI expert. I am a learning along with all of you. I'm very curious about AI and what it can do for nonprofits specifically. And there's just such a fire hose of information about AI coming at us right now that I was trying with this podcast check-in to just pull out a couple of different stories and threads that may be useful for you and how you're thinking about AI and kind of what's happening currently.

Carolyn Woodard

So today I wanted to start out with a report that many of you have probably seen. This was a joint effort between Virtuous and Fundraising AI. They surveyed 346 nonprofit organizations in late 2025 and published their findings in January 2026. And they published it as the 2026 Nonprofit AI Adoption Report. And there a lot of these statistics have been kind of floating around on LinkedIn, and people are linking to them, and it is really striking. So the headline that came out of this report was that 92% of nonprofits are using AI in some capacity, but only 7% report a major strategic impact on their mission.

Carolyn Woodard

And that the core theme of what came out of these interviews and survey of these nonprofits was that most organizations are using AI individually for work productivity, and there's a real risk there. I guess there authors and many people are identifying this idea that if you do things more, if you do busy work quicker, you might just get more busy work to on your plate to have to do. So trying to uh adapt those productivity gains to let you do more human-oriented things that you need to have, get some time back in your day to think about things or do bigger projects that you haven't had time for because of the busy work. But there's a real risk that being able to do busy work more efficiently means you're the person that does that thing and you just end up with more busy work on your plate. So uh, but

Carolyn Woodard

One of the findings was that individual staff are using AI tools for productivity, but that there's not really a leadership role or uh strategic thinking about enterprise-wide AI, a strategic vision, uh project that's going to be implemented, leadership around the ways that AI is going to be intentional about the ways AI is going to transform nonprofits, not just how we do what we do, but also what we are doing.

Carolyn Woodard

People have called this the efficiency plateau. I think that's one of those terms from Gartner or uh Harvard Business School. But using it as uh kind of day-to-day just to help you do one or two things more quickly or efficiently in your day-to-day work doesn't change how your organization functions and kind of leaves a lot of the opportunities where AI could make a big difference in your delivery and in your efficiency.

Carolyn Woodard

It leaves those opportunities on the table because nobody's thinking about the big picture. You're just thinking, oh, I can use AI to help me draft this email to my colleague, or it can help me organize my inbox, or it can help me plan the gala, but you're not thinking of the larger picture.

Carolyn Woodard

So 7% of leaders, the AI leaders who said they are using it for strategic impact, are using AI as a teammate, not just for tasks. So moving from efficiency, being able to do all of the things they do faster, uh, to effectiveness, doing things differently. And a key takeaway from this report is that using AI as a teammate and drawing on,

Carolyn Woodard

I just read somewhere that AI, because it used the large language models, it contains multitudes. So it contains a lot of collective wisdom. And sometimes we aren't seeing it that way. We're seeing it as this cute little tool that can help us write an email faster.

Carolyn Woodard

But if we think of it as a thought partner and we think of it as a teammate, a strategic partner, you can ask it deeper questions and you can pull more out of it that's going to help you think about how you're thinking about your nonprofit mission or how you're thinking about your work. So if you want to move from that 92% of nonprofits that are just using it for busy work into this kind of strategic leadership thinking around how AI is transformative, you're going to need a couple of things to help you make that move. And

Carolyn Woodard

It's not just like you turn it on and tomorrow you're now in strategic thinking. It's a gradual process, of course. You need to be comfortable with the tools first to kind of understand what they can do for you. So using AI to start organizing your inbox or writing a draft of a paper you're going to present or putting slides together, all of those are good kind of gateway entry points. And so, what you want to do then is think about what it will take to move past AI kind of as a gimmick to AI as a thought partner, as a strategic partner. And

Carolyn Woodard

Two things to think about that came up for me over the past week are uh clean data and clear rules. And all of this is hopeful that you are listening to this podcast and to all of our webinars and thinking about how leadership can get involved and how these are leadership questions, board questions, board discussions, staff discussion, all staff discussions about your values, your mission, and how you can see AI tools fitting into that and giving you opportunities that you can use to further your mission. So

Carolyn Woodard

I wanted to talk a little bit about something that I've mentioned a couple of times before, which is uh Google's Notebook LM. And there are some other tools like this out there, but the Notebook LM is really easy to use if you're in Google and Gemini. Uh remember, log in with your work email to Google to Gemini. But then you'll see this tab that you can use for the Google Notebook LM or you can create a notebook. Um, and

Carolyn Woodard

When you do that, you can create this restricted library so you can upload all the documents that then you're gonna ask the notebook AI tool about. So we can pull information out of a database at your organization, documents that you have that you're gonna that you can upload. And that's one way that you can kind of vet the outputs that you're gonna get. So they're based on trusted information and work that your nonprofit has been doing over the years, sometimes over decades. And if you wondered why, I

Carolyn Woodard

A lot of nonprofit staff are kind of pack rats, and we save a lot of these this these uh documents, like your um your strategic planning, your notes from your retreat, three-day retreat that you did, where you talked about you know what your nonprofit is doing and got some real deep learning out, and you kept all of those notes, and they've been sitting in their folder in Google Drive uh for ages. Um, and they're in your head, but they're also in Google Drive.

Carolyn Woodard

So you can put them, those you can define this notebook that then you can query, you can use AI to help you ask you questions about it. You pull out different strategic um ideas that you might have. So

Carolyn Woodard

This is all great because it also is um helping with something that nonprofits are all worried about was the fear that your data will leak out into these public models or that a staff member will update, upload some sensitive document into a tool that's gonna just use it in the public AI and that it will be findable somehow through that, which it's you know important information. It's um important to your organization. You want to keep that data secure, and you also want to keep it clean. So

Carolyn Woodard

I heard this term recently, AI hygiene, and I thought, well, that's such a weird term because it's not like the AI has to clean. I'm sure you could teach it to clean itself, but really it's what you're talking about is data hygiene, keeping your data clean.

Carolyn Woodard

So, how is AI hygiene related to data hygiene? And it's this practice of keeping your data clean and secure and organized so that the AI can easily read it. And the good news is if you have it clean, secure, and organized so humans can read it, then it's going to be easier for your AI tools to be able to understand and use the data that you have.

Carolyn Woodard

One way to think about it is if a folder is a mess for a human, it's a disaster for AI. So cleaning up your data for staff and for humans is going to help clean it up for your AI tools.

Carolyn Woodard

And if you think back to what I was just talking about, you have the notes from your retreat from five years ago where your executive team was all together and you did this great deep thinking, and you have those notes. You might have several different versions of it. You might have the notes that Kathy took and the notes that Bill took, and you put them all together in this document or in these files, uh, but then you didn't look at them again. You might have multiple versions of your employee handbook. You might have multiple versions of many foundational documents that you'd want your AI to be able to read.

Carolyn Woodard

If you're a person looking in that folder, you might look for the most recent one and you just know intuitively, or you might look at it and be like, that still says draft on it. Is there one in here that says final? But an AI isn't going to know that. It's going to look at all of those documents. The AIs are getting smarter faster, but they're still going to have trouble making those connections.

Carolyn Woodard

So when you are cleaning up and do duplicating those folders, you're really helping your AI. You're helping it get faster at providing you good outputs.

Carolyn Woodard

So one of the ways to think about it is you look in the folder and you think, like, if I had a brand new intern or brand new junior staff person who just started here and they they don't really know anything about my organization, could I have them look in this folder and they would would they know which one of these documents are relevant? If the answer is no, then you need a person to go through and look at those files and clean them up, archive the ones that, if you still can't get rid of them, you can archive the ones that are the older versions. And you can get AI tools to help you with that as well.

Carolyn Woodard

You need to be in charge of the organizing because again, the AI isn't gonna know. But um, you can use that to help you do the data hygiene that you need that is in the bigger picture, the AI hygiene, which is gonna help those tools work better. So, again, just thinking about if you wouldn't show a document to a volunteer, for example, then you please don't leave it in a shared folder where AI is going to be able to access it because everyone has permission to it. So

Carolyn Woodard

Leadership taking on, improving how humans interact with your data is really necessary at this point in time. It's something we've been putting off for decades. Like that folder of the notes from the retreat five years ago, we're just like out of sight, out of mind. One day I'll use those documents. That could be useful.

Carolyn Woodard

Now is the time.

Carolyn Woodard

And luckily, we have these tools that can help us organize. You can ask AI, like, what's in this folder? What do you think the priorities are? And then you can go through and help it, help you clean it up. And then in addition to having clean data, clean files, clean folders, a clean organizational structure, which I'm sorry, you're just gonna have to do.

Carolyn Woodard

This could be a staff-wide uh project. The leadership needs to take a leadership role. Uh, maybe you need a consultant, maybe you need to reassign someone, take stuff off of their plate. So they are just worried about your AI, your folders uh in SharePoint or in Google Drive and what AI can find in their like your AI hygiene database guru for a couple of months, and you're gonna make that time for them.

Carolyn Woodard

But in addition to that, you might be looking for other resources and local resources. So I read this really interesting article right now about Richmond, Virginia, and I'm sure they're very similar to many other cities, counties, maybe local nonprofit organizations as well. This one is not nonprofit -only based, but it's called AI Ready RVA. RVA is the local nickname for the Richmond area.

Carolyn Woodard

And it started as informal committee meetings, a bunch of people who were all interested in AI and who were worried that there's such a gap in the federal and state AI regulations, and especially around workforce development, uh, but also all kinds of other areas of policy. So we've talked a lot here about the data centers, about community impacts, about the workforce development issues, about um business, small business, how to help uh our communities use AI ethically but productively.

Carolyn Woodard

They they announced that they just appointed an executive director, which is how it came up in my um on my radar. Um, but it's just if you go to their website, which I will share in the show notes, it's just such an interesting um model. What they did is they started with these informal committees, and then they have created this cohort model. So

Carolyn Woodard

On their website, you can see all these different cohorts that you can join. So there's one for nonprofits, there's one for workforce development, um, small business. Uh, I think there's like 12 or 15 cohorts right now. So if that's the area that you're interested in, you can join that cohort. And then the cohort itself is kind of self-organizing and self-uh regulating. So they are having meetings, they're having events, they're having um, you know, they're they're getting grants, they're having input. They did this at an event with Mark Cuban on uh AI readiness for workforce development. Uh, just really interesting.

Carolyn Woodard

As you know, as a nonprofit, there's, I don't want to say there's tons of money slushing around right now, promoting AI, but there's a lot of money. There's a lot of programs. And so trying to help make sense of that in a local context. This is one model. And so

Carolyn Woodard

If you look around, you may have something similar local to you that you can join, and you'll find peers that are also interested in these areas.

Carolyn Woodard

Pretty much all of the segments of the population that nonprofits work on are gonna be transformed. I keep saying this, it is so disruptive. So everything that we're looking at, if you think out five years from now what is gonna happen to workforce development, you're gonna have to be AI literate. How is that gonna happen? How is it gonna force other, you know, gaps in um people's ability to get jobs and have jobs or you know, lose jobs, all that sort of thing. So that's just one area. It's not my area of expertise, but yeah, that's an easy one to see. Um, but

Carolyn Woodard

Across the board, wherever your nonprofit is working in, AI is gonna have big, big impacts beyond just efficiency of your staff members being able to write emails better.

Carolyn Woodard

So tying it all back together, uh, this is AI has been sold to us as so easy to enter. You just ask it, you prompt it, you just ask it a question and it'll give you these uh great responses. Um, so I would just want to say again, it is it is really easy to get into. And

Carolyn Woodard

It's so easy to get into, it's also easy to move to these next levels of using it for more than just like playing around with, oh, can you make me a funny picture, an image, or can you um find a good restaurant that's in walking distance of this metro where I'm gonna meet my friend, or you know, something like that, to using it for more efficiency and productivity in your own workday, to then understanding more how it works, how to prompt it, uh, what it can do, what it can do well, what is not so great at doing. And

Carolyn Woodard

Using that understanding and as you build up that knowledge, being able to see the opportunities where your nonprofit could be meeting your mission in different ways and probably will be meeting your mission in different ways five years from now. So

Carolyn Woodard

You don't need a computer science degree. You most nonprofits already think deeply about the work that they're doing and the environment that they're working in, the ecosystem, large causes, systemic causes of the challenges that they're working on, the communities that they care about, the challenges those communities are facing, the assets and the knowledge that those communities bring.

Carolyn Woodard

I just want to tie it back to this idea that when you're interacting with a large language model, don't think about it as like the stupidest things out on the internet, uh, or from Reddit or wherever the large language knowledge, you know, model has been pulling its knowledge from. But there's a lot of great things out on the internet too. And there's a lot of great documents and experience, and you can almost think about it as like the elders talking to you, like all of this knowledge that we can access. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

So if you if that helps you in thinking about adopting AI, I hope that is helpful. Uh keeping the ethics, keeping the commitment to your community and the trust that they're placing in you as a nonprofit. So think again about having a clear mission, having clean data, and having that governance piece and looking around you for resources that might be right around you. So

Carolyn Woodard

I hope that's helpful. Uh, until next time, you can catch us in on Friday in your podcast feed. We'll be talking some more about technology topics there. And then I'll be back next Tuesday with more AI for nonprofits. Take care.