Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics

AI for Nonprofits with Cheryl Contee

• Community IT Innovators • Season 7 • Episode 35

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Carolyn Woodard explores what it really means for a nonprofit to adopt AI responsibly and effectively with Cheryl Contee, co-founder of BrightWorks AI and Change Agent AI and co-author of the Amazon bestseller AI for Nonprofits: Putting Artificial Intelligence to Work for Your Cause. Cheryl is a pioneering technology entrepreneur recognized by Fast Company, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and The Root 100, and has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and the BBC.

The conversation reframes AI not as a threat to nonprofit jobs but as a way to multiply capacity in organizations that are already stretched thin. Cheryl and Carolyn dig into practical strategies for getting started, what makes a good AI workflow, and why the most successful nonprofit teams approach AI as an ongoing learning journey rather than a one-time implementation.

This episode covers:

  • Why the question for nonprofits is no longer whether to use AI — it is already embedded in your email, CRM, and productivity tools — but how to use it responsibly and creatively in service of your mission.
  • How to identify the right starting point: pick one workflow you dislike, test one or two tools against it, and share what you learn with your team.
  • Why humans must stay in the loop, especially for high-stakes decisions, sensitive interactions, and anything requiring lived experience, nuance, or accountability.
  • Leadership habits build an AI-ready culture, including normalizing experimentation, creating a prompt library, and documenting what works.
  • Common pitfalls to avoid: chasing every new tool, skipping staff training, ignoring ethical considerations, and expecting immediate transformation.

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Carolyn Woodard

Welcome everyone to the Community IT Innovators Technology Topics podcast. I'm Carolyn Woodard, your host, and today I'm so excited to be talking with Cheryl Contee about AI. So, Cheryl, would you like to introduce yourself?

Cheryl Contee

Yes, Carolyn. I am so thrilled to be here with you today. Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm Cheryl Contee, as Carolyn mentioned. I am the co-founder of Brightworks AI, which is a nonprofit, an AI adoption consultancy for nonprofits.

Cheryl Contee

I am also the co-founder of Change Agent AI, which is an alternative LLM to the big ones like OpenAI, you know, Google or Anthropic, for those who want something that's eco-friendly, data private, and data secure for sensitive populations and trained on nonprofit sector values.

Cheryl Contee

I am also the author of AI for Nonprofits, putting artificial intelligence to work for your cause, available on Amazon. Day one bestseller. It's still selling out.

Carolyn Woodard

I have it, and I said before we started talking, I've only really dipped into it, but I just love the structure. It's very clearly laid out. You have guest authors on the different pieces of the different chapters about how nonprofits can be using AI. So I am a fan so far. I can recommend it.

Cheryl Contee

Oh, thanks. Well, it's very practical and tactical. Um, you know, for those folks who are like, okay, I'm ready. Let's roll up our sleeves and figure this out. It's very much a field guide.

Cheryl Contee

In part, you know, I wrote the book in part because, you know, I was hearing some nonprofits say things like, Well, here at X Organization, we won't be using AI. To which I'd be like, Oh, sweetie, honey, baby doll, I don't think you understand what's happening. Okay. Uh, AI,

Cheryl Contee

You've been using AI for 10 to 15 years. Moreover, it's been using you. That's called classifier AI. That's your spell checker, that's your spam filters, that's how Instagram knows for sure you want those shoes and will get them to you in two days. And you can actually watch the truck drive to your house on the app, right? Um,

Cheryl Contee

Of course, 2022, right? You know, sort of the big bang of generative AI, AI that can create. And I think what's interesting about that, Carolyn, is that, you know, a lot of people don't realize that moment was literally the fastest technology adoption in history. You know, it took literally 38 years for radio to reach, you know, like 50 million users, right? It took seven years for the internet to reach 50 million users around the world.

Carolyn Woodard

Yeah.

Cheryl Contee

It took two months, two months for Chat GPT to reach 500 to a million users. And, you know, that has never happened before. That is unprecedented. And, you know, I think what people, you know, we're moving from generative AI, AI that can create, very important, into agentic AI, right? Which is AI that can think, plan, and act. And

Cheryl Contee

I think it's really important for people to plan so that they, you know, they don't uh fall behind.

Carolyn Woodard

Yeah, I've I've been hearing from a lot of people at nonprofits and in the philanthropy field that it just feels like this tidal wave that's washing over us. And one thing I loved about talking with you earlier was that you are able to talk about it in a way to kind of return agency to people who are using it. So I'm really excited to have this conversation.

Cheryl Contee

Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, look,

Cheryl Contee

AI is becoming infrastructure, right? Like it's it's whether you like it or not, it's built into your email, it's built into your CRMs, it's built into your fundraising platforms, your research tools, your productivity software. It's just it's gonna be normal, right? It's like it's email, it's Wi-Fi, it's spreadsheets, right? It's just there.

Cheryl Contee

So, really, then you know, the question isn't like, should my nonprofit use AI? Yes, like it's already again, that's actually not a choice, sweet P. Like, okay, like let's all get on the same page there. You know,

Cheryl Contee

It's really, right, how do we use AI responsibly and creatively and powerfully in service of you know the mission that we've taken on? So there's just this amazing opportunity, I think, for nonprofits to, you know, people who are guided by values and mission to serve more people, understand their communities better, you know, reduce the administrative burden, you know, unlock new insights, predictive analysis, and just scale your impact, right? Like,

Cheryl Contee

What if you could get more done, like 10x in a day, right? Like, how meaningful would that be to the work that you do? And

Cheryl Contee

I know a lot of people, Carolyn, are freaked out about well, if I let AI in, it's gonna take my job. And that might be true in some other sectors, but I have yet, I don't know about you, girl, I have yet to encounter the nonprofit that has too many people and too much money to accomplish their incredibly ambitious mission. Okay, so this is not that's just not a real thing, right? I don't think like yeah.

Cheryl Contee

Instead, here's here's here's what I want for y'all, okay. I the one of the first times I used, you know, uh the at this time chap GPT, I've migrated over to Claude and uh change agent. But uh, you know, I had like a presentation to to put together. And you know, I had I had my coffee, I was settled down, you know, I was ready to park it for like the next few hours, which is normally how you know it took to do it from scratch, and I was done in basically 30 minutes.

Cheryl Contee

And Miss Carolyn, I was beside myself, like I did not know what to do. Um I went to yoga and then I took a nap. And I want that for you know, for you listening. Okay, I want that for you because you know, this is a really challenging time that we're living through, and the work that you're doing is really challenging.

Cheryl Contee

And not only can you maybe get more done in a day, but maybe you can have more time for you in a day so that you are sustainable, yeah.

Carolyn Woodard

Yeah, no, I heard someone resp uh describe it as like the most amazing executive assistant you've ever had or could have, because they're so in tune with how you work and what you want to do. And what nonprofit every person on staff has an assistant? That just doesn't exist.

Cheryl Contee

Great. I mean, what if you had, you know, five digital employees? I have a scheduler now, Lexi at skej.com, S-K-E-J.com. Like I have I struggle to cope with this time and place, let alone other times and other places. So that is a really big help to me having, you know, sort of an AI agent. Um, and

Cheryl Contee

A lot of people, I will say 80% of people have no idea that Lexi is not a real person. Like she just, you know, even though it says in the bottom, like, Lexi is an AI robot. Um, you know, they don't know, you know, and they don't care. You know, they're just trying to, you know, find a time, you know. Yeah, and I, you know, a research assistant, right? Right, an executive assistant, like, you know, just right, just

Cheryl Contee

What if you had more hands, right? What if what if, you know, there were three of you or five of you? That's pretty cool, I think. Um, so you know,

Cheryl Contee

I think instead of thinking about just tools, right? We just talked about tools. Tools are important, but at the end of the day, it's mission first, technology second, right? You know, like

Cheryl Contee

I really try to encourage people to think not what shiny fancy AI tool should we be adopting and spreading around, but what are the problems we're trying to solve, you know, and what AI tools might, you know, be fit the shape of that challenge or that problem.

Cheryl Contee

I believe that AI is an amazing intervention for like what are the things, the tasks on your team's plate that they hate the most? What are the things that are the most time-consuming, like repetitive, you know, tedious, like expensive. Like, find an AI tool that fits the shape of that, you know, hole in your life. Because again, like, right, what if you got someone else to do the things that you hate doing? So you can do more of the things that you love and the things that only human beings can do.

Carolyn Woodard

Yeah. I feel like we just talked about that. Like the manpower might be a major challenge of most nonprofits. And so using AI to address that problem instead of saying, oh, there's this tool that does this thing, do I have something that fits the thing that it does? Yeah.

Cheryl Contee

Exactly. Uh I mean, how are you using AI, Carolyn? I'm curious.

Carolyn Woodard

Well, I actually just had this happen the other day that I every month I have to download a bunch of CSV files uh from Zoom about our webinars that, you know, tell our attendance and the survey that they answered, and you know, all the stuff that I want to know about how can we make our webinars better.

Carolyn Woodard

And every month, four years, I have put that all manually into a spreadsheet, right? And I was doing it as I always do. And I suddenly, in the midst of like I'd done the first sheet and I was like, hang on, I'm gonna ask Claude. And it literally took, I mean, it may have taken about as long.

Carolyn Woodard

It took about 45 minutes, and it was so interesting because it was like co-creating it with me. It would do something and say, does that look right? And I'd say, oh no, like the headers are off by one. Can you move them over to the left one? And it would go away and come back and say, Well, how about this? And I'd say, Oh, that's great.

Carolyn Woodard

It was just really um energizing. And like I said, it took about 45 minutes, which is about how much time it would take me to do it myself. But next month, it made a little agent for me, which in Claude is called Projects. So next month I just drop my CSV files in that and it's gonna do it for me. We'll see, we'll see what it does.

Carolyn Woodard

But I was just, it was really, I felt so like energized and excited to have accomplished something like this with this co-creator, like executive assistant, intern, you know, an intern, but in a really good intern.

Cheryl Contee

Yeah, like the smartest, right, like the smartest intern ever. Like it can do a lot of things, but it doesn't have your lived experience, right? Your context, right, your meaning, your quality control.

Cheryl Contee

And, you know, even though it was, you know, in this case, it was 45 minutes of kind of, you know, co-creating and teaching it how to do it, it was probably way less tedious than the like, you know, I have to copy it like field by field or whatever, import it, right?

Cheryl Contee

And right, the next time you do it, it's probably it's gonna remember and be like, oh yeah, this thing that we did before, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. I know how you like it. I know you like it, you know, sunny side, you know, oh up and exactly with a little salt and pepper. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am.

Cheryl Contee

Well, you know, there are a lot of common pitfalls, right? Like, you know, it can go sideways, AI. Like, you obviously are a baller, Carolyn. Like you don't need you don't need any help. Okay.

Carolyn Woodard

But for those of you - a lot of marketers, I think, have been using AI for a little while. And there's a lot of marketers who are using it, so there's a lot of good answers because it has a lot to work with, even if you're using like the freemium tools. Um, so but I think that's like the

Carolyn Woodard

I guess I would say that's the takeaway is keep using it, keep trying it because you get better at using it too.

Cheryl Contee

Yes, exactly. I think that is, you know, the the first place, you know, to start is like, you know, pick like, for example, one thing that you hate doing. What is the thing that you always shove to like 4 p.m. at Friday because it is like your least favorite thing?

Cheryl Contee

So pick one workflow, you know, test one to two AI tools on that workflow. And one of my favorite sites, I think you know about this site, Carolyn, it's called "there's an AI for that.com." Literally, that's the name, you know, because you don't have to use Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT. You can, and those can do a lot of things, particularly Claude these days can do like a lot of things. But, you know, there are literally thousands of AI applications, and it's fun to even just go to there's an AI for that.com and just see like the the breadth of, you know, and just the energy, you know, in kind of the AI creation community. So

Cheryl Contee

I trust and believe you will find at least one to two AI tools that can help you with that specific tasks or workflow, you know, then compare the time saved or the quality improved, just like you did, Carolyn, right? You were like, hey, you know, nor it in this case, it didn't necessarily save me time this first go round, but it was a far more pleasant, you know. It was just like

Cheryl Contee

Quality of life is sometimes, you know, as important as time saved or money saved.

Cheryl Contee

And then tell people about it. You know, there's a lot of you know, AI that's happening in the shadows. You know, everybody wants to be better at their job, but nobody wants to get fired. So they're like, oh, I'm just gonna use AI over in this corner. You know,

Cheryl Contee

I think it's important, you know, to tell people, you know, about your workflow, your experiment, your learning cycle, and then you can iterate and expand and maybe pick up some other ideas from other folks. That's just like a very simple kind of AI, let's get started playbook.

Carolyn Woodard

Yeah, I love it. Yeah, we have at our organization, we have a um, we use Teams, and so we have a dedicated AI team that we all like share. Well, I did this and I was trying to do this and it didn't totally work. And what do you advise? So we have a very active conversation going on over there.

Cheryl Contee

Right, which is kind of exciting, yeah. Um, and you know, I think you know, if you've got something that's like structured or pattern-based or like, you know, really text heavy, for example, you know, or like there's there's math or like things need to go in different cells in your spreadsheet, like it's really AI's great for that kind of thing, right? Uh

Cheryl Contee

It is less great, right, for haste high-stakes decisions, right? For sensitive human interactions. Do you have a context-loaded judgment call to make? Which in these times that's very real.

Cheryl Contee

You know, if it's a thing that's gonna require lived experience or trust, nuance, accountability, you know, I think humans need to stay in the lead. And I think humans need to stay in the loop.

Cheryl Contee

As you know, Carolyn, human in the loop is literally an AI technical term, which means like, you know, you can't just let the agent do whatever, right? Like, you need to stay in the driver's seat because there's a lot it doesn't know, it doesn't understand.

Cheryl Contee

It's like a really smart intern, it doesn't even know what it doesn't know. So, you know, someone always needs to be reviewing, checking, driving the process, you know, ensuring the quality control. Yeah. Well, uh, you know,

Cheryl Contee

In terms of leadership habits uh that I recommend, um, and I know there are a lot of leaders listening, uh, you know, we just talked about normalizing learning around AI. You know, I think, you know, what I've seen, just as you were talking about, Carolyn, you know,

Cheryl Contee

Creating regular opportunities for your staff to share experiences, prompts, lessons learned, uh, you know, just to encourage that curiosity and safe exploration. You know, I just did um a talk uh in Palm Springs with uh the head of Board.dev and the head of social impact at GitHub. And you know,

Cheryl Contee

Sid Espinoza was saying, hey, you know, at Microsoft, which owns GitHub, you know, it's now in our performance reviews, like how much we've used AI, like, you know, and how we've been using AI. Like literally every staff person has to do that.

Cheryl Contee

In part, you know, it's to really encourage people to explore, to be curious, to, you know, to to jump in feet first to a certain extent. I think it's super important also to capture and share what works as you've been doing, you know, like document your successful use cases. You know, what are workflows?

Cheryl Contee

Create a prompt library. You know, a lot of people, you know, quietly will just sit in front of, you know, the blank prompt screen, you know, like you know, Claude will be like, it's coffee and claude time, and they're like, duh, I don't and that's okay.

Carolyn Woodard

What am I supposed to ask?

Cheryl Contee

That's okay. Yeah, that's okay. You know, like you, you know, like prompting is a whole skill, you know, like we have like a couple of chapters about that in the book, you know, like how I mean being a prompt engineer, like being good at talking to the robots is literally a job. Um,

Cheryl Contee

So create a prompt library where people can be like, all right, you know, I I I want to do some prompting, I want to start building some stuff around my fundraising. You know, what are some fundraising prompts that I can get started with, right? That are relevant to the work that we do, or you know, email, you know, templating, etc. Um, yeah.

Carolyn Woodard

I've seen that done also as like a recipe, like prompting recipes where it's like you want to give it the context and then you want to talk about what you want it to do, you know, like how you go through to create a good prompt.

Cheryl Contee

A hundred percent. And then I think staying connected to you know how this is all evolving. Like obviously, you know, there's gonna be bumps in the road. You know,

Cheryl Contee

I'm not trying to be, you know, Pollyanna about this, right? Like, you know, we're gonna go through kind of like, you know, you know that book The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Like this is we're going through that now. Like this is the jungle, okay?

Cheryl Contee

But I will tell you, you know, what was interesting about AI for Nonprofits when it came out sort of last, you know, late last summer, you know, it was a day one bestseller, as I mentioned, which was amazing. But uh, you know, it reached the top five in the AI category on Amazon. It reached the top ten in business and finance, which is a huge category. Uh, and it was number one in office automation, which is a strangely actually pretty big category on Amazon for weeks.

Cheryl Contee

It was on there for weeks, and you know, my uh, you know, co-authored Darien Rodriguez Heyman and I, you know, went back to our publisher and we're like, did you code it right? Because we are trying to reach nonprofits, the nonprofits. Uh and you know,

Cheryl Contee

While he said, Yeah, no, it's it's you know, that's right. It's Amazon. Amazon is putting it in front of people. And what I

Cheryl Contee

My takeaway from that, Carolyn, is that you know, people are looking to nonprofit leaders for cues, for ideas, right? You know, on how to, you know, implement these tools, you know, not just powerfully, right, not just efficiently, but ethically, right?

Cheryl Contee

And so this is an opportunity not to sit in the backseat and sort of sort of like see what happens, but to actually take a leadership role in modeling how you do this right. So that's the opportunity. Um, so you know, I hope that you will, you know, tap into great resources like NTEN.org, nten.org has some great resources. TechSoup uh these days. I was just talking to Marnie Webb, who you probably know, you know, has uh, you know, TechSoup has a great set of resources. There's a lot out there um, you know, to to keep learning as you know, tools and best practices evolve.

Carolyn Woodard

Yeah, and that's something that nonprofits really have in our DNA, is like we always talk to our peers, we always talk to, like we have all these all-staff meetings, you know. So sharing it there and finding the resources, I think that is a big part of it that maybe is less challenging than some of the other pieces.

Cheryl Contee

Absolutely. Uh, there are, you know, some pitfalls. Maybe we can talk about that, you know, really quickly. Uh,

Cheryl Contee

Obviously, you don't want to chase every cool new tool that comes out. We talked about that already. Um, you know,

Cheryl Contee

You don't want to not train your team. You know, upskilling is really important. And even the most awesome, cool tools aren't gonna have a lot of impact if people don't feel very confident using them, right? You know, like if you get like something that's you know $30 a seat, you know, for 10 people and zero people use it, that's a hundred percent loss. Right? Like, don't do that. Um, you know, I think uh

Cheryl Contee

Obviously ignoring ethical considerations, you know, you want to make sure you're you're thinking about bias, you're thinking about you know confidentiality and and sensitive data.

Cheryl Contee

But really, I think the one that I see a lot is just expecting immediate magical transformation. And that's not really gonna happen.

Cheryl Contee

AI is really more of a journey, right? It's you're starting a learning process. You're you know, hopefully you're you're getting your team on the path to experiment, to discover what works, discover what doesn't work. It's okay if it doesn't, if it doesn't fit, that's totally fine. You know, how do you refine and optimize your workflows? You know.

Cheryl Contee

The idea is to gradually build your capacity over time. So, you know, instead of thinking about AI as a single breakthrough moment, you know, think of it as that journey, that road you're, you know, you're you're getting onto.

Carolyn Woodard

I think in my own experience too, and I've heard this from other people, that the more you use it, the more it strikes you how you can use it.

Carolyn Woodard

So, like my little example of I was doing this dumb thing that I have to do every month, and I suddenly thought, like, oh, I could ask AI.

Carolyn Woodard

And the more you have those moments just around like your own productivity, the more working at a nonprofit, you could have those lightning moments where you're like, what if we put the census data with our population? And then we, you know, it's like you start thinking about your mission and ways that it could uh transform that as well.

Carolyn Woodard

But you can't start out with, let's change our mission all around. The more you learn about how the AI works, the more you can see where those inflection points might be.

Cheryl Contee

Exactly. You know, the the organizations that I'm seeing that are being successful with AI aren't the ones that are trying to get everything right right away. You know, they're the ones that want to just sort of learn and keep learning, you know, as as things move along. Uh, well,

Cheryl Contee

This has been awesome, Carolyn.

Carolyn Woodard

I'm so grateful. Thank you so much for your time and your just words of wisdom in this book, which I will put everything in the show notes. So we'll have a bunch of uh URLs and links there to the stuff that we talked about today. But again, Cheryl, just thank you so much. I really appreciate this conversation.

Cheryl Contee

Oh, thank you, Carolyn, and thank you, y'all, for listening. Appreciate it.