Nonprofit AI Voice Intake Technology with Chip Kennedy

Carolyn Woodard explores voice AI in the social services sector with Chip Kennedy, founder and CEO of CivicReach, a technology company building AI-powered communication tools for nonprofits and government agencies delivering human services. Chip brings a rare dual perspective: years as a technologist and startup founder alongside his role and experience running a nonprofit serving families experiencing homelessness.

When people we serve need information, how can we get it to them? When our nonprofits free up employee time by using technology - in this case Voice AI to answer simple questions in incoming calls - what else can those staff members do with that time? Can emerging technology help staff up government agencies and nonprofits who are chronically understaffed and under resourced, without losing the trust of the communities they care about? 

The conversation digs into how voice AI is helping under-resourced social services organizations close the gap between people asking for help and the staff trying to reach them. Chip is candid that voice AI is not the right fit for every organization, and he shares how to evaluate whether it is right for yours. 

He also makes a compelling case that AI-driven phone intake is not a job displacement risk in human services – a sector so chronically understaffed that organizations are more likely to redeploy freed-up staff capacity than lose positions.

Carolyn and Chip discuss:

• Why human services is one sector where job displacement fears around AI largely don't apply – and what freed-up staff capacity actually looks like in practice.
• How to evaluate whether voice AI is a good fit for your organization before committing to a vendor. What are the questions to ask about their business model, their data policy, and their understanding of your nonprofit mission.
• The value of running a structured technology pilot, why more nonprofits should be asking vendors for one, and how to ask.
• How to build internal champions and skeptics into your pilot team so you get honest feedback at the end.
• Three questions every nonprofit should ask any AI vendor: where does your data go, how will our organization have to change, and how do you plan to stay sustainable?

Resources Mentioned:

• CivicReach – https://civicreach.ai

_______________________________
Start a conversation :)

• Register to attend a webinar in real time, and find all past transcripts at https://communityit.com/webinars/
• email Carolyn at cwoodard@communityit.com
• on LinkedIn 
• on reddit/r/nonprofitITmanagement
• on the Community IT website

Thanks for listening. 

Transcript

Chip Kennedy 0:22

Business sustainability is not for-profit or nonprofit. It's so much more layered than that and a sign you can serve any sector and do as much good as you want, still build a sustainable business.

Carolyn Woodard 0:34

Welcome everyone to the Community IT Innovators Technology Topics podcast. I'm Carolyn Woodard, your host, and today I'm really interested to be here talking with Chip Kennedy, who is the founder and CEO of Civic Reach. So, Chip, would you like to introduce yourself and tell us about what your company does?

Chip Kennedy 0:53

I would love to. Thanks, Carolyn, for having me. I'm really excited to be on the podcast.

Chip Kennedy 0:58

My name is Chip. I'm the founder and CEO of Civic Reach. We are a technology company that builds better communication tools for nonprofits and governments in human services and social services. What that means specifically is we use tools, things like AI, which can be scary for some folks, and lots of other tools that help close the gap between social workers, caseworkers, and anyone on the front lines of delivering social services in this country to folks who are asking for and receiving help.

Chip Kennedy 1:30

We think there's too much bad technology and too much bureaucracy that often gets in the way of these conversations and delivering benefits and support. And we aim to close that gap.

Carolyn Woodard 1:39

It's so the more I learn about your company and your story, it's so interesting because it does feel like this new frontier to this kind of age-old problem of getting the information to the people who need the information. But I would love to hear more about you and how did you come to found this company?

Chip Kennedy 1:59

Happy to share. And you said it well yourself. New frontier of an age-old problem. And I think that that explains my story well.

Chip Kennedy 2:07

I've had two lives as I've come about my career. One as a technologist, learning the tools of how to build fast-paced startups, how to leverage technology companies for social good. I've been an engineer, a chief technology officer. I've started companies in the tech for social goods space. Lots of both horror stories of startups that have gone well and gone wrong, as well as just a lot learned in how to build technology for humans, the things that actually make our lives better.

Chip Kennedy 2:36

The other life is part-time throughout my adult life. I've had the absolute privilege of running a nonprofit in the homelessness services space with my family. It's something my parents started. It's in Boston. It's called Christmas in the City. And we throw this annual holiday party for families living in homeless shelters across Greater Boston.

Chip Kennedy 3:01

It was the brainchild of my parents before I was around, but I sort of inherited a role of helping to keep the organization around and run it. And I had a hand in bringing a version of that party to New York. I now live in North Carolina, so I think we're finding lots of opportunities down the East Coast. But it's all to say while I'm over here building a career as a technologist, the whole time I would spend every December thinking through how do we create a little bit of extra dignity and magic and joy for families who've had the hardest year imaginable. And trying to answer that question every year, not with technology, just with elbow grease and heart, was fascinating to me.

Chip Kennedy 3:41

So Civic Reach as an idea was the first time that I said, well, what's my biggest problem as a nonprofit director? Living in the social services space, helping families in that space. And how can me, the technologist, Chip the technologist, solve it?

Chip Kennedy 3:56

And communication tools, you said age old problem. That was the problem. We knew exactly how our services worked when someone came in our doors. We we didn't understand how everyone could or should find us. And we sure didn't understand how to refer folks to other services when they need. The social safety net is an interesting term because it's frayed in places and some of the holes are bigger than others. And doing this job for years now and talking to nonprofit directors and anyone who is delivering services, uh, it is not equal everywhere, and it is not easy to navigate.

Chip Kennedy 4:29

So that communication layer, that referral layer, how this network comes together, uh, I think you could use some TLC from the innovation side of things.

Carolyn Woodard 4:37

So if we're if there are people out there who are listening to this who are working in the nonprofits who are serving those people and constituents, um, can you talk a little bit about uh evaluating and responsibly deploying AI voice, which is what your company does, and talk just a little bit about how it works.

Chip Kennedy 5:01

Yeah, I'm gonna give you two answers, and and I want this to be accessible for folks.

Chip Kennedy 5:06

And I'll first say what I'm not supposed to say. Voice AI is not for every organization. I mean, with lots of organizations, it's an amazing tool. It if you want to have a demo, it will really impress you, but it's not meant for every organization. I I talk to nonprofits, I talk to counties and cities, I talk to social workers all the time, some who are really excited, um, some who aren't excited, some who are skeptical, and and many where we I'm the first one to say it's not a great fit. Uh so the lesson there is yes, if we want to talk about VoiceAI, I can tell you all about how we built this really interesting product.

Chip Kennedy 5:42

But I what I really want the takeaway to be for leaders in human services and social services, whether you're a caseworker, a social worker, a nonprofit director, anyone who's dedicating a part of your career to helping your community, uh, innovation is your friend. And I think maybe one tool is not for you. Maybe AI is not necessarily what your organization is ready for right now, but changing how you do things and experimenting with what comes next will help you in the long run.

Chip Kennedy 6:12

And I want every organization we work with, every every organization that that listens to Civic Reach and the tools we build, including and especially ones that don't work with us in the long run, to take that lesson away. Keep innovating technology, keep innovating best practices, management practices, because the best that can happen is that you grow and you serve more people.

Carolyn Woodard 6:33

Yeah, it totally makes sense. I I love that idea. That is very similar to what Community IT says as well, which I think we're also not supposed to say. But you know, we want we want every nonprofit to have the IT that works for them. And sometimes it's us and sometimes it's a different solution, but we want it to work.

Carolyn Woodard 6:51

So can you can but just to go back a little bit, can you tell me a little bit more about if you're in this sector and you're thinking about a type of a tool like this that will help with your intake? Um, are there some things that you should be looking at in the evaluation? It sounds like you're saying both for the tools that you're considering, but also for yourself, like know thyself as well.

Chip Kennedy 7:16

Yeah. So Civic Reach has learned a lot growing up and figuring out how we can best solve this age-old communication problem.

Chip Kennedy 7:23

And our starting point was intake for each organization that we work with. So any organization that's on the front lines of helping folks in need, what does their intake process look like? So when is someone a good candidate? When does our technology help?

Chip Kennedy 7:37

It's when you know if you had more capacities for intake and you solve that problem to some degree, your organization would serve more people. It's a simple equation.

Chip Kennedy 7:49

And so if if we talk to folks and we say, okay, you want to serve more families, you want to serve more meals, you want to expand how many beds are serving folks, funding's the number one challenge, always.

Chip Kennedy 8:02

Now let's get scrappy and figure out how what the next challenges are. And if we say, well, what happens if you had two more staff answering phones? If you had a call center set up at the front desk there, what would happen? They'd say, well, we would serve twice as many people. Our caseworkers would be happier, we could triage more, we could this whole program of emergency assistance we used to do that we don't do anymore because we couldn't handle the phone calls.

Chip Kennedy 8:23

When we get those answers, we say, Well, let's talk about innovation for intake, let's talk about the tools Civic Reach has built, because we can now solve that part of the equation, and you will get more capacity because of it.

Carolyn Woodard 8:34

So are there technology or technical considerations that uh organizations have to think through? And I assume you help them think through those.

Chip Kennedy 8:44

Of course. There are, and and I know Carolyn and your whole team probably does this all the time of let's learn as much as we can about the technology so we're not bringing a foreign concept into organizations.

Chip Kennedy 8:58

It's it's not just giving capacity through technology, it's creating organizational capacity.

Chip Kennedy 9:03

I'd say the biggest implications of our work and the products we build, especially using AI, it's the people implications. Uh so

Chip Kennedy 9:13

I mentioned if we're gonna work with an organization, it's because we know that if we can change and shift the equation of how expensive and hard it is to do intake, we can increase their capacity. But increased capacity means increased capacity. It does often mean more cases if you're caseworkers and social workers. It could mean uh longer lines. It it

Chip Kennedy 9:34

AI is not a uh a magic bullet. I I know listeners have absolutely heard this before. What we say that means for the organizations we serve is you want to serve more people. That takes effort. We don't solve that problem. Our technology is not here to do social services. Technology is not here to take care of our neighbors. As a technologist building these tools, I never want to save the day where we're that's the conversation we're having. Technology is here in our AI and what Civic Reach does is technology to support organizations that are helping their neighbors, to help more of their community.

Chip Kennedy 10:10

So we often have to have hard conversations, not a little bit about AI, a lot bit about how might your organization change to meet this new demand. We're gonna make it more effective, you have to make it work.

Carolyn Woodard 10:23

Yeah. Um, can you talk a little bit more about some of those um, I guess, skepticism? We're seeing a lot in our clients, a lot of mistrust of AI in general, like the big AI companies for sure, but also in the area that you're talking about, with interacting with constituents and interacting with the people that you serve and the communities you really care about. I imagine there are a lot of conversations about trusting the AI to be able to do that.

Chip Kennedy 10:57

Yes. Trust is paramount. I'd be concerned if I'm not if talking to someone and we don't talk about trust.

Chip Kennedy 11:06

Here's my take, not just with Civic Reach, but in general, what where's this just mistrust of AI coming from, of which I share. I'm skeptical about a lot of what we talk about at large in AI. It's not doing the jobs that people promised. It's taking work that we didn't want it to from people, either wholesale jobs.

Chip Kennedy 11:26

When we talk about young folks graduating college now, I'm also worried. I advise and mentor so many folks who got the promise of a computer science degree and now they're being told, well, we're going to automate away half the industry. That's rightfully so frustrating.

Chip Kennedy 11:41

And then we have all of these tools, the Googles of the World and lots of these tech companies, so many I use every day. They're giving me AI functionality I didn't ask for that is making my product experience worse or my interactions with whatever I need worse.

Chip Kennedy 11:57

So, how do we solve both those things? And how do we build meaningful technology that is trusted? I think we start by solving those two problems.

Chip Kennedy 12:06

So, one, job displacement. The frustrating thing about the human services sector, the social services sector, to anyone listening that runs or works for a nonprofit doing community services, anyone who works in government agencies doing community services, you are understaffed. I have yet to find someone in any one of these roles that has told me any otherwise. So I know I'm painting with a broad brush, but please, I guess, email Carolyn and tell me if you're the exception.

Chip Kennedy 12:34

We don't have jobs to displace. We are not bringing AI into an area of service where there was a group of folks working really hard and AI is gonna replace them, and and no executive director we talked to, no county commissioner, no one is trying to replace those jobs. We know we're understaffed, we know we're underserving these industries. And there's a complicated funding equation and political equation as to why.

Chip Kennedy 12:57

Here we're gonna solve the technology side of it. So the beautiful thing that happens, when we talk to a county emergency services call center and say what happens when our AI goes live, they say everyone who no longer has to take calls is gonna go work in the emergency shelters during a hurricane event.

Chip Kennedy 13:13

When we talk to human services organizations and city departments working on housing, we ask them what they're gonna do. They're gonna say that folks enrolled in this program are gonna get a call back for the first time because our voicemail backlog was infinitely long, meaning people just weren't getting called back.

Chip Kennedy 13:28

So I I don't hear loss of jobs, I hear helping organizations with people working on the front lines uh be able to do their jobs much more easily and hopefully do more of their jobs. So, and and the the day that Civic Reach moves into the job placement business, then I I want to be in a different I want I want to be in a different job.

Chip Kennedy 13:48

And the other piece is trust. I I this is the challenge I give to our engineers, to our product team, the way we build our product. We never want to build a product that people don't want. They want to say who are our users, folks asking for help. Uh folks enrolling in government programs, folks enrolling in social programs, folks receiving benefits sometimes acutely, sometimes over the long term, who are our customers, folks who work in the nonprofit sector or work for government agencies that are doing that work to help their communities.

Chip Kennedy 14:19

We're doing something wrong if folks don't love our product because we're building it for them. And this is important. We're not squeezing AI where it might or might not belong. We're looking for opportunities where intake and referrals and the entire journey of how someone asks for and receives help are harder than they should be, and we're creatively thinking of technology to deploy.

Chip Kennedy 14:42

A lot of our technology is actually not AI. It's because AI is not always fit for those tasks. But we see problems, we pick the ones where technology is a good candidate to solve it. Sometimes that means AI, sometimes not. And that's what we're going to keep doing. And hopefully people will continue to really like what we've built.

Carolyn Woodard 15:00

I was listening to someone speak recently, and uh, he also was a technologist who works in nonprofits now, and he was talking about this concept of piloting a lot. And he the way he put it for nonprofits was to build in a lot of small decisions before you get to the big no-go, go, no, go decision. So um, and that I think comes out of, you know, like coding and technology as well.

Carolyn Woodard 15:27

But it's not something that maybe a lot of nonprofits really have a lot of experience doing. Like you get the grant, you have to do the thing, it's, you know, like that's the go-no-go decision.

Carolyn Woodard 15:38

So I wonder if you could talk a little bit, since you bridge these two worlds, um, for organizations that were considering something like this, um, are there ways to do pilots? And how would you advise them to go about, you know, testing something out as they're deploying it to their constituents and they have this reputational risk, they have you know this trust issue that we were just talking about. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Chip Kennedy 16:06

I would love to. Um This is the point if I'm standing in a room when this question gets asked of asking who here has heard of a pilot, a technology pilot, and who here has done a pilot. And especially in different rooms with nonprofit leaders, uh it's always lower than I expect.

Chip Kennedy 16:24

So let me state out front: if anyone hasn't, a technology pilot is a way to, in a limited period of time, with a limited amount of expense, test out a technology for your organization and that lowers the risk, meaning you adopt it a little bit, you train some of your staff, don't have to train all of your staff, to see how it might work in your organization before you've fully committed cost to a new technology or a new technology vendor, before you've committed staff to training, and before you've committed change in your program delivery.

Chip Kennedy 16:56

It's when done well, a beautiful way to try before you buy. Uh it's a really effective way to show new technology to your staff without scaring them and forcing change on them all the time. You're you're enabling them and you're giving them tools to explore new technologies as opposed to being forced to use new technologies.

Chip Kennedy 17:14

It also saves money because say a technology or a technology vendor is a bad fit for you. A pilot is a very effective way to learn that in a way that procurement and contracting isn't always a great way to learn that. Uh those are tools run by salespeople. Pilots are run by builders and product people. So you get the strategy organization that's going to be, I think, more earnest with what their technology can do.

Chip Kennedy 17:38

So how to do pilots with that definition? Um, number one, ask. Ask. I I Carolyn, you and I work in the business of creating technology for mission-driven folks. Um, we're here to help them. If someone says I don't want to do a pilot, I'll say, okay, we can make it work. But if someone says I need to test this, of course we're gonna say yes. I I I

Chip Kennedy 18:01

I love the idea that the technology my team has built is gonna help someone. If they want to try it out, great. The terms get to be set by organizations, but not enough organizations know to ask.

Chip Kennedy 18:12

Say, I want to try, I want to do a pilot. What does your pilot program look like? What would a pilot program look like for my organization? So always ask, always bring it up. Um

Chip Kennedy 18:22

Two, create your internal team. Not the team with a vendor, uh, not the consulting team. These folks are all gonna be involved. Carolyn folks like you and me will be involved. But, you know, I run a nonprofit. If we're gonna try new technology, I'm first finding the folks in our organization that are gonna be the champions and are gonna also be the skeptics and they're gonna be the ones who lead this process internally.

Chip Kennedy 18:45

So at the end of a pilot, at the end of that three months, that six months, uh, as a leader of a nonprofit, as a leader in a government organization, you don't have to go ask the vendor building the technology or any consultants how it went. Ask your team. Ask your team that internally managed the pilot, internally used that technology every day. They can be folks who are super excited about technology. They can be folks who are skeptical, but they'll give you their honest opinions.

Chip Kennedy 19:11

I think those are the keys to success. Ask questions, be involved in the process. You don't have to change your whole org to pilot. Uh you just have to decide that you're going to, and that's the biggest barrier to overcome.

Carolyn Woodard 19:26

And it seems like at that point, too, then you've got something great to take to your funders where you want to scale something that you tried versus starting something brand new that you want to get the grant for.

Carolyn Woodard 19:40

Have you did you um when you've worked with different organizations, have has anything like surprising come out of pilots that you've done? Like what have you learned from doing this work?

Chip Kennedy 19:52

I think we learn a ton when we pilot with organizations. And not every organization pilots, but as I said, more should.

Chip Kennedy 20:00

I think the biggest consistent learning that's surprised me consistently, um, which I is a bit of an oxymoron, is organizations often tell us where our technology starts. So someone has you know a nonprofit doing um CSPG community action uh programs for poverty alleviation might have 80 programs. So they'll start in one program, and then as the pilot's running, other folks in the organization start to see the experiences that clients and community members have with our technology, and then the better experience that caseworkers are having with processing applications because of our technology. And the organizationally they'll say, well, when it's going well, we actually picked the wrong program. This program over here really needs it. Um

Chip Kennedy 20:47

We had a whole county government tell us yesterday of just like, hey, we're I know we're building the pilot over here, but someone heard the demo from this department, and this other department wants to cut the line. Um and I

Chip Kennedy 20:59

I know I'm I'm speaking well of our technology, but the learning is, and this is the beauty of it, these were in cost-limited, time-limited engagements. So no one in the county, no one in the community action agency, no one in the nonprofit got in trouble. No one made a bad decision by telling the vendor to start out in one in one department in one program because there was no cost to switching. It was really easy for us to switch.

Chip Kennedy 21:24

And that's not true outside of a pilot, but because we were in the safe bubble of a pilot, everyone got to learn from it. And then in the full implementations, we knew, all right, there's a much more needy, a much more important starting point for us. So you learn about impact and you learn where the impact is going to be. It's not always where you might think.

Carolyn Woodard 21:43

I mentioned this in the email when we were um talking about setting this up and talking today that I've recently been thinking a lot about this issue that it's very difficult in the nonprofit space to experiment and to fail.

Carolyn Woodard 21:59

Because usually you have a donor or a funder who gave you the money, the funding, the grant to do the specific thing. And they want to see that that was effective. And it's so it's kind of like you're saying like they skipped over the part where you learn what's gonna work the best, and that you have an ability to fail or have an experiment not go as well or have a pilot run that you're like, oh, we actually need to do it this way. It'll be more effective, or it'll, you know, like we learned these things that we know that now that we have to do.

Carolyn Woodard 22:36

So I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that issue. Because you, again, you've been on both sides of this, you know, funding and funding is always a problem. Uh, technology at nonprofits, technology at, you know, government agencies is always kind of a big investment that they often have to just make not totally blind, but they have to listen to what the demo says and what the salespeople say and what the vendor is telling them. Um,

Carolyn Woodard 23:05

So I would love for you to just explore that a little bit more of like what have you seen and do you have ideas on helping grow that space where you're able to do a pilot, able to experiment, and able for it to not go perfectly, but lead to a better outcome later on.

Chip Kennedy 23:26

Yeah.

Carolyn Woodard 23:28

With a like $100 million question, like, can you just solve that?

Chip Kennedy 23:33

Wouldn't the world be better if we were all a little bit more experimental and a failure? Um Yes. Yes. I I I

Chip Kennedy 23:42

I run a software startup. Uh and so experiment is baked into our DNA. And we have to remind ourselves to do it even more all the time. Remind ourselves of uh failures are part of the process of discovery. There's things where the cost of failure is higher. There's uh how we protect client data, there's things we take really seriously.

Chip Kennedy 24:03

It's it's not about "experimenting means you'll fail everywhere." It means how do you design the guardrails? How do you design the environment of which you can fail and keep learning while protecting what you need to protect?

Chip Kennedy 24:14

And leave the technology world, uh, the all the organizations we serve, uh, I think would be better off by taking on an experimental experimental mindset uh in learning more.

Chip Kennedy 24:25

And I can tell you, all of our first nonprofits that worked with us, they had this attitude in spades. They wouldn't have found us otherwise. Uh we were still growing. They wouldn't have wanted to work with an AI company starting two years ago when it was not as popular and not as well known of what AI could do in the services sector.

Chip Kennedy 24:47

So it's important to do, it's hard to do. I think we have to change our societal conversations around failure. I also think we have to teach more folks organizationally how to measure failure. And what are you measuring for? If you know,

Chip Kennedy 25:07

The organizations that work with us have taught us a lot of how creative ways to measure pilots and measure experimental technology. And we've learned that taking a more expansive view of what you do always helps.

Chip Kennedy 25:20

So a more simplistic view might be here are the dollars we raise from funders and here are the households served. Cool. Uh throwing technology in there. Um if that's gonna risk either of those two numbers, then you're gonna be afraid to move forward.

Chip Kennedy 25:36

Organizations that have come to us and said we desperately need you didn't just give us that simple equation to say, this is our budget and this is how many families we serve. They said, our caseworkers are spending seven clicks every time they need to print out a document. Okay. How much time does that take? Well, we think per per case worker we're we're losing as many hours a day, and this is how it adds up. And okay, so you do all that math, look at those other numbers. You are not,

Chip Kennedy 26:04

There's an opportunity cost to how many families you're not serving. And there's also an opportunity cost because over time, not serving as many families as you could or want to will affect your competitiveness to stick with funders and to get new funders. And and

Chip Kennedy 26:18

I'm preaching to the choir with everyone listening, you understand this cycle well. Don't let a technology vendor tell you the big equation. But live in those details. An experiment doesn't have to be we grow or we survive or or die as an organization. It can be moving these numbers in the small ways and and getting creative with how technology can do that.

Chip Kennedy 26:39

Sometimes it's technology, sometimes it's not. You can pilot an experiment in so many different ways. Uh, but doing it is what's important. And and find the smaller equations that are less risky. Change this one thing over here in this one program, run the pilot there. So when it fails, not only did you learn something, but if there are negative effects, they're they're contained and you didn't have to risk your organization.

Chip Kennedy 27:05

So as best I can say, I think there's lots of ways we should practice it, and I think there's lots of more ways that uh nonprofits especially can practice it.

Carolyn Woodard 27:14

Well, I hope that people listening are are thinking about that mindset of thinking about pilots and uh experimenting and being open to the idea of you know measuring and learning from failure and uh building those relationships where you can learn and fail forward. Um,

Carolyn Woodard 27:34

I want to take it back just to um you know wrap up a little bit. So if you are listening to this and you're thinking about, like you said, like you heard somebody in the other department got this and you're really excited about thinking about it and trying it, um, do you have um you know a few questions, like two or three questions that you would tell someone to ask any vendor about a tool like this that they were gonna use for intake or for their call center or for this uh kind of, you know, pro, like we said, providing the information to the people who need the information?

Chip Kennedy 28:09

Any vendor, AI or not, any any person like me who says, I'm gonna help, you know, I think technology can help your organization. The three things that I would tell anyone to ask.

Chip Kennedy 28:19

Number one is where does my data go? You don't need a PhD, you don't need a computer science degree to ask this question, ask it. And if the answer is too technical, then you got a bad answer. Ask it again. Where does my data go? Where do where do my client client data go? Where is it? Um explain it to me. Um and

Chip Kennedy 28:41

And this doesn't need to be your lawyers, although not legal advice. It doesn't need to be your your IT director. Just ask. What is your your your what are your data practices? How are you thinking about data governance? How are you securing it? Where does it live in the world? What other vendors are involved here?

Chip Kennedy 28:56

And you'll get lots of answers you can parse through and learn over time. But asking it is critical because so many vendors don't always expect you to ask and won't give you that information, and you'll learn a lot. And you might learn some things about why you especially want to work with one person and might not want to work with another person. So number one is data.

Chip Kennedy 29:15

Number two is what will change in my organization after this technology is deployed. Not just outcomes. Vendors are usually pretty good at talking about how your organization will be amazing. But how will staff change? How will folks' interactions with the technology change? Uh we're a voice AI tool, so we're we're not uh a CRM replacing another CRM. We're a setup with a lot of organizations and how they're answering the phone. We we demonstrably significantly can change how the organization does something as simple as answering phone calls.

Chip Kennedy 29:50

So ask us, how did other organizations change to adapt after that? And we can tell you here's what staff did differently. Here's how caseworkers approached their caseloads differently. There were changes. We should not ignore them. You should prepare for that. You should ask the vendor how much they know about that. Not the big, shiny, we got you more money from funders or we help you help more families. I hope we're all doing that. But how did the organization have to change to accommodate that technology is a really good question.

Chip Kennedy 30:18

The third question I'd ask is long-term cost and sustainability. So, cost, I know most folks don't have to ask, how much will this cost? How much will this cost me in the long term? Um, I can ask vendors to capture costs over time. It's something, you know, it's an industry secret. When people ask that of us, we're always willing to do it if you want to partner with us.

Chip Kennedy 30:39

But sustainability. Ask the vendor, what are you doing to be a sustainable business? Carolyn, Community IT Innovators has been around for a long time, Civic Reach has been around for just a few years. But we can both have really good answers to that question of this, these are the business practices we're doing to be sustainable. This is how we're gonna continue to serve uh not just the person we're talking to, but everyone who's in your role as long as we possibly can. Um, and here's how we're gonna do that.

Chip Kennedy 31:06

I love when organizations ask us, how do you plan to sustainably stick around? Um, because that's a real risk, and we we should de-risk that and we should talk about that. And a good answer is gonna make you feel really good because you'll learn that an organization aspires to stick around. And a bad answer will show you vendors that maybe don't care as much about your sector, don't care as much about your type of organization.

Carolyn Woodard 31:30

That's such a good way to end this because I think a lot of us have been thinking about and talking about in this sector, this feeling that we're in the bubble. And we don't know, is the bubble gonna deflate? Is it gonna, you know, how long is it gonna take for the market to settle out? And how many of these companies are gonna be around, you know, even just a couple of years from now, let alone 25 years from now. So I think that um, like you don't, you can't know, but I love your idea to listen to the quality of the answers.

Carolyn Woodard 32:06

And are the people that you're talking to prepared to answer that question? Or do they give you just kind of a brush off, you know, like we're growing, everyone's growing, it's gonna be great. You know, that sort of an answer that's maybe too um too obvious and that they haven't really thought about it.

Chip Kennedy 32:25

I agree. I agree. Or just the simple question of how do you make money? Uh, what are all the ways your company makes money? I can know I'm gonna sign this contract, but what are all the other ways? Do you make money off data? Do you make money off of different industries that you you can learn a lot uh about a uh a business, uh a potential partner, I think by asking those questions. Totally agree.

Carolyn Woodard 32:47

Yeah, that's great. Well, is there any do you have any last thoughts for us on where this type of technology is going? Uh, you know, in the next few years, um, voice AI, you know, what do you think is is coming? Oh, um another easy one.

Chip Kennedy 33:07

I as much as I I I I am skeptical. I call myself a pragmatic optimist about technology. So I love thinking about what the future can hold and bring a healthy amount of skepticism and pragmatism to uh how we get there.

Speaker 1 33:24 Speaker 1 33:24

AI, and in general, what we're seeing right now with innovation in technology has this immense potential to reshape access to information and resources. So, what does that mean for the the all folks across nonprofits, all folks working in government who are delivering information and resources to families and individuals on the margins, we can change that equation.

Speaker 1 33:50

Every place where I've heard, and I've heard for a long time working in a nonprofit as well, of where lack of information about programs is the first and largest barrier. I think we can dismantle that barrier. And AI is this fantastic tool in that tool set. It's widely available, it's widely affordable for organizations, and and I'm seeing it continuing to be that way. And I think that's amazing.

Speaker 1 34:21

We have real challenges, we have real equity challenges, we have real big AI companies that are pushing us in directions that we have to challenge. But the tool itself, the technology itself, gets to change that equation and how hard and expensive it used to be to create equitable and accessible information about the help that was out there. That's changing now.

Speaker 1 34:44

So then what do we get to do to build on that with other technology and with other practices? That once everyone has the information, we can then get creative on how we're better delivering help, better targeting help, better helping people when they need it, how they need it, with the organization that best wants to serve them. But these are all really, really tough equations when we look at the system of the social safety net. I think those equations are start are going to start to get solved in new and creative ways that I'm really optimistic. It means we're gonna help a lot more people than we were able to before.

Carolyn Woodard 35:18

Thank you so much for your time today, Chip. I just had what a lovely conversation. I feel like I learned so much. And I just um the best of luck to you in your in your endeavors.

Chip Kennedy 35:29

Thank you. Really appreciate having me on. Really appreciate the work that that y'all do for the sector. And um, we're we're both here to to serve others who are serving others. It's a really special conversation.