Today I’m doing a ChatGPT redux episode. I did a more general walk through of the tool earlier this spring – that episode is called Revolutionize Your Nonprofit Workflow with Chat GPT.
In this episode, I want to talk about capacity. And specifically, how the tool can be used to add capacity to your stretched-thin team in ways that you may not be thinking about.
My aim here is to be super concrete!
Growing a nonprofit is hard work, and so much of it is about calibration and balancing acts — bringing in the money you need to pay the staff you need to have the impact you want to have… Meeting the needs of your community and the call of your mission even before you can see exactly how you’re going to find the money.
These are perennial problems.
In the end, I talk about clarity, capital and capacity as the three intersecting areas of a sustainable nonprofit’s infrastructure. Clarity tells you and your team where you’re going and capital is the money that will get you there. But the capacity is the fuel. Without fuel the engine stalls, and so we have to think concretely – and often creatively – about how to add capacity so that you can continue to build and work towards your mission.
We hear a lot about how ChatGPT can help with fundraising – from helping with donor segmentation to drafting emails. All of that is true and SUPER important and exciting.
But I want to go a step further and show you how ChatGPT can also be leveraged to add real capacity – beyond fundraising.
So today I’m talking about five ways that you can use ChatGPT to add capacity.
First, let’s talk about program capacity.
You have a program team that’s intersecting with your community members, answering questions, managing volunteers, translating information, etc.
First, use ChatGPT to answer Community and Constituent Questions: If you’re an organization that fields questions from, or provides information to, people in your community, use ChatGPT to answer frequently asked questions directly on your website.
If you’re feeling brave, hire someone to create a chatbot on your site. Otherwise, try keeping chatGPT open in a tab and as questions come in, feed them into the tool and let chatGPT answer them.
This might be especially helpful during emergency situations when your beneficiaries need help right away and when you have limited staff members available to respond to inquiries at all hours of the day.
Another option: Feed questions info ChatGPT and create a written FAQ that lives on your website!
Second strategy: translation. And think about tis one in two ways. First, If you offer programming in multiple languages, ChatGPT is quick and easy way to translate everything from your curricula to your marketing materials into other languages.
Second, It’s also an excellent tool for translating complex or technical info (such as legislation, medical terms, business terms, or academic language) into content that can be shared with, and understood by, members of your community.
Ok, my next three are about expanding your HR Capacity. Maybe you don’t have a director of operations or an HR manager. Most small and growing orgs don’t and that’s fine. So think about using chatgpt to streamline some of the work that those people would do:
Third strategy on our list: Creating Job Descriptions: So how… Feed ChatGPT information about the tasks, deliverables, and envisioned workflows for a new job and let the tool craft the initial draft of the job description. If you have examples of job descriptions that you like – either from past hires at your organization, or from other organizations – feed that content to ChatGPT as well and direct the tool to use those examples as models.
4th strategy on our list: Create or Refine Your Hiring Rubric: Feed ChatGPT a description of your organizational values, the skills and competencies needed for the job you’re hiring for, and information about key deliverables and let the tool identify key indicators for your rubric. You can also have the tool map out interview and reference-check questions that will illuminate alignment with the key indicators.
Sixth, and this is a big one: Board Management: ChatGPT can do the heavy lifting of organizing and making sense of data and information for your board, by creating summaries, identifying key trends and patterns, and highlighting relationships between pieces of information. Feed ChatGPT copies of content like call transcripts, articles, funder reports, and notes/ minutes from meetings. the re are 3… Let the tool do the heavy lifting of reading through and highlighting trends and common themes, and preparing organized summaries of the content. This is perfect for a summary of next steps from board minutes, keeping your board abreast of sector trends and key industry information (without having to do the research and reporting yourself!).
So I really encourage you to think about using chatgpt to shore up capacity in other ways than fundraising.
I give prompts and a tutorial in my NP chatgpt quickstart guide. You can get that at brookerichiebabbage/chatgptguide
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