So I’m going to talk about one of my current favorite topics right now. And that is chat GPT.
Those of you who are also on my newsletter list my leadership forward or three, two, one weekly newsletter. I’ve seen myself write about this.
I’ve also written about this on LinkedIn. How I’m really a little bit late to the party on AI generally, but definitely chat GPT.
It has not been that I wasn’t interested in it. I think intellectually and even ethically, I find AI and where it’s going to be a really interesting and important topic for conversation, for discussion, for exploration.
I think where I really struggled was professionally and practically and really in my heart, I’m a pragmatist. My brain almost always goes to thoughts of, okay, but what are we going to do with this information?
Really, what was coming up for me was, I just don’t have time. to play around and explore and figure out if and how this tool can be helpful to me.
I believed that it could be, but I just didn’t really have the time to figure out concrete ways that I could use a tool like chat GPT in my life in any meaningful way, in any meaningful practical way.
And then a few weeks ago, I was listening to one of the business podcasts that I listened to. And it’s, I’ve had guys I’ve been listening to for like 12 years.
I really like this guy. And most importantly, I trust him and sort of how he’s grown his business and how he thinks about his time in his business.
And he basically articulated the same thing. He’s like, look, I’m late to the game with chat GPT. I have a really good friend and colleague sort of in the business world and he’s really into chat GPT.
weeks ago and he walked me through three concrete ways I could use chatGPT and I’m going to share those with you.
That’s what we did on the podcast and it’s like something clicked. This light bulb went off and I just decided I was going to try those really concrete ideas they had to do with sort of customer avatars and research and the floodgates opened.
So while I’m late to the party on chat GPT because other folks have been playing around with chat GPT for months and for me it’s been about two weeks.
I am really really on board and the reason that I’m really on board and the reason I’ve been writing about it and and why I am talking with you about it today in this podcast is that practically speaking just looking at chat GPT not even getting into the other AI tools that I’ve started to explore around designing presentations and building websites.
and crafting images. I’m not even going to get into those today. Just looking at ChatGPT, which is a language structuring tool, you can save hours of time and get ideas and inspiration and support that costs nothing.
And for the organizational leaders that I work with, primarily in the startup space and those organizations and my accelerator that are growing their organizations, right?
They’re under a million dollars and they are growing their teams, they’re building their boards, they’re crafting and finalizing their strategic vision.
There is a lot on their plates. And even something as simple as crafting a welcome sequence for new donors while so critical to their fundraising, thinking about doing that and the hour to hours that it will take to write the right kind of…
content, structure the tags, you know, in your email service provider, set everything up, connect it to your CRF, all of that.
That feels overwhelming to the folks that I work with, crafting an MOU for a new partnership, thinking of blog titles and podcast topics, that’s overwhelming.
And chat GPT was all of that. So that’s why I’m talking about chat GPT because when it comes down to it, it’s a very powerful tool that can save you money, that can save you time, and that can actually help you move the work of your organization forward much faster in really concrete ways, very easily.
And whenever I come across a tool like that, I know can benefit the leaders I work with. I am really excited to get that tool into their hands and to help them use it.
So that’s why I’m talking about this with you guys today. And what I specifically- specifically want to share is the how.
How can you begin to incorporate chat GPT into your workflow to not only speed up how long it takes time, it takes you to get things done?
And specifically I want to talk about how you can begin to incorporate chat GPT into your workflow to not only speed up how long it takes for you to get things done, but also to spark your creativity and what you’re doing.
I want to focus on the how. Just as an example, chatGPT might spit out something for you that you didn’t even think about and you’re like, oh, that’s a great idea.
I was trying to think of a presentation topic, this speech I have to give or this workshop I have to run.
I was trying to think about it. of a title and I literally would never have thought of that. So I want to elaborate on that piece.
I want to start there. You might not have thought about that going into if you’re writing an email or presentation or even drafting a meeting agenda or whatever it might be, that the sparking creativity piece is something I think a lot of people when they’re thinking about chat GPT, they kind of miss out on.
So I want to start there and then go to the actual content that it can create. Most people that I talk to, myself included, have thought about chat GPT.
If they thought about it at all, I’m going to put in a prompt and then chat GPT is going to spit something out.
That’s how we talk about it. Put in the right prompt and we’ll get content back. Then I’m going to fix it up a little bit.
I’m going to copy that content. I’m going to paste it and I’m going to move on. So a lot of people are using chat GPT that way and I’m going to talk about how to do that.
And As I’ve talked about in my newsletter and in some of my LinkedIn posts, you can totally do that.
It’s great as an ideal starter. It gets you going. You can put in a prompt. You can get a result.
You can get an output and be like, wow, I don’t want to change anything or I want to change something very small.
And then that’s amazing. What I really encourage, though, is to not do that. To actually use chat GPT is like.
Like a thought partner, a hyper creative thought partner that has access to way more resources and information than you do.
And then add your own flavor, add your own examples and stories and build on it. So if you haven’t started playing around with chat GPT, I would actually recommend starting there.
That’s like getting your juices flowing in some area where you are feeling stuck, where you have to produce content in your feeling stuck.
Jump in and just start asking it to do things. Spend a little bit of time learning how to ask a question.
That’s what we call prompts. I’m going to talk more about that here. And if you know what you want to accomplish, but you don’t know what kind of prompt to write, here’s a little tip.
You can literally ask chat GPT what to ask itself in order to do the thing you’re looking to do.
It’s a little bit creepy, but pretty cool. You can literally say, Hey, chat GPT I want to write an email about this.
What’s the best prompt to do that? What kind of prompt should I write in order to achieve this goal?
Really meta, right? I also get really excited about chat GPT. Yeah. So, before I go on, I just want to say that I got so excited about Chatsh and I asked the floodgates open.
I came home. I spent like three days playing around with prompts and sort of just playing and figuring out, hey, what happens if I put this in and hey, and it right this email for me.
Could it write this blog post for me? Could it improve on my writing here? And then I did a mini training inside of my accelerator, just in prompt to on one of our coaching calls before we dove into the questions.
I sort of hijacked some of the coaching call and basically said, I’m going to start off with a little bit of a question.
by just sharing my screen and walking you guys through a few really concrete low hanging fruit things you can do with chatGPT now today with your fundraising with emails to your board, with email to supporters.
I know one of you is starting a monthly donor campaign. Let’s use that as a model. I know one of you is updating your website.
Hey, let’s do that here on the call. I was so excited that I just sort of hijacked our coaching column for like 30 minutes doing that.
I think they liked it and I’ve sort of built on that. But I got so many responses to my newsletter when I basically shared the story and some concrete resources for prompts and stuff.
Responses where people were like, oh, I had never really thought about this in the nonprofit sector or I’ve heard about chat GPT but it’s sort of like, it’s not really for me.
I got so many responses like that. Like, hey, do you have any more resources that I created this like start bundle.
And it’s basically a combination of prompts. It’s a mini training, mini video training about how to get started with chat GPT 50 plus model prompts that you can cut and paste right into chat GPT in areas like fundraising, marketing, web development, setting agendas, time management, and sort of trying to go really broad.
And then also a guide about how to build prompts, right, how to teach chat GPT to be the tool that you want it to be.
So it’s all inside the quick start nonprofit quick start bundle. And you can get that at richybabbage.com backslash nonprofit chat GPT bundle.
So if you are just getting started with chat GPT, and you can hear the excitement of my voice about how practical a tool this is, I highly recommend picking up the bundle, richybabbage.com backslash nonprofit chat GPT bundle.
Okay. So let me start with a list of things that you can think about using chat GPT4.
So think about things like generating blog post titles, presentation outlines for speeches or presentations or workshops you have to do, presentation content, what should my slides say?
I want to start with the list of interviews that you’re doing with somebody else who are being interviewed, social media captions, partnership agreements, MOUs with organizational partners, emails to your board, emails to your donors, website content, the list goes on and on.
In the bundle that I mentioned, I actually organized the sort of vault or catalog of prompts into these slides.
buckets, right? What are some prompts that you can use if you’re writing emails? If you’re doing fundraising research, that’s another one.
I don’t recommend using chatGPT to research specific people for two reasons. One, it sometimes gets details wrong. And so if you’re going to have to sort of go back and check, you might as well just have a human do that.
So I wouldn’t recommend doing this sort of individual person research. But research about foundations, research about corporations, businesses in your community, in your sector, absolutely sort of pipeline, top of funnel research and be, you can just take hours off of that research using chatGPT.
You can also think about fundraising research around donor avatars or donor profiles. And so the second sort of reason not to do research of individual people is chatGPT.
At this point, only goes up to 2021. anything prior to 2021 or anything after 2021 you won’t have access to and most people’s lives have changed a lot since 2021.
So that’s the second reason not to do that but donor, avatar, donor profile research can actually be really powerful and I’m going to give an example of that in a few minutes.
So the list of what you can use chat tbt4 is massive and in the bundle I’ve organized the prompts according to that list.
So I want to dig down just a bit and highlight just a few use cases here so it starts to seem practical for you.
And let’s start with fundraising since that’s often where people’s minds go. So as you start to think about your fundraising workflow, the first thing I recommend is starting with the end goal in mind.
What’s the thing you’re trying to achieve? Do you want to explore donor donor? Do you want to explore donor personas?
Do you want to write an email to your list? Do you want to craft a newsletter series that’s really engaging and gets people to actually take some action?
Are you launching a new program? Do you want to generate content for your marketing documentation, right? Your one-pagers. Do you want to write social media?
This is a big one. This social media thing. I’ll just point out a lot of the conversations that I have in…
So one of the other programs I run is the Launch Lab. And it’s just for startups. And a lot of the conversations that I have with the leaders in the Launch Lab is around how to find staff to do things like meaningful social media engagement.
So you have a number of organizations that are either on LinkedIn or Instagram. There are a lot of folks that are in those two places.
And they just don’t have time to sort of be there and show up in a way that. Turns those resources or turns those platforms into powerful top of funnel vehicles right ways to attract the right people into your ecosystem, which is primarily how you should be thinking about social media.
They don’t have time to do that. So when you talk about a tool that can draft a month’s worth of social media posts in your writing style, based on your mission, aimed at your ideal donor avatars, that’s hours of work.
Very, very powerful. And then you pair that with one of the many AI tools that identifies and can even create visuals for you.
And you can have an entire social media posting calendar done in under an hour. So just to highlight sort of what is your end goal, right?
Social media posts, emails, etc. Now, once you know your end goal, then you’re going to be able to do that.
And you can work with chat GPT to get there. And I would encourage thinking about chat GPT is like a junior member of your team.
It can be a junior copywriter or a junior development associate. And by junior, I don’t mean less skilled because one of the powerful things about GPT is that you are an expert copywriter.
You are an expert grant writer. You can make it far more of an expert than you are. By junior, I mean it will take your direction.
It will do whatever you tell it to do. It’s not going to own anything, but it will execute wonderfully.
So think about having this sort of expert junior level person on your team. So you have this end goal and you’re going to work with chat GPT, the junior team member with the world of expertise to get there.
The next thing that’s really exciting to know is that chat GPT will learn as you go along. The more context and information you give it, the better results you’ll get from your prompts.
So I highlight that here because one of the things that we want to do right alongside the prompting of chat GPT is give it information at the front end, sort of train it at the front end.
It’s almost like onboarding this junior person at the front end so that as you give it future prompts, it’s drawing on what you’ve already told it.
So 50 prompts later, you can say for the mission of the organization I’ve described to you, for the… owner profiles that you’ve identified.
There were five. For the first two of them, draft an email sequence, right? And you could have laid out your mission and had them help you, I had chat GPT help you identify donor profiles three days before and 50 prompts ago, but it retains that information.
And that learning feature is really powerful. You can also use it to learn your writing style. So if you are going to be using chat GPT again with the end goal in mind of drafting email sequences or drafting year end appeal letters or a series of invitations to join your new monthly donor program, which is something that is working on an accelerator student, you can say, hey, chat GPT.
And one thing that I’ve noticed I’ve done a couple times, I’ll just highlight. I would have pinned on is I talk to chat GPT like it’s a person, which you do not have to do.
I find that I do. I say, please, I say, great. I say, that’s awesome. I like that. Could you please I also find that I refer to chat GPT as like a person.
Oh, hey, when that person, you know, when they want to help you with this, right, I’m going to do that and pay it no mind.
I’m talking about chat GPT, not a person or group of people. Okay. So you can say, hey, chat GPT.
Here are three examples of really effective emails that I have written that reflect my writing style. And you plug in those emails, just cut and paste.
Now write a series of emails to donors that would be really excited in this part of our mission. And you’ve already given it your mission statement.
This part of our mission, write a series of emails to donors that would be really excited about that part of our mission using this writing style.
And it will learn your writing style. It will draw on the style that you prompted it with. So this learning piece is really important.
And I want you to keep that in mind because you’re not starting from scratch, so you’re building as you go.
So you have your end goal. You’re going to work with touch EBT. You’re going to train it and teach it as you go.
You’re going to give it context upfront. So what does this look like in practice? Let’s say you want to launch a new monthly donor program.
Start with, hey, chat GPT. I run a nonprofit in Blank City. Here’s the mission. And you literally cut and paste your mission.
You can add your mission and vision. You can add. You can say, these are the values of our organization.
You can cut and paste the information from your strategic plan or your website or your website. grant proposal. It doesn’t have to be fancy.
Chet GDD doesn’t care. But you plug that in context about the organization. Here is a high level description of the three programs that we run and the people that we run them for.
Then you say, we’re launching a new monthly donor program. And if you have a description of the objectives of the monthly donor program, you put that here.
We’re launching a new monthly donor program in order to raise blank amount over the next year. Now here’s the prompt.
What are three examples of donor avatars that would be most interested in this kind of monthly donor program for an organization with our mission vision of values?
And Chet GDD will give you three donor avatars. Describe them what they care about, why they’re interested in your mission, how you might communicate with them.
Once you get that result, you can build on it. You can go deeper. Great. Thanks, chat, TBT. The first one, first donor avatar is really interesting.
What might get in the way of that donor avatar giving to our organization? What are five specific points of confusion or concern that that donor avatar might have about what we’ve shared, right, about our mission?
So you notice a couple things here. I’m building. I don’t have to restate the mission. I can refer specifically to we liked donor avatar one.
Or I like all of those donor avatars. What are specific points of confusion or concern that they might have?
And it will spell it out by donor avatar. You can also zero in on one. I also find it to be particularly effective to give constraints.
What are five specific points? Can you give three examples, et cetera? You can continue to expand on those results.
This is the executive summary of our current strategic plan. It outlines our vision, priorities, goals, and core activities. Based on this, write an email sequence of five emails that invite donor avatar number one to join the monthly giving program.
Over the course of the sequence, I want you to address the points of confusion identified above. I want you to describe our work in a compelling way and include a clear call to action.
That’s the prompt. Then you’re going to get five emails. Thank you. Now, chat GPT has a few word limits that are really easy to get around.
You can, as you’re feeding it context, you have a limit on what you can put in, and that’s about 3,000 words.
But you can start a new chat thread and say, continue to build on the previous chat and just keep adding context, right?
So because it learns, you don’t have to start from scratch. You don’t have to fit everything in, in the chat that you’re feeding it.
So if your executive summary of your strategic plan, for example, your mission, vision, values, and description of programs are more than 3,000 words, you can just break that up into chat.
Similarly, there’s a limit that chat GPT, it’ll cut itself off after about 500 words that it is giving you.
If you see it, do that. Just say, continue on your previous response. And we’ll just keep going. So you can keep getting these results.
Now, let’s say you really like the emails, but they sound too stiff. You can say rewrite the emails and make them sound more casual and fun.
You could say rewrite the emails and write them as if you’re talking to a sixth grader. You could say, write the email and make them sound less casual and more serious.
You can say rewrite the email and include more examples of blank blank and blank. Right? So you can go back and forth with this chat GPT content you’ve been given.
Now, to wrap up our email sequence, you have five emails that are aimed at specific donor avatars that you really like and addresses their concerns, fan points of confusion, it’s compelling.
It shares information about your work and your monthly donor campaign that you’re inviting them into and includes clear or calls to action.
Now you can say, OK, chat GPT, give me 15 subject lines for the emails that would make my audience want to open those emails.
So you have the email written, it’s generating your 15 subject line options for you. And you can say, I really like number two and number 15.
Give me 10 variations on those two email subject lines. And you can continue to drill down. So it’s taken me a number of minutes to walk through this.
But those prompts actually did that series of prompts to see what I would get on behalf of the student that I’m working with.
That entire thing took me seven minutes. It’s an entire email sequence in seven minutes that they can then plug right into their email service provider.
I was very, very excited about that. OK, another use case. that I love for nonprofits. And this is revamping a homepage or a donation page.
I actually just did a training inside my accelerator all about how to translate your strategic plan into content for your homepage and your donation page to make them really compelling.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about revamping nonprofit websites so that they are actually inviting and attracting to the right people.
So you can use the same information we’ve been talking, you’re talking about your mission, your strategic plan, or you can feed it the text from your current homepage and ask it to improve on that language.
Let’s say you start from scratch. You can say, hey, chat, GPT. You are an expert fundraising copywriter with 20 years of experience writing copy that raises millions of dollars for small social justice nonprofits.
We are a small social justice nonprofit in blank city. Here’s our mission. If you have a particular. I feel like a fundraiser in mind, like if you like the way that there’s an organization that you have in mind where you’re like, I really like how they write about art issue, right?
I really like how their donation page flows. I like the language. You can say, you wrote the copy for this organization, say Charity Water.
So everybody loves Charity Water content and website. So then you would say using the information about our mission, etc., whatever you’ve shared, write copy for a new donation page.
You could also say, write copy for a new donation page that appeals to the donor or avatars above, because remember, it remembers the donor avatars that you have identified above or that it has identified above.
You could also just leave it at write a donation page, right? You could also not give it your mission.
in your vision, right? If you don’t have that information, if you’re just crafting it, you can just describe, this is what our organization does.
It doesn’t have to be fancy, and then you’ll just continue to tweak what chat should be gives you. When you get the content back, it will outline happy for a new donation page.
You can say, make it more bold, make it bolder, you could say model it after x, y, and z nonprofit, charity water, invisible children.
You can, this is where you can feed it your current language and say, integrate what we currently have into this new language so that it sounds more like us.
You can go back and forth with chat GPT to get what you want. You can take the language that now give me the structure for a donation page.
It’s using this copy so that I know exactly what order to put things in and include head lines or headers.
In between each section. So you can actually have it structure is almost like a wireframe your donation page for you.
You can ask it for recommendations based on this copy. Where should I input or insert pictures? What kind of imagery could I use on this page to best reflect what’s being described?
This is going back to the point I made at the very beginning about sort of sparking your creativity. You can get ideas from chat to be T for all of this.
Okay, third use case presentations and other types of content. So let’s say you have to give a presentation you have to do a workshop.
out of your organization and you are just stumped. You’re like, I don’t really have time to sit and draft this whole presentation outline.
You can literally say chat GPT. Here is a past presentation that I’ve done or here is an article that I’ve written or a series of emails that I’ve written on this topic.
What are five presentation topics that I could based my presentation on? You could not feed it any of that content or context and say, I have to give a presentation about a link.
The audience is made up of A, B, and C, and my goal or objective for the presentation is X, Y, and Z.
Right? Four sentences. What are five possible presentation topics that I could present on? So you can give it lots of context.
You can also keep it broad and then drill down in the same way that I talked about with the donor avatars and emails.
You could say, I really like presentation topic one. Give me five other examples just like that one. Right? That are similar to that one.
Once you have a topic, you can say draft an outline for a 20 slide or 50 minute depending on the parameters you want to give it presentation about that topic.
That GPT has a feature called regenerate response. So if you don’t like what it’s doing, you can stop, you can click stop and regenerate and it can start again.
You can have it draft the outline, you can have it draft the slide content, you can have it recommend images for your slide, layouts for your slide.
Again, if you think about chat GPT as a junior sort of staff member, tell it what you want it to do and then riff off of what it gives back to you.
There are so many use cases for chat GPT. I get spend hours doing this. I just today prompted chat GPT to draft a model partnership agreement for a friend whose organization is partnering with another organization and they needed a template for how to structure this sort of unique program agreement.
that they’re entering into. And what Chatubt gave back was great. Basically, the prompt was, my organization is a nonprofit and we’re entering into an agreement with this other nonprofit to do blank work.
Draft and agreement that covers ownership of IP, payment structure, revenue sharing, sharing of audience lists, sort of all of the things that they were struggling around how to structure.
We said, you know, draft an agreement that covers all of this and give us three different examples of how we could structure rev share, audience share, you know, these other things.
So it was really helpful. I mean, that was, again, hours of work that was saved just by having Chatubt come up with this template.
So like I said, I could spend hours doing this. I won’t. I wanted to cover three. use cases with you so that you could I don’t know just start thinking about how you might plug into chat GPT in your own Work and in your own life.
We talked about fundraising and donor avatar research Messaging to your donors crafting emails all the way from idea to subject line We talked about web content homepage donation page that’s same Slow with chatGPT works for marketing materials.
I talked about a home page and their donation page It can be fundraising materials as well right a one-pager works the same way We talked about presentations and workshops You can think about content in this third use case as blog posts and outline for a series of blog posts and outline for a series of newsletter or email content that goes out to our newsletter list our newsletter list is made up of people who are just
in this way, you know, draft an outline of emails to them about A, B, and C, right? So thinking really broadly about content.
And then finally, just the example I gave about practical things like MOUs. I’ve seen people say, here are the seven things I have to get done today.
I eat lunch for half an hour in the middle of the day and I go for a run at the end of the day.
I have to have a day, right? A plan for my day. Here are the objectives for a meeting. Here’s who’s going to be in the meeting, craft a draft agenda.
So there are these practical ways as well. Like I said, I pulled a lot of this together in really concrete ways.
The model prompts, the how to build prompts, the how to train chat GPT, and the short video training about how to get started into my nonprofit Quick Start Bundle.
And one more time, you can get that at RichieBabbage.com backslide. nonprofit chat GPT bundle. I’m probably going to talk about this again at some point.
I just think it’s such a cool and useful tool and I want to lower the barriers to entry for any of you listening who have thought, yeah, I’m not really sure about this tool seems a little overwhelming.
Seems like there’s a lot. Trust me, I was there with you. I get it. And hopefully, this little sort of presentation today was helpful in jump-starting your thinking about how you might be able to integrate the tool into your life and into your workflow.
I definitely encourage you to check out.
Links Mentioned:
Nonprofit ChatGPT Quickstart Bundle
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