Nonprofits share stories of positive impact gained through AI education day
On Thursday, November 14th, 2024 40+ skilled volunteers from AvidXchange, Honeywell, and EY gathered to help nine nonprofits identify ways to help work smarter with artificial intelligence.
Watch our video overview here and read our original blog post about the day here.
Nine nonprofits participated in breakout sessions with Apparo staff and skilled volunteers using ChatGPT, CoPilot, and other GenerativeAI tools to experiment with AI and prompts that can change the way they work. Through this interactive engagement, nonprofits collaborated with volunteers on the latest tools to better leverage them to amplify their missions.
Four months after the session, we checked in with several nonprofits to learn about the impact they experienced.
Heart Math Tutoring has successfully incorporated artificial intelligence into several aspects of their nonprofit work.
Heart Math Tutoring is a Charlotte-based nonprofit with a mission to ensure that all elementary students develop the strong foundation in math and enthusiasm for academics needed for long-term success, by helping schools use volunteers as tutors.
We met with Heart Math Tutoring’s Melissa Lefko (Operations Manager) and Rebecca Presnell (Senior Manager of Executive Operations) to learn about their takeaways from Apparo’s AI Workshop and AI Art of the Possible Day.
They shared several examples of the powerful ways they have already been able to incorporate AI into their work:
- Creation of new cybersecurity training for staff (based on learnings from Apparo’s Bank of America Cybersecurity Resilience cohort)
- Saved 2 days of work (created in one day rather than the three it normally takes to create a training like this)
- Generated new ideas that would not have otherwise been addressed
- Summarizing meeting notes – saving approximately 30 minutes of work per staff meeting (once a month)
- Creating a summary one-pager from notes in an Excel spreadsheet
They have many plans for the further incorporating AI into their work in the near future:
- Creating additional new, monthly cybersecurity trainings for staff
- Leveraging learnings from the AI Playbook to create an AI usage policy, to ensure safe, appropriate use is incorporated into daily work life
- Incorporating lessons learned from cybersecurity training with AI to create additional monthly staff training
- Working with the full team to share learnings and identify more uses for AI
Melissa shared, “I had never strategically incorporated AI into my work. Thanks to the Apparo AI workshop and AI day we’re saving critical time, that we can put to work to fulfill our mission in meaningful ways. By applying this AI learning, I can deliver more trainings so that our operations run more smoothly. This enables our staff to be on-site, in the schools, serving the students for as much time as possible. They won’t need to be wasting time coming back to me for help. AI is helping me create access to information in ways that I can’t as one individual.”
Rebecca shared, “The Apparo AOTP day helped me distinguish between AI myths and actual capabilities. It helped me understand truly effective uses that can help ease our administrative burdens and build our brand, so we have more time for our mission-related work and can reach more students.”
Dottie Rose Foundation has put their improved AI prompt writing capabilities to work to further their mission.
Dottie Rose Foundation‘s mission is to set the standard in computer science education while bridging the gender gap in the technology field. They connect the dots within the technology and computer science sphere to educate, support, and inspire the next generation.
We met with Dr. Sharon Jones (Founder), Jillian Klingberg (Executive Director) and Holly Harris (Director of Education) of Dottie Rose to discuss their takeaways from Apparo’s AI Art of the Possible Day.
Holly shared, “I came to the day with solid prompt engineering skills, but learned how to make them even better by adapting to AI limitations, using personas, asking for clarifying questions. Making those small changes to how I work with AI has been very powerful in improving the results. As a small but mighty team, AI can make us even stronger.
Sharon shared, “It was a powerful opportunity to work with my team on the business, not just in it. We walked away with expanded AI knowledge, confidence and a new volunteer (Ram Sridharan of AvidXchange) who continues to support our organization.”
Jillian shared, “We’re often heads down, working on the business. It was so valuable to work with volunteers who could share a fresh outside perspective on how we can optimize AI and a time saving tool. It was a valuable experience.”
They are successfully applying their strengthened AI prompt engineering skills in many ways:
- Writing thorough email replies, ensuring all key points are addressed
- Drafting letters of appreciation to volunteers
- Creating outlines and timelines for educational programming
- Developing new educational games
- Drafting language for grant applications and fundraising appeals
- Drafting questions to use for interviewing candidates
- Drafting articles for the press
- Trying new AI tools
- Spreading this learning to others
The Park Community Development Corporation has put AI to work to for fundraising and more.
- Prospecting – The research process to identify a single new potential funder or sponsor took 1-2 hours before applying AI. Now it takes just a few minutes, which has helped them to double their list since last year and eliminate information gaps.
- Letters of inquiry – Some funders require these letters when applying and they took 1-2 hours of work before applying AI. Now they can also be created in just a matter of minutes.
- Program surveys – They used ChatGPT to help optimize surveys about their programs in the affordable housing space, adding and phrasing new questions that will help improve their programs to meet the needs of families in affordable housing
View more photos from the day.
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