TBC: The First Lesson of AI in Fundraising

TBC130: AI: The First Lesson

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[00:00:04] Jason Yeh: Hey there. Welcome to anotherepisode of the Back Channel. In today's episode, I want to start easing into atopic that has been on everyone's minds for nearly the last two years that I amnow only just starting to integrate into the work that I do, and it's going tocome up in more of my content, including the back channel.

[00:00:24] That topic is ai. Ithink the things that I want to cover about AI are an encouragement. A warningand a first lesson. So the encouragement that I want to push out there foreveryone is that if you are not asToby from Shopify talked about to his team, if you are not using AI reflexivelyas in your first instinct should be to do something with ai, whenever solving aproblem, at least seeing what AI can do to help you get further down the road,advance yourself, then you are making a mistake.

[00:00:57] That is somethingthat we all need to build into our [00:01:00]habits. It's something that I push my team around to make sure that we aretrying to break out of instincts that we have built over time. Being a littlebit older generation. If you are older than say 25, you might have alreadygrooved your workflows to first use Google first.

[00:01:18] Try to grindyourself through a problem. So that's my encouragement. My warning is that,look, ai, from what I've discovered, doing knowledge based work as well asusing, using, AI to help as anassistant for physical around the house projects. What I've consistently seenis that AI has this breakdown. 80% of what it does is insanely amazing.

[00:01:45] It's so good. Itgets it right. It pushes you automatically, it gives you the right answers.About 10% of it. It's meh, about it's, not amazing. It's also not terrible or [00:02:00] painful or bad. And then there's this last10% that we all have to watch. 5% of that is 5% of the time. 5% of the answer,5% of steps in a step-by-step process is absolutely wrong, is made up, ishallucinated, can actually be painful, canactually be.

[00:02:20] It's deleterious tothe, to the goal that you're actually going after. That's 5% of what AI isright now, and the other 5% is a little more insidious, not as obviously, oh myGod, I can't believe you're lying to me. Wrong, but maybe just as negatively impactful.And that 5% is that I believe that AI misses the nuance, the sort of nuanced 5%that actually moves the needle.

[00:02:49] That actually is thething that kind of unlocks how you might execute a real strategy. I thinkthat's part of AI's answer set at least today, that we all need to be aware of.[00:03:00] Now, I believe that thesepercentages will change that that 80% probably goes to 95. That the 5% errorrate goes down to, I don't know, one, two, 3%, and that nuance changes.

[00:03:13] Maybe it capturesmore nuance. There's always gonna be a little component of it, and I thinkthat's where our challenge as humans lies over the next couple years, at least.​

[00:04:53] I. So think aboutthat when you are using AI to, to drive your projects forward. [00:05:00] It is going to be an amazing tool, but itis not set it and forget it.

[00:05:03] There is still someknowledge that humans need to learn on their own. Guided with ai. We get therefaster, but uh, we can't just toss it over the the wall. Okay. Now with allthat in mind, I still believe that we need to be changing our workflows, and alot of that starts with me. So when I'm talking about education or advising orcoaching around processes that are associated with the best fundraisers, if Iam not guiding everyone through well, how do we use AI in this process to makeyou faster, better, smarter, quicker?

[00:05:37] Well, I'm really notdoing my job. Okay, so you are gonna start seeing me talk about reevaluatingand readdressing the guidance that I've given my community and making sure thatI integrate how I would use AI in that. And some of this is going to be livelearning with you all, as I say, well, you know, this is how I build a story ora deck.[00:06:00]

[00:06:00] Today, here are thequestions that I ask myself when helping someone with a deck. How would I do itwith AI to be smarter and better? How would I use AI than to question myself tomake sure that this was the right answer? That's what I'm gonna be doing. So myfirst lesson, actually, let's start with something that I have been doing,which is working on door stories and decks.

[00:06:20] Now, there are a lotof tools out there. That have been built to leverage LLMs to build decks foryou. You, you can, you can even godirectly into chat BT and say, help me build a deck and help me build, um, you know, the storyline, et cetera. Andthere are more advanced projects that are directly integrated into the processof building visuals too.

[00:06:44] So there's a, there's a text-based story that goes alongwith a deck, and then there are visuals. There are apps like Gamma, which I hadstarted hearing tons of, of amazingthings about when it comes to building amazing decks. Now, here's what I'veactually experienced [00:07:00] firsthand usinga lot of these products, including Gamma, which I think a lot of people hadhoped would be this tool that allows you to one shot amazing.

[00:07:08] An amazing pitchdeck as in give it a prompt and then poof. Slides slide and it's amazing.Barely need to touch it. My own experience is that it's only been kind of okayand kind of okay. It doesn't really get you that far when it comes to using AIbuilding decks. What I have seen work very well as my first lesson is not doinga one shot, do the whole deck for me.

[00:07:37] But rather as youbuild a deck and get more structure around the deck, and even maybe get avisual language that you've created via a human designer, maybe via AI drivenimage creation, maybe AI driven logo creation, that you can zoom into a veryspecific slide and start giving much [00:08:00]more detailed context to different AI models, including just, you know, ChachiBT oh three.

[00:08:06] And out comes a muchbetter singular slide than say, if you were to grind through the idea of like,well, how am I gonna do this slide where I compare two things, make it visual,use limited words, use this visual call upon this analogy. How am I gonna dothat? A lot of times that itself is difficult, but with the help of ai, you cangive context for a specific side and get something that may not be perfect outthe gate, but certainly gets you really far down the road where you can takewhat's there, massage it yourself, maybe work with your team, work with adesigner, and get to the end point that is really going to shine way fasterthan you would.

[00:08:48] Okay. So that's myfirst lesson around fundraising and ai. How to use AI when building decks, atleast today. And of course, the very first part of my,uh, my rant about the encouragementto use the II banana, the encouragement to use [00:09:00] AI and the warnings around how you use ai,I think are very important too, right?

[00:09:04] Hopefully this lineof content becomes very exciting for you guys, that you guys follow along alittle bit more, and I'll see you on another episode of the Back Channel withsome AI involved.

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