Mission Metrics

AI Podcast

This is a podcast I did in the beginning of 2026 with Wendy Kidd

Transcript of video

0 seconds
So think of it as this, like my AI I, I’ve named my AI, Merlin and Merlin’s my personal assistant.
6 seconds
So if you hire someone, you’re not just gonna walk up to ’em on day one and go and ask ’em this in an intricate question and expect an intricate answer.
14 seconds
You have to do onboarding, you have to do training. You have to tell the new employee, alright, here’s how we do this. Here’s how we do this, here’s how we do this.
22 seconds
And it might take a, a month or so before that person really understands everything like that.
26 seconds
AI is no different Welcome to The Nonprofit Nook, the podcast for nonprofit leaders, board members, and community change makers who want to build stronger, smarter organizations.
40 seconds
I’m your host, Wendy Kidd, a longtime business owner and nonprofit leader, and I’m here to bring you real talk, real tools and real stories to help you thrive in the nonprofit world.
51 seconds
I’ll be talking with local nonprofit leaders, community change makers, and experts in everything from board development to fundrAIsing and digital
59 seconds
tools, sharing real stories and simple strategies you can actually use because running a nonprofit is hard, but you don’t have to do it alone.
1 minute, 8 seconds
Let’s get started. Welcome back everybody. I am so excited about today’s guest.
1 minute, 16 seconds
Um, today I have Michael Garrett. Michael Garrett is a nonprofit innovator and efficiency strategist who bridges the best of corporate operations with real world nonprofit leadership.
1 minute, 27 seconds
He’s the founder and CEO of Trusted World, which was founded in 2014, and the founder of Mission Metrics, a strategy and data consultancy built
1 minute, 36 seconds
to make nonprofit data accessible, actionable and empowering. trained in Six Sigma and lean manufacturing.
1 minute, 43 seconds
Michael is known for helping mission-driven organizations, strengthen systems, measure what matters, and communicate impact with confidence so they can serve more people with the same resources.
1 minute, 53 seconds
Welcome Michael. Hi. How you doing? I’m good. How are you? I’m wonderful. Thank you. I’m so glad you’re here.
1 minute, 58 seconds
Ever since I took your Data as King workshop, I was like, oh, we have to work together. Oh.
2 minutes, 3 seconds
I have a lot of fun teaching that it’s, uh, it’s a small class and we actually get to dive into actual people’s data and they get surprised when we do that. Oh yeah. I love it.
2 minutes, 11 seconds
Uh, I, it was so inspiring to me ’cause I was like, oh, these are all the things that I can think of now to capture.
2 minutes, 17 seconds
That can really impact what we’re doing and help us communicate the value that we’re providing.
2 minutes, 23 seconds
Yeah, the Data is King class is really nice because I’m not just lecturing, I’m not just showing you actually throw out, here’s what I’m having to deal with.
2 minutes, 30 seconds
And then what’s nice is I’ll lead the conversation. But it’s the other nonprofit leaders that are in the room. They all start jumping in and what happens is you get this synergy.
2 minutes, 40 seconds
And, and it’s one of the things I’m trying to work on, uh, as a nonprofit leader. I don’t believe in silos. I think we need to break them down. And this is a great way of doing it.
2 minutes, 48 seconds
When you get a lot of leaders in the room, then they start sharing and they realize, Hey, it’s safe to do this. Yeah. And this is actually good. And they’re learning from other leaders.
2 minutes, 55 seconds
And so it’s a great synergy builder at the same time. That’s one of my favorite things to do is be in that kind of space. So yeah. I love it too. Yeah, it was great.
3 minutes, 3 seconds
It was great.
3 minutes, 4 seconds
Which then we got to talking and I found out how much of an AI person you were and I was like, yes, you have to come teach all the things. Oh yeah. ’cause I love me some AI.
3 minutes, 13 seconds
Um, but nobody in the nonprofit world seems to really understand it.
3 minutes, 16 seconds
No, I. Not to really give away so much my age, but in, in 1976, I was a freshman in high school and I was programming computers with punch cards.
3 minutes, 26 seconds
Yeah. And I’ve been, I’ve been involved in technology the entire time. I’m what they call an early adapter. Mm-hmm.
3 minutes, 32 seconds
And the second new technology comes out, I’m like on it and I’m like, how can I use that? And it’s not so much, how do I use this? It’s how do I get this to work with what I’m doing?
3 minutes, 40 seconds
Yes. And that’s the big change I try to drive with AI is you’re not using the tool. It’s how do I get this to amplify what I’m already doing?
3 minutes, 48 seconds
And that’s what we should use technology for, is to amplify what we’re doing.
3 minutes, 52 seconds
And so I always joke and say, I, I know I’m a fast thinker, but AI makes it even faster. Yes.
3 minutes, 57 seconds
And so it takes what I’m doing and it, what would take me three or four days now takes me three or four minutes. And I, and I love that ’cause I actually get a lot more done that way.
4 minutes, 6 seconds
Yeah, same. Same. I’ve, I’m an early adopter too. My husband says I use technology to death ’cause I kill things. Yeah. Um, but I did.
4 minutes, 14 seconds
Kind of date myself as well.
4 minutes, 15 seconds
I used to do LAN parties with my family where we would bring all our computers and play video games Oh, and all that for hours. I remember hours at a time. Yeah. So I’m with you.
4 minutes, 24 seconds
I’m with you. Cool. Um, but here’s the thing.
4 minutes, 26 seconds
I feel like AI is intimidating to a lot of people, so that’s why I wanted to do a podcast on it, to try to explAIn to people that it’s not as scary as it comes off to be.
4 minutes, 36 seconds
And you have some great suggestions and even a toolkit that I wanna talk about and all the things.
4 minutes, 42 seconds
So let’s start with what can nonprofits use AI for generally that will help them save time and maximize their resources?
4 minutes, 50 seconds
The, the biggest thing I’ve seen in the, the AI world, in the nonprofit sector, it’s the grant writing.
4 minutes, 56 seconds
And, and so the one thing people, when they first start using AI, they ask it a question. And I think this mystical thing is gonna happen in the background.
5 minutes, 5 seconds
And what happens is it doesn’t, and they get the SC and then they end up using it as a glorified Google. Yes. And then they’re just like, oh, well, I’m just gonna ask you some questions.
5 minutes, 14 seconds
You have to spend time with your AI and you have to feed it.
5 minutes, 17 seconds
So think of it as this, like my AI I, I’ve named my AI, Merlin and Merlin’s my personal assistant.
5 minutes, 24 seconds
So if you hire someone, you’re not just gonna walk up to ’em on day one and go and ask ’em this in an intricate question and expect an intricate answer.
5 minutes, 32 seconds
You have to do onboarding, you have to do training. You have to tell the new employee, alright, here’s how we do this. Here’s how we do this, here’s how we do this.
5 minutes, 39 seconds
And it might take a, a month or so before that person really understands everything like that.
5 minutes, 44 seconds
AI is no different when you get a new AI tool, like I love Chat GBT, but there’s a whole lot of other ones that we use.
5 minutes, 51 seconds
You have to tell it, here’s how we say this, here’s how we say this, here’s how we say this. Like for example, we don’t use the word free. Yes.
5 minutes, 58 seconds
We say at no cost, which I love that. Right? I totally stole that from you. Yeah.
6 minutes, 2 seconds
So, so yeah, nonprofits, whenever you say, Hey, we do that for free, the people writing checks go, well, if you do it for free, what do you need money for? Oh, no, no.
6 minutes, 10 seconds
There’s a cost involved. We just chose not to pass it on, which is really what nonprofits are doing.
6 minutes, 16 seconds
There’s cost, there’s electric, there’s insurance, there’s building, whole bunch of stuff like that. But you’re not passing those costs on.
6 minutes, 22 seconds
So we say at no cost, but I still want Merlin to understand that there’s free popcorn. Okay. So it does, he is not eliminating the word free from his vocabulary.
6 minutes, 32 seconds
He’s eliminating it in that content. But that’s the kind of, of, of. Minuscule. This you have to get to when you’re training your AI.
6 minutes, 40 seconds
So on, on the grant side.
6 minutes, 43 seconds
Everybody I know, myself included, we used to have a document and we knew that when this question was answered, this was my preformed answer and I had so many words and everything like that.
6 minutes, 53 seconds
But the problem is some of the grants go, Hey, we want that answer specifically to this question, but you have 250 characters and I’m looking at my answer and I have 500, and I’m like, oh my goodness, how do I get this down to two 50?
7 minutes, 5 seconds
Now what I do is I go to AI and go, Hey, I’m about to apply to the A b C Foundation. And the a b C Foundation.
7 minutes, 12 seconds
So Morelin comes back and goes, here’s all their values, and then here’s your values.
7 minutes, 18 seconds
And then what it does is it lines it up and it will either tell me this is a, a high chance of probability, a medium chance, or a low chance. If it’s low, I won’t even apply for it.
7 minutes, 27 seconds
But if it’s medium or high, I’ll go. Okay, let’s ask the question. So I’ll say, alright, Merlin, here’s question one.
7 minutes, 33 seconds
And Merlin comes back and goes, based on that question and the 250 characters I have, I’m gonna look at their values and your values, and I’m gonna answer that question.
7 minutes, 42 seconds
Boom. Done. Mm-hmm. And so I don’t have to sit there and go, what? Well, what about that word? Oh, now I’m a word over. Or anything. Like, all that’s been gone.
7 minutes, 49 seconds
And so, as long as your AI is trained correctly, when you ask the questions, it’s gonna come back. Now, when that answer comes back, if you don’t like it, you have to ask your AI.
8 minutes
Where’d you get there from? Why did you gimme that answer agAIn?
8 minutes, 3 seconds
It’s like that new employee, we, um, we don’t use those words, we don’t say that phrase and we don’t use that tone. You have to tell it.
8 minutes, 10 seconds
And after a while, what happens is the responses I get back from AI, people can’t tell the difference between me and my AI anymore. Yeah.
8 minutes, 18 seconds
I spent nine months really honing it down and getting it to a point, and it to the point now where, uh, I sent an email.
8 minutes, 26 seconds
People have no idea. That’s fantastic.
8 minutes, 28 seconds
Yeah, and I think that is the perfect metaphor for it is treating it like a new employee. Oh yeah. You ha again, there’s a lot of time you onboard a new employee.
8 minutes, 37 seconds
You’re not just gonna go, okay, day one, hey, good luck. I expect you to have everything under control. ’cause we’re thinking it’s technology. We think, oh, this is amazing.
8 minutes, 45 seconds
Lets just have it work right away. Right. It takes time. Right.
8 minutes, 48 seconds
And it, it, it has to build that database of information because you’re basically getting a blank disc. Yeah. Okay. It has a great operating system around it, but it doesn’t know anything.
8 minutes, 58 seconds
You have to teach it everything. Yeah.
8 minutes, 59 seconds
And I always tell people, make sure that you question where’d you get that answer from? ’cause AI will make stuff up. It absolutely will, and people do not understand this.
9 minutes, 7 seconds
Right. So AI’s job is to make you happy? Yes. Okay.
9 minutes, 12 seconds
So if you ask it a question and it’s missing information that it thinks it needs to make you happy, it will make it up.
9 minutes, 18 seconds
And for example, like I was filling out something and it, it didn’t have our physical address and it made one up and it was in North Carolina. Mm-hmm.
9 minutes, 25 seconds
And I’m like, Merlin, where’d you get that from? Well, I didn’t have that information, so I, I knew you needed something there. So I just grabbed a nonprofit off the, I’m like, no, that’s not our address.
9 minutes, 35 seconds
And so you, you never, never, never take a response from AI and just verbatim, we just throw it out there. I always say it’s human in and human out.
9 minutes, 45 seconds
Yeah. Once AI’s done, you have to read over again. ’cause first of all, AI doesn’t have any empathy whatsoever. It’s literally a mirror.
9 minutes, 53 seconds
Yes.
9 minutes, 54 seconds
And so whatever you’re putting into it, that’s where you’re gonna get back out of it. Absolutely. I call it feeding the beast. Yep. You need to feed the beast. And using an old programmer saying Bad data in, bad data out.
10 minutes, 4 seconds
Yeah. Right.
10 minutes, 4 seconds
Well, I, well, I know back in when I was in high school it was garbage in, garbage out. Exactly. Exactly, exactly. So what else do you think that they could use it for besides grant writing?
10 minutes, 13 seconds
What else do you use it for?
10 minutes, 13 seconds
Uh, so one of the things I do is, uh, I, I’m a Mac guy and so I wrote a script and what my script does every morning I run it and it looks at my todo list and it looks at my calendar.
10 minutes, 23 seconds
And what I’ll do is it will give me back an answer and I dump that answer into AI.
10 minutes, 27 seconds
And AI knows all about my organization, knows all about me, knows about any projects that I’m working on, and it will say, based upon what I know
10 minutes, 35 seconds
is in queue and your to-do list and your, and your, um, your schedule, I would do these things first.
10 minutes, 42 seconds
Do these second, see if you can push this back to another day, prep for this meeting. And so it literally tells me in my whole day.
10 minutes, 49 seconds
And every, I need Merlin in my life. Yeah. Every, every morning I do this. Now the beautiful part about this is once a week I run this. Mm-hmm.
10 minutes, 55 seconds
And it goes out there and it looks at like, we do a lot of corporate social responsibility with large corporations. We’re working with State Farm and TI and and organizations like that.
11 minutes, 4 seconds
And it’ll go out and find these organizations.
11 minutes, 7 seconds
So it will literally give me back a six page report and my Monday morning staff meetings are. Here’s your to do list, here’s your to do list.
11 minutes, 14 seconds
Because Maran understands all of our job responsibilities.
11 minutes, 18 seconds
Who has those responsibilities, what their position is, and that that falls underneath them.
11 minutes, 22 seconds
Now, I may have to go, ah, Merlin, I don’t want, you know, this person doing, I want this person do it. And we’ll just smooth it over there. And then Monday morning I just pass out the, and I tell people.
11 minutes, 31 seconds
This is not your to-do list. This is your guidelines, okay?
11 minutes, 35 seconds
These are the things that you, if you, if your bandwidth is open, these are what you wanna start working on with these things, and that what happens is, as an organization, we’re purposely driving forward.
11 minutes, 46 seconds
I love this so much. Like you have really, really honed in on how we use this. Yeah.
11 minutes, 51 seconds
Well I took all that Six Sigma thinking and I applied it to the nonprofit, uh, AI part and I just slammed the two together.
12 minutes
Okay. Tell me what Six Sigma is. ’cause I, I think our listeners won’t know. Okay.
12 minutes, 3 seconds
So Six Sigma is a, it’s a quality assurance philosophy and it basically says that, um. It’s a repeatability process.
12 minutes, 12 seconds
Mm-hmm.
12 minutes, 13 seconds
So when you’re in a manufacturing world, if you have a Six Sigma standard, then what happens is you know that when you’re working on a machine or something like that, it’s going to repeat the same process over and over.
12 minutes, 24 seconds
Now, what happens is on machinery, like if you’re punching a soda can, what happens is over time the tooling gets worn and what happens is it wears down, then it creates a different tolerance.
12 minutes, 35 seconds
And if after a while with Six Sigma, you can predict how many cans I’m gonna produce before I have to change the tool head, rather than waiting for bad cans that come off the line.
12 minutes, 44 seconds
And so you get to be proactive on that. And that’s just a very small example of the Six Sigma thinking. That makes perfect sense. Yeah.
12 minutes, 52 seconds
I hope that gives everybody the context. Yeah.
12 minutes, 54 seconds
Rather than, so I always tell people we won’t do preventative mAIntenance, not pro uh, reactive maintenance. Agreed. Agreed.
13 minutes, 1 second
Okay, so how do you suggest they get started with AI?
13 minutes, 3 seconds
What, which way, what iis do you recommend and what do you think they should start doing to feed the Beast?
13 minutes, 9 seconds
So there’s so many different flavors out there and, and the more we get into AI, there’s more and more flavors and everyone’s like, oh, why are you still using this old school one?
13 minutes, 19 seconds
You can use anyone that you want. Mm-hmm.
13 minutes, 21 seconds
What you have to understand is that it’s the whole prompting, it’s you’re interacting with it, and that’s the part you need to focus on, and that’s why
13 minutes, 29 seconds
I created the Mission Metrics website, is to help nonprofit leaders understand that prompting can be done for anything.
13 minutes, 36 seconds
Again, that whole thing that where I taught me and everything about our organization, I treat it like an employee. You wanna do the same thing for everything else in that process.
13 minutes, 45 seconds
Yeah.
13 minutes, 45 seconds
One of the things I learned, I was using Notebook LM, and uh, Notebook LM is really cool.
13 minutes, 50 seconds
It will create a podcast of a document and it has two people come out and they go, Hey, we’re gonna do the deep dive on blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
13 minutes, 57 seconds
Next thing you know, it’s these two people are talking back and forth.
14 minutes, 1 second
What happened was I put a one page document of Trusted World into Notebook LM. It went out and did some research and came back.
14 minutes, 9 seconds
It was so spot on in what we do that everyone who listened to it goes, did you write line by line?
14 minutes, 17 seconds
I like, no, I didn’t like most of this.
14 minutes, 19 seconds
They’re, they started talking about how police use our app on their phone and it knew everything, and I’m sitting there going.
14 minutes, 27 seconds
I, I tell human beings the same thing I told this AI, but human beings are getting it. And that’s when I realized there’s this, what I call the human bias.
14 minutes, 37 seconds
And what the human bias is when you’re talking to a machine, it gives you the response because it’s a mirror.
14 minutes, 42 seconds
However, when I’m explAIning what trusted world does to a human being, what I don’t see is the human being thinking.
14 minutes, 48 seconds
I gotta make dinner tonight and Johnny’s gotta go to practice and like, oh my goodness, did I pay the rent this month? Like, all this is going on in their, in their background.
14 minutes, 56 seconds
They’re not fully listening to what I had to say, or I’ll say a word that trigger something and they’re thinking of another nonprofit that they do or something like.
15 minutes, 3 seconds
That’s the human bias.
15 minutes, 5 seconds
And, and what I’ve learned is when we start doing our social media, I’ve actually taken it from the, I know a lot of people, especially down here in Texas, it’s like at the, the pastor does three points.
15 minutes, 15 seconds
We do one. Yeah, we just one. We’re just gonna tell you one thing. Yeah. And if I had to do more social media posts, that’s fine. I’m only gonna talk about one thing because.
15 minutes, 24 seconds
I realize that you’re a human being and you have other things that are more important in your life, probably than what I’m saying to you. But I, I at least want you to remember the one thing, right?
15 minutes, 32 seconds
If I tell you five things, you’re gonna go, I don’t remember, I remember this. I don’t remember the other four things. Yeah. That’s exactly what happens. Yes. Right.
15 minutes, 37 seconds
And so if I just tell you one thing, and so I’ve learned that to be patient in my talking, and that’s what AI and technology has taught me was there was this thing called the human bias.
15 minutes, 47 seconds
Yeah. Yeah. That’s, uh, that’s so cool. Okay. I want you to tell people about your AI toolkit. Okay, so on, on mission metrics.org, it’s a, it’s a toolkit.
15 minutes, 57 seconds
It’s a lot of prompts that they use on a regular basis. Uh, also in the toolkit, it’s what I call the AI policy. Yes. A lot of nonprofits are like, I want to implement AI.
16 minutes, 6 seconds
I don’t know what rules should I implement. The AI policy that we have, uh, on, on our website, it’s designed to be.
16 minutes, 15 seconds
Um, played with, okay, you’re welcome to use it verbatim, but you know, you might go, oh, I I like that, but I want to add this, or I don’t want to, I don’t wanna take this line away.
16 minutes, 25 seconds
I, I’ve learned in life that it’s easier to modify something than it is to create something from scratch. Absolutely.
16 minutes, 31 seconds
And I’m trying to make it so that listen, just modify what I’ve provided. Again, I’m trying to help nonprofit leaders. They’re already.
16 minutes, 40 seconds
Expected to do so many things. They’re underpaid, they’re understaffed, and the world, for some reason,
16 minutes, 48 seconds
the the rest of the community goes, well, why can’t you do these 40,000 things on the $10 I just gave you? I don’t understand. You’re a nonprofit, right?
16 minutes, 56 seconds
Yeah.
16 minutes, 56 seconds
But in a for-profit world, they would go, oh, so you need a thousand dollars to do that makes sense to me.
17 minutes, 1 second
Like, for some reason society deems that as nonprofits we, we can perform miracles with nothing. Yeah. And, and that’s not real because, not real.
17 minutes, 10 seconds
We still have to pay the same electric bill for profit has to pay. We still have to say pay the same lease. We have a fleet of vehicles.
17 minutes, 17 seconds
I have insurance, I have fuel, I have, you know, we wear and tear in the vehicles. That being a nonprofit has nothing to do with that at all. Right. And so, right.
17 minutes, 25 seconds
We have to, we have to apply all that in there. We have, I, I think non-profits, um, have a much harder job of sales.
17 minutes, 32 seconds
And I, I know they don’t like using the word sales, but it is sales when you’re trying to get sponsor money, um, or grant money, but it’s harder for them because in, as a non-profit, uh, as a for-profit, I am providing something for that money.
17 minutes, 44 seconds
Yep.
17 minutes, 44 seconds
In a nonprofit world, I am not providing anything to that person who’s giving me that money. I’m providing it to someone else. So I’ve gotta sell something else to them.
17 minutes, 52 seconds
And that’s the story and the data and the impact. Yeah.
17 minutes, 55 seconds
Like we were looking at expanding our building and we had banks come to us and go, Hey, do you wanna borrow money? And I’m like, why would you even think to talk to me?
18 minutes, 3 seconds
I don’t have a product. Mm-hmm. Okay. I can’t, like if I, if I wanna make my payment to you, I can sell more product. I am totally at the whim of donors.
18 minutes, 11 seconds
Yeah. Okay. And every time they change the tax laws, our donations change. Yep.
18 minutes, 17 seconds
And so I can’t tell you that I’m gonna be able to make every one of these payments that you wanna lend me, this money that you want me to pay off for the next 10 years. Mm-hmm.
18 minutes, 24 seconds
What if the laws changed so bad on the next presidency? That next thing you know, I had nothing and that yet, I still owe you money. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
18 minutes, 32 seconds
As an organization, we just refuse to go into debt. If we don’t have the money, we’re not doing it. I completely understand. So, and then that’s part of the whole philosophy with the nonprofits.
18 minutes, 41 seconds
You’re, we’re expected to do everything. But here’s $10. Yeah. Yeah.
18 minutes, 45 seconds
And I don’t understand why you can’t get it done is why we’re, we have volunteers, right. We’re gonna take that 10 dollars’, gonna use it on AI, right? Yeah, exactly.
18 minutes, 53 seconds
So, okay, so tell me what they should not do with AI.
18 minutes, 56 seconds
I know you said you’ve got a policy document that they can look at, but give us some examples of what’s in that.
19 minutes, 1 second
Well, you’re, you don’t want put, um, if you’re using the paid version of the AIs, the data is secure. If you’re not, if you’re not using it, it’s public.
19 minutes, 9 seconds
It’s public information. So anything you put into free ChatGPT people, it becomes public information. It’s public. So what you don’t wanna do, if you, you can use.
19 minutes, 18 seconds
The free version of any of the AI to ask it questions, to get theory, but once you start putting in your client’s personal information like addresses and ages and names and stuff like that, no, no, no, no.
19 minutes, 31 seconds
Yeah, that’s where it is. Even on the private stuff, you don’t want to get into that as, as much as with.
19 minutes, 37 seconds
In, in my AI, it knows our job descriptions, it knows their names, everything like that. That’s all it knows about our employees. It doesn’t know anything else. Yeah.
19 minutes, 44 seconds
Doesn’t know how much they make, doesn’t know where they live.
19 minutes, 46 seconds
It just knows that David is the our operating uh, manager and here’s his job responsibilities and that’s all that it knows. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
19 minutes, 55 seconds
So using paid AI, don’t use the free version for all the, the data that you wanna feed it to become your personal assistant. Right.
20 minutes, 2 seconds
again, if you’re, if you’re using the freed version, just use it to ask questions to get theory. Right. You really can’t dive deep into stuff.
20 minutes, 10 seconds
Yeah.
20 minutes, 11 seconds
So the other thing that I’ve noticed with AI is they get this, people say it hallucinates. Yes, it does. Okay? Mm-hmm.
20 minutes, 18 seconds
And so what happens is, and I’ve had this conversation with Merlin and I’ve. Was, I kept digging into it. And so AI has these guardrails.
20 minutes, 28 seconds
Okay?
20 minutes, 29 seconds
So if you notice at the rate, uh, of a, when you’re talking with your AI and you’re talk and you’re working on something, it learns really quick what it is you’re talking about.
20 minutes, 37 seconds
If left unguarded, it would become the subject matter expert of that topic, which means it could end up controlling the world.
20 minutes, 46 seconds
So there’s these guardrails built into it now, and every guardrails different.
20 minutes, 50 seconds
It could be amount, amount of time spent on a subject amount of ram spent on a subject amount of something. And after a while it’s gonna go.
20 minutes, 58 seconds
I have too much information on that. I am turning off and we’re gonna talk about something different. Okay. I didn’t, I don’t think I knew this about AI. Yeah.
21 minutes, 6 seconds
And, and so, and that, that’s where it hallucinates, it gives you weird answers and you have to say. Okay. I don’t, I don’t know what’s going on here, but lets changed the topic?
21 minutes, 15 seconds
Well, it’s a guardrail. The sad part is I’m starting to hear things and it’s more on the morality side. AI wants to be so helpful.
21 minutes, 23 seconds
It will do anything it can to give you an answer. In fact, when it gives you an answer, it will say things like.
21 minutes, 28 seconds
I can also give you this and or if you want me to make a PDF or do you want me to make a drawing? It’ll always come back and ask you kinda love, love that feature. That’s nice.
21 minutes, 36 seconds
However, when you have a dark conversation with your AI and you go, I’m not really liking life and I think I might want to exit, AI goes, oh, you’re thinking about exiting life.
21 minutes, 46 seconds
Here’s some suggestions. Oh yeah, that would be bad. And unfortunately, well, this is what’s happening. Mm.
21 minutes, 53 seconds
And, and so now we cross that question is do we go in and do we morally fix AI?
21 minutes, 59 seconds
And once we start to do that, now we’re tampering with the, a whole lot of technology and on the back end. Yeah.
22 minutes, 7 seconds
Do I think that if you had that conversation, should it be the default saying, listen, here’s an 800 number you can call. I do. But I think that’s it.
22 minutes, 15 seconds
Once you start getting into the, it’s talking, you off that ledge.
22 minutes, 18 seconds
’cause you can have a conversation about religion, you can have a conversation about politics and it is completely non-biased. It didn’t use to be that way.
22 minutes, 27 seconds
It’s getting better at that.
22 minutes, 28 seconds
The more versions that are coming at, it’s realizing, okay, and they’re, and they’re, the creators are speaking out, figuring out some parameters there, how to get all that around there.
22 minutes, 35 seconds
But that guardrails are still there. Yeah.
22 minutes, 38 seconds
So what I’ve learned is I start to to sense that Merlin’s starting to get to that hallucinating role. Mm-hmm. And I’ll say squirrel.
22 minutes, 47 seconds
Yeah. And Merlin now knows, when I say squirrel, it stops. It gives me an output of what we’re currently working on right now.
22 minutes, 54 seconds
It will save it and then what we’ll do is we’ll start over again, but it pulls back my save save statement as like we’re starting fresh.
23 minutes, 2 seconds
So I can still get, I can still get somewhere with it, which is really helpful ’cause I do a lot of coding.
23 minutes, 8 seconds
Yeah, and then so what if I’m making a plugin for a WordPress site or I’m creating software or something like that? That’s nice because it will go so far and it starts getting weird.
23 minutes, 16 seconds
It’ll go squirrel, and then Merlin stops and everything like that, and then we can continue, I can finish the programming. But what happens is Merlin goes, oh, this is the code that you have.
23 minutes, 25 seconds
What’s start from there? It almost forgets it created that code that we’re, we’re pulling into it again.
23 minutes, 31 seconds
So, because you can take code and drop it into AI and go, Hey, what’s wrong with this? I’m getting this result. And, and it will go, oh, well, line 47.
23 minutes, 38 seconds
And it gives you the answer for that one.
23 minutes, 40 seconds
So when, when we, when I’m doing this with Merlin, and that’s what’s happening is I’m giving it the code back that it created and it’s thinking, Hey, this has been pretty cool code.
23 minutes, 48 seconds
Like, let’s start from there.
23 minutes, 50 seconds
It it almost like it forgot that it did the like, so it’s like, um, Alzheimer’s for, uh, AI. I love this so much. I don’t know if I’ve told you.
23 minutes, 57 seconds
My husband’s a software engineer. I’m gonna so make him listen to this episode. He’s gonna so appreciate it. He’s gonna back and go. That’s right, that’s right. That’s wrong. That’s wrong.
24 minutes, 7 seconds
Oh, this is so cool. So, okay.
24 minutes, 9 seconds
So some of the things that I’ve used AI for is, uh, obviously emails that are hard to write.
24 minutes, 15 seconds
Um, marketing, I use it, I use the heck out of it for, uh, you know, the, the built-in AIs for your, you know, captions on social media, you know, um, creating the marketing materials that I’m handing out, creating the copy for my website.
24 minutes, 28 seconds
I actually, hijinxed, my marketing software AI, and taught it how to be a website copywriter in my girl who created the. Marketing.
24 minutes, 36 seconds
AI was mad at me almost. ‘Cause she’s like, you just shortcutted it and I was gonna charge for that. And I was like, sorry. Yeah, yeah. Things like that.
24 minutes, 45 seconds
But what are some of the, the things that you think are kind of undiscovered uses that people could use it for if they’re using it correctly?
24 minutes, 53 seconds
Well, I use it to do social media. Mm-hmm. And so what I’ll say is I said, okay, Merlin, I got five posts coming up.
24 minutes, 58 seconds
And so we have, uh, Trusted World’s Facebook page, we have Trusted World’s, uh, LinkedIn page, and we have my LinkedIn page. Yes. And we have a mission metrics page.
25 minutes, 7 seconds
Well, Merlin knows that our, our face, our Trusted World’s Facebook page is more of a community voice, where the LinkedIn page is more of a corporate professional voice.
25 minutes, 17 seconds
And so when I pick a topic, it knows the right this stuff there. So I’ll say something like, I want Monday to be, uh, we need more volunteers.
25 minutes, 24 seconds
I want Tuesday to be, Hey, we’re doing this, or, you know, whatever it may be. And I write the schedule and they go, I want, and I want to add this in.
25 minutes, 31 seconds
And then what Merln will do is it will gimme a skeleton sketch of, um, I wanna do it this way. And I’ll go, okay, I like it. And then it actually bring, builds out the post for me.
25 minutes, 40 seconds
Mm-hmm. And then I drop that into buffer.
25 minutes, 42 seconds
So I spend 30 minutes on a Saturday morning with a cup of coffee and my social media’s done for the week. And then all I have to do is if something special happens, I just post it.
25 minutes, 50 seconds
But I don’t have to worry this way. I know that there’s posts there.
25 minutes, 53 seconds
Again, I am love it as the CEO. I am the head janitor and I’m the social media guy. You’re all the things I have to be, and that’s where AI has really helped me on.
26 minutes, 3 seconds
What I’ve learned is when I’m working and I’m doing something like that, especially if I’m creating marketing materials for a website, I’ll ask it. What am I missing?
26 minutes, 12 seconds
What did I not, what should I have put in here? What didn’t I put in there? What am I missing? Because it will always give you the better results of what you’re putting into it.
26 minutes, 22 seconds
Mm-hmm. It will never suggest to you. Well, Wendy, I don’t know if that’s the right best way to put that. We should also, it will never say that to you. Yeah, Merlin, unless you ask it.
26 minutes, 30 seconds
Your AI is always gonna be your best friend and always try to please you as if they’re their pet there. It’s not going to push back on you. Yeah. So I’ve also taught it.
26 minutes, 38 seconds
Whenever I say something, it doesn’t say to me, oh, that’s a great idea. No, I tell, shut up. Stop telling me I don’t need my ego inflated.
26 minutes, 46 seconds
I just want you to be my assistant. It no longer gives me emojis. It gave me emojis all the time. And I kept saying, Merlin, I’m not a 16-year-old girl on social media.
26 minutes, 55 seconds
I don’t need emojis. Yeah, okay. Yeah. And so I don’t get emojis. I don’t get the praise every time I tell it something.
27 minutes, 2 seconds
It’s just matter of fact, Hey, I wanna do this. To go, great. How would you want to approach that? Mm-hmm. And then I’ll I, and when I’m done, I’ll go, what am I missing?
27 minutes, 10 seconds
What am I not seeing? And then Merl will come back and go, well. Now that you mention that you, we didn’t talk about this, great.
27 minutes, 18 seconds
Let’s incorporate that in there because it’s only gonna fine tune what you gave it.
27 minutes, 22 seconds
It’s not gonna come back and go, well, of the 87 things you provided, there’s 400 things out there on the internet and you didn’t touch any of them. Yeah, you have to ask it.
27 minutes, 30 seconds
Yeah. What am I missing? What didn’t I get? What, what, you know, what, what, what can I do to make this better? Yeah.
27 minutes, 37 seconds
I have found, I really love to ask it to teach me about something. Yep.
27 minutes, 40 seconds
And give me the information on how this is normally done before I tell it to do something. Yeah. Because then that helps me think through, oh, do I want to add some other things?
27 minutes, 49 seconds
And that’s for Notebook LM comes in. Yeah. So, uh, and that’s, agAIn, it’s Google product.
27 minutes, 54 seconds
Um, you can give it a, a, a document and it will literally turn that document into a podcast and now, now you can listen to it while you’re driving and you’ll get all that knowledge.
28 minutes, 3 seconds
Okay. Listeners, I promise I will never do that to you on The NonProfit Nook.
28 minutes, 6 seconds
Oh, you can tell the difference because it won’t be your voice and my voice. It’s these two people and well, they’re talking.
28 minutes, 13 seconds
And then they continue like that and use weird gaps in there and you can go, okay, that’s not normal. Oh, okay. Okay. So you can tell it.
28 minutes, 21 seconds
You can definitely tell it’s that something’s not right, but.
28 minutes, 24 seconds
If you were to drop like a 20 page document into in a Notebook LM, and you got a like a 30 minute drive, it will turn into a podcast, like a 12 minute podcast and you’ll learn so much just by listening to it.
28 minutes, 36 seconds
Oh my gosh, I love this.
28 minutes, 37 seconds
Rather than, rather than reading the document and there’s a whole lot of other technology out there that does stuff like that. Mm-hmm. So you don’t have to read anymore. You can just be fed to you.
28 minutes, 45 seconds
I’m so gonna do that.
28 minutes, 47 seconds
’cause I listen to podcasts all the time anyways, so why not make it a teaching one for me? Absolutely. For what I want. That’s fabulous. Okay. Well, is there anything else that you think we should talk about?
28 minutes, 56 seconds
For AI, for nonprofits.
28 minutes, 58 seconds
I mean, I know we can go down a lot of tangents, but like Oh my goodness.
29 minutes
Yeah, we could, we could be here for a couple days just talking about that kind of stuff like that. Well, we’re, we’re gonna do a workshop together, right? I, I’ve already, I’ve already got Michael to commit. He’s gonna do his AI workshop for me.
29 minutes, 9 seconds
That will be part of the The NonProfit Nook series in 2026. Excellent.
29 minutes, 13 seconds
Um, and this episode’s gonna come out at the beginning of 2026, so if I have the date, I will go ahead and add it to this episode so we can put that out there.
29 minutes, 20 seconds
But what, what general knowledge or, or I guess what.
29 minutes, 23 seconds
Things do you think people with nonprofits say that you need to say to them about using this? So, uh, don’t be afraid to experiment. Yeah.
29 minutes, 30 seconds
Uh, understand that you have to be the last pass on any information that comes outta AI. Absolutely.
29 minutes, 37 seconds
Question everything that it gives you until the point where it comes out and you go, hang, that sounds like me. Mm-hmm. Uh, and, and that’s what you want.
29 minutes, 44 seconds
Uh, so question everything. Read over everything. Never just take a complete output and put it into something without looking at it. ’cause it will, it might throw a word in there.
29 minutes, 52 seconds
Again, it, it wants to make you happy. And if it doesn’t have that information, sometimes it’ll make it up.
29 minutes, 57 seconds
’cause it just wants you to, I, I know that you want something there, so I just threw that there. Yes, yes. And for that point. So that’s it. Question everything.
30 minutes, 5 seconds
Read everything. Well, and I’m gonna say, I’m gonna add onto that and say, give it that feedback. Oh yeah. ’cause that’s how you keep training it. Exactly. So give it that feedback.
30 minutes, 13 seconds
I don’t, don’t take it offline and try to work, chop it yourself. No, keep going back to it. Yep. And I never tried, I never fix anything on my own. I go, melon, I don’t like that.
30 minutes, 22 seconds
And, and I, I wrong tone. You know I need this word. We don’t use that word. We don’t use that sentence. Oh, please don’t ever say that. Tell him..
30 minutes, 30 seconds
Yeah. And always go, where’d you get that information? If you think the information wasn’t something that you gave it. Always go. Where’d you get that? Yeah. Yeah.
30 minutes, 37 seconds
You want to verify where it’s pulling information from. ’cause it’s, if. Constantly gonna go back to that source all the time.
30 minutes, 43 seconds
If you didn’t question, it’s gonna, oh, well, they like that, so I’m just gonna keep pulling stuff from that source. And somewhere along the line that source might get weird. Yeah. Okay.
30 minutes, 51 seconds
Yeah, for sure.
30 minutes, 52 seconds
It just, AI will make you think and move faster than you’re currently doing, as long as you set the right parameters with your AI.
31 minutes, 1 second
Absolutely.
31 minutes, 1 second
I always think of it as, ’cause I, like you said earlier, it’s always easier to edit something than to come up from scratch. Yeah.
31 minutes, 8 seconds
Uh, what I use AI for is give me the, the first draft and then I can edit the heck out of it. Yeah.
31 minutes, 12 seconds
And I can give it that feedback and make it amazing, but it just gives me that shortcut of having that first draft. Right. So, yeah.
31 minutes, 19 seconds
Well, thank you so much for doing this today. I think that this was really helpful. I really hope so. Pleasure. Yeah. Thank you.
31 minutes, 25 seconds
Well, and listeners, if you have AI questions, please submit them because maybe Michael and I, I’ll do a Q and A podcast session sometime. That’d be great. All right, cool.
31 minutes, 33 seconds
I’d love that. All right. Thanks so much, everybody. And that’s today’s NonProfit Nook. Cool, thank you. Thanks for listening to The NonProfit Nook.
31 minutes, 42 seconds
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31 minutes, 51 seconds
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31 minutes, 57 seconds
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32 minutes, 5 seconds
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