Episode 83 - Smarter Fundraising, Deeper Impact with Gabe Cooper

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The need for change in the fundraising sector has never been greater.

But innovations and technology are evolving faster than our ability to understand them.

Are these advances good or bad? Do they have unintended consequences?

And what is the application to the global fundraising sector?

That's what we're here to find out. Welcome to the Fundraising AI podcast.

Your up-to-date resource for responsible AI for the global fundraising community

hosted by Nathan Chappelle and Scott Rosencrantz.

All right. We're back for another episode of the Fundraising AI podcast.

And I'm here with a very special guest in a very special place actually.

This is like a legit podcast studio. I'm here with Gabe Cooper CEO and founder of Virtua software

at our headquarters here in Phoenix, Arizona. Hey, Gabe.

Hey, Nathan, thanks for having me. I feel like we've been hanging out all week already.

And so this is just a continuation of the great conversation.

It's icing on the cake. Yeah, too bad we didn't just hit record in a lot of other conversations

that we've had. Yeah.

So for me, this is a special week because I joined Virtua's basically April 29th of last year.

So I missed the all-team meeting last year just barely.

And so this is my first all-team meeting. And it was just amazing to see the last couple days where

about 150, some people got trapped in the snow at their houses. I couldn't make it.

Yeah, yeah, which is so sad. But to meet all the people for the first time that I've only seen

heads of and I'm like, oh, you're pregnant. Oh, oh, you're like, I had no idea. You're like six

feet tall, right? I mean, it's been so cool. And I shared this with you yesterday. But of course,

I became a fanboy of you a long time ago after having been a serum user my whole career.

And I just love the way you talked about what serum should do and how they shouldn't just store

data, but they should take action. And I started stalking you. I don't know if I've shared this

officially, but we'd go to an event. You probably sense this anyway. And I would kind of find my

way around like, so where's Gabe? And who is he talking to? And I kind of just hang out there

for a while and maybe there'd be a thing to think. And then I'd be like, where are you going to lunch?

Or are you going to dinner? And I would tag along with other people. And I don't know what it was

other than I think the ethos and your approach. I mean, it was always customer first and it was

impact first. But it was yeah, that idea of like how technology can scale impact. And it was like

for the right reason. So yeah, it's been amazing. And so then this last year being on the team,

to see this come into fruition this week. And I told you this yesterday. And of course,

I'm biased, but I'm not exaggerating is that the vibe that you've created at Virtuous is

extremely unique. Like I it's this trifect of really smart people that are also really passionate

and also kind and like very caring with each other. So I thought it'd be great for you to just share

a little bit of your origin story. I don't know if that that was an intentional like 10 or how many

years you can go back to this. Like, what was the problem you're trying to solve? And like,

did you have an idea of like, this is what it would be a dozen years later? Gosh, I mean, I don't

know that anybody when they first start something has a full complete vision. I think for most founders,

you're just like just dumb enough to be awake without knowing how the future is going to play out.

But certainly it's it's sort of more than I had hoped for. And more than I'd hope for, I think,

for the thing you mentioned, which is I get to work with a shockingly smart people who are

incredibly kind every day in that. And that's the thing I didn't predict this has been just

such an amazing part of the job to this point. So yeah, when Serdy Virtuous about 11 years

got spent several years in and around the nonprofit space for nonprofits and running an agency

software company that served in a profit space. But more than that, I just had a passion for

sort of generosity more generally. And it was frustrated, both working with nonprofit tech,

but as a donor to nonprofits, this experience sort of sucks. Right. Technology in the right hands

can really solve some of these problems. And the big problem we're trying to solve and we've

talked about this a lot is how do you create personal experiences for donors that draw them into

the cause and meaning for way, make them give them more sacrificially, right? And it's just this

virtuous cycle, I guess. And so that's really what we founded Virtuous for. But it's been great to

see it like actually come to fruition. Was the idea, of course, Virtuous is known as being a

responsive fundraising platform. And I don't know when that kind of manifests itself. If that was

kind of the, I mean, it was that ethos all along, but I don't know if that like came into its

own at a certain point. And then it became kind of declaratively like the thing that people saw,

it was like, Oh, wait a minute. Like again, I always bought a CRM thinking, I need a place to store

my data in case like Joe wins a lottery and he's never coming back. And I have a record of donors.

And we can make sure that we could provide receipts. But I had never considered like serum responsive.

It never even occurred to me throughout my career that all that data could actually be put into

action. So I don't know, at what point did that kind of like was up from the beginning or kind of?

Yeah, you know, the purpose, the why was there from the very beginning. It's like the reason we

founded it was to solve this problem. I think what we discovered is a more we would talk to fundraising

professionals. They would say, Yes, I wanted to do that my entire career. I just don't,

I don't know how to do it. And also, I don't know like what it's called. Right, right.

Probably about eight years ago, we were like, okay, we're planning a flag in the ground and saying,

this thing everybody already wants to do, where it's responsive fundraising. And so that's the

thing. And so I think the story's been there from day one, but really that calling it something

is probably been a, yeah, seven, eight year journey. Yeah, well, I mean, you've written two books

about it. So I think that philosophy is actually now really concrete. And I mean,

it's something that I mean, it's everywhere all over the virtuous office, but it's also something

that our team proudly talks about. And because it takes it again from system of record to a system

of action. And one of the the best things that over the past year for me has been, you know,

walking alongside, you know, virtuous customer, some who are brand new, who are like holy moly,

like I didn't like, yes, this is like what I dreamed of. And now it does this thing. And then

others that, I mean, been on virtuous for longer. And it's like in kind of crazy to see like how

much they put the system to work. And just to see that delta between like someone else that

implemented a different, you know, solution. And they're just kind of doing the same thing they've

always done. And then you see these like virtuous customers catapulting and then like increasing

not just funds raised, but like their ability to connect with the donors like in a more intimate way.

And it's not only good for the short term like for for the nonprofit sector in the short term,

it's good for the long term too. And how we're embracing relationships and increasing trust by

communicating in more personal ways. Yeah, I had a percent. I think the disheartening trends that we've

seen in giving in the US, the sense that I've been to like the iPhone and social media. There's

this wave of distractions that are now washing over most folks. And so one of the downstream

impacts of that has been like it's harder and harder to break through with what we call everyday

donors, people that give a hundred bucks a thousand bucks. And because of that, what you see is

less and less people engaging in charity every year and having more and more major donors that

are having to step up and cover the gap. And that's like, that's bad for the future of generosity. A

lot of times we can celebrate the big headline number look generosity. Stay the same or win up in

this country. It's great. But when you double click and you're like, oh gosh, there's just

underlying trend that's not sustainable. Right. And it's not just, it's not just because it's

future money-flogged and on profits. That's true. But it's also like, we don't want to live in a

world that's less generous. Right. Right. People are generous. Things are generally better. And so

that's the thing we're trying to create. Yeah. Well, you and I, this is all simpaticos well,

because, and I think I've shared this with you, but I felt this burden to write a book called

the Generosity Crisis. And it was not something I had never wanted to be a writer. It wasn't

something that it was like, oh, this I'm going to fulfill my life's destiny. It was I tried to

convince several other people to write a book called the Generosity Crisis. And surprisingly,

there's no takers. And then probably done with the manuscript or close to it. And your book comes

out in your first chapters called the Generosity Crisis. And I remember just like, I broke out

in a sweat. I'm like, oh my gosh, like, this is insane. And my head was swimming. And I think you and

I are we've talked about this, but we're I'm convinced. And I think you are too that when people

are convinced if they're presented with data, that what got you here won't get you there. Like

their concrete evidence of like what we're doing does not work long term, then the motivation to

change becomes worth it, worth the change. And so I've seen you do that. And I've seen you pour

into that. And so, you know, your role with giving USA and serving as the incoming chair or already

your deeply passionate about that idea of your technologies and enabler or it can help accelerate

this. But the underlying passion is that you don't want to see a future that looks far less generous

than it does today. Yeah. So what drives that? Like was that something that you were raised with?

And you just had this like overdeveloped sense of consciousness that yeah, I mean, it is

probably my parents were both just incredibly generous people. And so I saw it modeled a lot.

And then as I got older, I met a couple of folks that are really involved in, you know,

what he might call like generosity movement. And so I saw people that were in the business world

doing really things were just like freakishly and sacrificial generous and doing it in a way that

was sort of pages. And then you just see this like ripple effect out from those people even when

it's anonymous or nobody knows what created the gap. Right. People re-given, re-given, you see

these like sort of cultural waves emanate out from that. And I'd looked at it and I'm like, man,

that is just it's magic. And it's in its antithetical to a lot of what you see, honestly, in culture,

like whether it's political divides or ideological divides or just like sort of consumerism

we're in a world where you're always encouraged to buy something or these encourage to spend like

20 more minutes scrolling at feed. We live in this bombardment of just consumed, consumed, consumed.

And people were not supposed to like. And generosity is like the thing that breaks down those

balls gets you more focused on your neighbor than yourself. And so it's just magic.

Yeah, it reminds me of the book by Chris Anderson, Infectious Generosity and this idea of like

you caught the bug, right? And it ties into something that, you know, we're biologically wired

for, right? Humans are prosocial beings and we wouldn't be here if we weren't. But to your point,

it's almost like everything is working against you to really even spend time to think about what

it is. And in fact, I worry less about the person who doesn't give to a charity this year. I

worry more about the person who goes to bed not even thinking if they should. And so that is again

going back to that like the inundation of technology and average person swipes 300 feet

on their phone a day and just emails and slacks and all the stuff. And it's just so easy to kind of

like spend your time thinking about I just got to get this thing over with. But to your point,

your generosity ties into like the most inherent human instinct. So I love that. So from

responsive fundraising, I mean, again, so that you know, that's a 12 year kind of manifestation.

The world's changed a little bit slightly. I mean, we were talking yesterday and you showed a

slide that had like 12 logos of companies that were playing with and experimenting with and

encouraging our entire team to just try. And I mean, over those 12 logos, I think eight of them

didn't even exist six months ago. Like the world changed a lot in 12 years. And so to go from like

responsive fundraising to kind of this next era, I think about the future, we know we're really

bad at predicting the future. Like that's just one thing. Like we're like, oh, like if I had to

predict like where we'd be in like Chatchy PT world today, like large language bottles, I probably

would have said like, Oh, 2030, 2033, maybe we'd be there. And now we find ourselves here. Do you

have a sense of kind of like next frontier? Like where does responsive fundraising go into this new

world? We're like so much more as possible. Yes. It's a great question. The reality is we're all

trying to figure that out, right? And so I can prognosticate here for 30 minutes and it's

six months from now, you could relisten to this. Right. It's about half of it. It's just all

changing so fast. But there's a few things that I'm convinced of. Number one is AI can make a

massive impact on fundraising generosity, but can make a massive impact on program. And so you

know I'm always super jazz about fundraising. I just want to acknowledge like big problems like

disease and poverty, wealth, inequality, like joblessness, all of these things.

AI is deployed well in a human first kind of way. It has the power to solve for a lot of these

problems. This is why you've talked about this is why I think the nonprofit sectors maybe

now more important than ever because that sort of the leaning by default of the nonprofit

sector is how do we create good in the world? Now we have this massively powerful tool that can

be used for good or not good, right? And so in some sense, the sector should leave the way on

making sure that on the program side, we're leveraging AI to get the best outcomes and being

the sort of out front leaders in the world. That's one on the fundraising side. I'm

get a still from you here. I like the term that you've coined recently, which is

in of one fundraising. And so it's this idea now that with AI, I'll sit back for a second. We

one of the big things about virtuous that we did that people love was I did fundraising automation.

You could watch somebody's behavior. They click an email or they give their first gift and you

could automate a set of touch points on multiple channels. And so they get the right communication

at the right time. And that's that was a huge step forward, right? The problem was the emails that

they get less sense of welcome series. The emails that get the welcome series, everybody that

gives a first gift is basically getting kind of the same email. It's like mostly personalized,

but it's not what you might call in of one. So in a wide meeting, like this person and their

personality and their needs only exist once in the world. So how do I treat them as an individual

person? Well, I think now for the first time, AI is this amazing technology that actually allows us

to have in of one, like we can create content that's very unique to that person. We can know

so much about who they are and what they care about the this. You can kind of think it as the

promise of a response of fundraising can only be like 80% fulfilled in the model. And now you

can kind of close the gap on that other 20% to really create like truly personal moments at every

stage. Yeah, I love it so much because you know, having started my AI journey in 2017 only on the

AML side, which is the machine learning predictive AI. It's like I knew then that it was going to be

transformative in the sense of like now we can understand what a donor looked like the day before

they made a gift, right? We can understand that, but we had no way of activating it, right? So

it was just like, oh, this is it makes us feel good. Like we solve this like 2300 year old dilemma

that Aristotle talked about in the barriers of generosity. But then it's like then what, right? So

there was always this like, okay, well, then we've got to catch up to the next thing. Meanwhile,

you had been steadily going forward on building like tools that allowed people to create lots of

personas. So like I think about Arkansas children, so Matt Price built like 100 different

personas. So it's not again, personalized the end of one, but you provided a platform that

allowed for that if you wanted to. And then to your point now, it's like, we finally have that

other side of the coin, which is like, oh, now we can understand with a great deal of certainty,

what a person looked like before they made their gift. And we can start modeling from that with,

you know, like our insights product and just like high degree of like efficacy and data. But now

it's like, oh my gosh, we have an automation pipeline already built. So then we have an AI overlay,

then then takes that to the end of one. So it's like, it's kind of magical, right? Because like that,

what we're talking about was not even possible, even like, I mean, definitely two years ago,

but probably a year ago, we would have been like, oh, that will come sometime in the future.

And the future is now a hundred percent, right? And so it's maybe the most exciting,

slash scary time fundraiser because all of the things that you thought were impossible are now

possible. Right. Today, not some future day, which is amazing. So,

most fundraisers right now are dealing with sort of two simultaneous feelings, which is this

amazing sort of optimism and excitement about what's possible and what this represents in the

world at the same time, this like mass of fear and fear is sort of like combined with even ethical

dilemmas. What does it mean to be human? Right. Like, yeah. You know, if I'm having AI

craft all this stuff, is it is it authentic? Does it really mean anything? Am I being dishonest and

inauthentic? Am I fundraising practices? And so now there's all this like sort of new set of

things that have been sort of thrust on fundraisers. And so it's exciting, but it's sort of a

non trivial moment to navigate that. Yeah. Yeah. So important. I think we have to name it.

Right. We have to name the tension in the moment and not shy away from it. I've had a weird week.

I wrote an article about this on the airplane over that, you know, it basically was called,

sorry, if I made you cry. So made two people cry this week. And one was out of sheer overwhelm.

And he had come to me and said, Hey, can you describe what I should do for an end? And I didn't

mean it to be overwhelming, but I shared kind of the moment we're in. And he had, I mean, in very,

like you're everyone senses this, right? They're wrestling with whether it's named or not.

The other one ended up getting teary because he just saw world of possibility of like, I've got all

these amazing ideas in my head. And now there's a way to like extract them. So he cried out of like

sheer just like, oh my gosh, like in just yeah, so exciting. And we've had those conversations

here this week because we're, you know, we are truly like a virtuous human first AI forward.

There's no person in a virtuous that can go back to doing things the way they've always been doing

them and thinking it will suffice like that the pace is increased. The need for that is increased

that our customers deserve it. All of those things. And it creates tension for people who don't like

change. And you know, many people in the nonprofit sector don't like change. Our sector is not known

for being super adaptable and loving change. But it doesn't mean that it's not happening. And so

I think it's important to name it. It's also important to recognize where it's coming from,

where whether it's overwhelmed or if it's FOMO because those required different things, right?

One is like, you're even FOMO. Well, spend 30 minutes a day and just play like just go in and just

like don't try to create anything perfect like beautiful. Just play. You know, and if it's

overwhelmed, then try to prioritize and recognize that all of your things in your head are not the top

priority. And then do what you can do as a human. And so yeah, I think it's an interesting moment.

As a leader, how much do you think about that? Like you've got to think about the future to be able

to compete successfully. So you can't let the throttle off the gas. But you also have a team

recognizing, you know, only 20% of people look forward to change. And the rest of them are like,

don't do this to me or they're sitting on the sidelines.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is is understanding that everybody's at a different point in their

journey and understanding this stuff. And so I mean, some of it is just sober on its conversations.

I think it's important for nonprofits to hear this too is that you're likely not going to get

replaced by AI, but you will likely get replaced by somebody who knows how to use AI. It's just

and again, I don't want to be too sort of brutal with some of these statements. But

the reason that's true is because if somebody on your team can have five times more

impact, let's say your impact rescue, right? And somebody that's learned to leverage AI

can make one donor dollar go five times further to have five times more impact and

rescuing five times more animals. It's almost here, responsible. Right, exactly.

Not too. Not too. Right. And that sort of imperative seems like hard in this moment when

everybody's figuring stuff out. Yeah. So one of the mandates for our team has been that sort of

sober sort of conversation. At the same time, leaning in with a lot of empathy, knowing

everybody's at a different point in their journey. And look, like you said, it's really just

curiosity. It's playing in time 15 out. My brain's less playable than it used to be.

Wow, I can't imagine what it used to be. It's things are typifying. And so I get it. Like

it's hard. Like, you know, the first time smartphones came out or the first time the internet

came out or, you know, the first time everybody's on forces and somebody drives through a town.

Yeah. Or it's like this. It's a sea change. And if you're not wired that way, it's a hard

moment. But I would say you said this law for, but if you think about it as play and curiosity.

Yeah. Like no strings attached could go horribly wrong. I can throw it all away and you get

yourself permission to be curious. I could use the word wonder before. Yeah. Yeah. And it's hard

to step back from that perspective. But I think that really is the thing that urges it out.

Yeah. That part is so important. And

this episode is sponsored by Microsoft. Microsoft is committed to providing relevant, affordable,

and innovative cloud and AI solutions to help nonprofits tackle the world's biggest challenges.

To ensure affordable access to technology, Microsoft offers grants and discounts across

Microsoft 365, co-pilot, Azure, and more exclusively for eligible nonprofits. To check out your

eligibility and get started, visit us today at microsoft.com slash nonprofits. And I get a lot of

group requests for organizations to talk about curiosity because it feels less technical. It's

something that inherently every person like we're born inherently curious child like wonder. And now

I overlay the word urgency because now the pace is to a point of like, I love what you said about

like it almost becomes like a moral imperative to use AI because if you believe in your mission so much

and the goal of every nonprofit is essentially to put themselves out of business. I mean, it's the

same. I think years ago I said this and it didn't land very well. But it was basically,

there'll be a point in the future where not using AI will be like irresponsible. And donors will

look at you like, you know, you're and people lit like did not like that. They were like, that's

BS. And that's not true. But I'm like, think about this for a minute. If you're a nonprofit co-sense,

I'm not going to use the internet because of cyber bullying and all this other bad stuff and social

media and all the things that it's done. I'm not going to use the printing press. I just

rather write. Right. Yeah. Pirates and hand them out manually. Right. At a certain point, you can do it.

Right. Yeah. But it's it may not be the most effective way to accomplish. And ends up, yeah,

it's it it becomes irresponsible at that point in this moral pair. So I at the same time. So like,

of course, I worry about different aspects of the future. I believe in the human condition to

like prioritize humans. And we were just talking to our customer success team. And the number one

strategic advantage they have is that they're human. Right. And they can like look at a customer

eye to eye and be like, Hey, I understand. Like, let's, you know, there's an issue here. Let's

figure this out together. And we're going to get through this. And AI will never, I mean, AI can

have seemingly all the answers. But it will never truly empathize with you. Pretend to. And

whether you believe it or not, it's one thing. But it's like, your brain is wired. And actually,

when even they show brain scans, it's really interesting. Brain scans of a person talking to a

bot. There's almost no chemical reaction. Like your brain is just we're biologically not wired to

have like this emotional thing with a synthetic being. But like a person to person. And that's,

you know, I love that because like, as if thinking about the fundraiser analogy is like,

the fundraiser is like, well, I'm an inherently human job. Yes. But the work that you use to prepare

yourself to get in front of a person, if that could be done 20% faster with 50% greater accuracy,

then that becomes something that you can spend more time doing the things that you love to do.

Yes. And we've seen, I mean, I don't know if you have any favorite success stories of clients,

just like even just getting on to virtuous and being like, oh, my gosh, I didn't know this is

possible. So many, especially with our automation tools, just a hobby, huge amount of manual work,

these looked at hours and hours, hours of week. And now I have the hours back and I can do more

things with donors. I think the important thing here is in a room of nonprofits, maybe only

half will have heard the word like a gentick AI or appreciation for what a gentick AI means.

This is really sort of the magic. And so you think about AI. So a like large language models can

look at a bunch of texts and figure out what it's saying. And then dry new things or new conclusions

or stuff. So if it makes sense of a lot of text or images or whatever things, right. Agents

is like just automation. So if you've ever used like our fundraising automation tool,

it just automates a bunch of tax. That's what a gentick AI is. It's an AI and some automation. So

why that's important for fundraisers is I can go through my weekly calendar and I can look and say,

what are the human tasks I'm doing or the non-human task I'm doing that suck? Yeah.

I have to bring this crap out of Google seats, figure out what it means to put it in this other thing.

No one likes it. I have to transcribe the notes on this dump piece of paper and then put it in

this other thing. I have to come up with a meeting agenda again and get the whole thing in a word

doc and get it sent out to the team. There's a death by a thousand cuts in nonprofit.

Yeah. I talked to fundraisers all the time. I'm like, how what person here week you spend

talking to dollars? Like 20% maybe. Good week. Let's make it 80%. Use AI and automation,

a gentick AI. Just to remove all the stuff that you don't want to do anyway. It's like you didn't

sign up to do this stuff. It's making you get home at night unhappy. Why don't we use a gentick AI

to strip all of that away? It's going to make you 10 times more effective. And to your point,

fundraising is inherently human. The more human sorts of things that we can do in the job,

the more effective we're going to be as a fundraiser. And so that's for fundraisers,

I'm just incredible excited. It's a huge difference. I mean, it is a paradigm shift to go from

like 2080 to 8020. And again, when we talk about fundraiser burnout and I spent my entire career

literally losing good people because whatever the pressure and they just couldn't be as successful

as they thought they could be. And then onboarding new people and it's a vicious cycle.

You know, and it's interesting because of course, Virtua has just bought momentum recently.

A couple, I don't know how long ago, six months last year or some time. I had been an advisor

with momentum. I knew Nick and Griff for quite a while. And again, I kind of, I believed in

stability to kind of prioritize donors and feed them to fundraisers quickly. But I didn't

understand the impact of what that would make in terms of like fundraisers success in terms of

like fundraiser retention and to find out that now organizations have been using momentum for a while

have tripled the amount of time that fundraisers stayed in the job. So from 18 months to 36 months.

And it's wild, right? Because that's like probably one of the biggest cost burdens of a fundraising

team or anyone who is just like hiring someone, training them, uh, fundraisers don't get to their

full productivity until about year two and half to three. And so they they're just in the cycle

where they're never actually fully contributing. But then if you triple in the amount of time

the fundraisers stays in the job because essentially they're becoming more successful because you

offloaded the stuff they didn't want to do and serving it to them. I mean, that's like insane.

I mean, it's like magical. It's magical. Yeah. And the other big thing with momentum that I've

been so excited about is historically, the knock-offs have worked for. They have a big director's

sponsor digital program. It's our send the email newsletter, the appeal to almost everybody on the

file. And then you have major guest strategy. And so you're looking for those

hitting on the sector, you're like $50,000 plus gifts. Right. Then there's this chunky

middle. You call it like middle class to upper middle class America that can probably afford to

give five grand at the end of the year. You talk to university's healthcare human services across

sport. It's like, what do you do with those people? And it's like nothing now. Like, why not? Well,

because the math is I wouldn't need my people to carry a portfolio of 500 donors to make the

math work. I do that. It's like, no, you can't. You totally can now. And just that

the opening up of that sort of, particularly through this momentum product is like, now you

triple your portfolio size and not hit your job and not turn over after two years. It's

made it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to 10x your portfolio capacity overnight. And then with a high

degree of accuracy, it's pretty insane. And again, then funders would stay because they're doing

more work better. And you know, everyone wins. So, I mean, virtuous made a big splash with that.

But essentially, like, from a cultural perspective went from a single product company sort of,

we already had a couple of products. But like, now truly a multi product company, meaning like

momentum is great because you can, you don't have to be a virtuous CRM customer be a momentum.

You can be a sales force or a black bud. And I mean, that's a big move, right? I mean, I don't

like, yeah, that was a big move. So is that signal kind of like the future state of where virtuous

is going in terms of like multiple products, kind of the single interface or I mean, the easiest way

to to look at it from the highest level is I've fallen in love with my customers problems and

not falling in love with in any particular product. The any product is just a tool to be able to

solve the customer problem. That's the thing I care most about. And as an organization,

we care deeply about our customer problems. So what what we found is especially now with the

rise of AI is there's all that kind of be all sorts of interesting ways. Momentum is just the

first that we can lean in and solve real pain for real customers. And sometimes you don't need to

like swap your entire CRM. I'll honestly a lot of times you do and a lot of people wait,

way too long to do it. Right. Sometimes it's overkill. Sometimes you just need to accelerate

your major daughter team with her raise on like giving product. Sometimes it's just like

we need to create donation for our data driven and tell the sort of our organization better,

right? Right. So we think be able to bring the right solution to bear at the right time

focused on solving particular pains. It's just a better way to serve the sector long term.

Yeah. And so what you'll see from us moving forward is yeah, leaning into this multi product,

like how can we bring the right solution to bear to help you with what you're dealing with today?

Right. But then it is also leaning into AI. So momentum is like AI first product. What we're

moving toward now is like AI and everything like a like virtuous as the AI leader in the non-profit

sector. We want to like be in an organization that helps shepherd our sector through this moment

and come out the other side like way better than we started. Yeah. I love it. I mean, obviously

is chief AI officer that is like, I mean, it's all it honestly is surreal to me because I spent

a lot of time, you know, early on early 2017 to 2021, 2022 talking about AI and it was just not

understood. It wasn't taken seriously by most people and it over the last couple days here at

the all team kickoff. It's like, I mean, to that point, AI and everything, right? Like we should

not be thinking about solving new problems in old ways. Like you have an abundance of tools and

unlock your imagination to do these things. And yeah, it's surreal because now it's like overwhelmed

because it's like there's there's so many possibilities. So all right, two last question. So one,

just from a practical sense. So I obviously there's lots of overwhelm in like non-profit leaders or,

you know, now leading in a technical or world when they've been used to, you know, leading in a black

and white world, like, is there any advice that you'd give them to like, like, just get to the next

level? Like if you're just, you've been doing things the same way, you're feeling the tension that

it's not working. Your goals keep on going up, but you're just working harder to achieve those goals.

Like, is there any practical advice that you kind of give them? Yeah, it's there's a couple of

bigger things that hold very pride. So the bigger thing is that you can have people come in to help

you, but you have to be curious and have childlike wonder around this stuff. I mean, if you think

about just common challenges that fund raising over the last 50 years, you hear stories like,

we didn't know how to raise major gifts. And so we tried to pay somebody from the outside to come

and raise, raise, raise for us. And we had no idea how to do it ourselves. And usually that ends

poorly. Right. Well, works is when you bring somebody into help, but you're leading in to learn

at the same time. And you're trying to level the same with directory spots. You pick your

fundraising channel. If it's like, I'm outsourcing that I don't care. I don't want to think about it.

It just never goes as well. And so this is not a problem that you can fully outsource. You have

to lean in and and be curious. Carb out time in your day, time and night. Don't even try to solve

a work problem. Yeah. Like try to solve a home repair. Somebody, we did a dumb little like a car race

that our whole team kick off this week. Our CFO created an app and AI that track like a real-time

leaderboard and bracket of the car races. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So goofy and so fun. But give

yourself permission to experiment. The other thing is like super practically speaking. A lot of

these new tools like a clot to work is super powerful. There's a bunch of these really powerful

tools. Sometimes with depending on your I keep the security policies, you can you want to make

sure that you're actually carrying about security. But one that you don't have to worry about is

quite as much as lovable. Right. So if you guys haven't heard about lovable today, a great place

to start just to get wonder, go to lovable, log in with your Google account and then type in the

words like, I need a landing page for my next campaign. Yeah. And then type, here's my current

website and then type, here's some copy from that campaign and just hit go. Just type those words

and hit go and watch what happens. Just give yourself permission. No. Are you going to use

a landing page? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not who knows. But just like, just give that a shot.

And if you start creating this like, whoa, like, yeah. How does it do that? I didn't know what

was possible. And then your imagination will get spinning on everything. Yeah. I just do it.

Like just get in there and try it, you know, take some time away from the computer to like

imagine and dream about, you know, your biggest challenges and the things that you wish you could

do if you had a magic wand. And I promise you'll never have an epiphany if you're sitting

swiping 300 feet on your phone a day. But if you step away and do that. So actually, you

already, you kind of spoiled it because I want it. You were like the world's biggest tinker.

Like the thing, I actually, I tell people a lot that I love the most about working with you

other than that you're really smart and professional and kind is, is that you're a doer. And I don't

know the last time I've gotten on any call with you. We were like, let me just show you my screen

for a second or something that I was playing with last night or five o'clock this morning or something.

And and it's just amazing. I know we can't get too attached to AI tools because as soon as you do,

you fall in love, they'll break, they'll break your heart by in the two weeks later. But if you could

only have one AI tool today, it just like, all it doesn't matter if it's free or paid, like,

what would be the tool that you just could not live without? Like you just can't go back.

Yeah, it's different for everybody and everybody has different needs.

The two for me right now, I know you said, I'm going to break the rules.

I have like, I know you've got a lot. I know.

Okay, one is a real dumb easy one. It's fixer. It's it's in my email inbox. It reads my

email and it helps me draft my email. Yeah. And so now I read and change the email,

they get strapped. Right. But it helps me get through my inbox. Probably 80% faster. Yeah, sure.

Dumb utility, gosh, straight. Yeah. The other one is probably replete because it allows you to build

software without being a computer, which is pure magic. Yeah. Right. And I was an engineer by

trade, but man, my skills are rusty and it would take me so long to build something. Yeah. Now it's

quick as I can imagine it. I can build it. Now, is it scalable? Is it stuff that we would

deploy into the wallet version? It's probably not. But man, for a bunch of like, stuff around

your office, like, oh, I wish we had it for that at the office guy. It's just perfect for that kind

of stuff. Yeah. All right. Yeah. I know it's so hard, right? It's so hard. I think about

notebook LM, which is free. Like I have no intention of ever reading a 60 page PDF every

year and like I'm a video learner audio learner. So like I everything I just throw in there.

But actually, you changed my answer because talking about fixer, I use fixer too. Actually,

I am not a good typer. I actually elected to take home act instead of typing because that's

where the girls were hanging out in high school. And I'm like, I'm take home act. I should have

learned typing. And so typing has never come natural to me. And so whisper. I don't know if you

use whisper. I haven't typed an email in like six months. Like I voice dictate everything. And

I mean, I don't care if I'm on an airplane. I ear pods in my prompts are a hundred times better

because it's not like controlled by how many characters I have to like bang out of my fingers

to the keyboard. It's just like what's on my mind? And it's iterative and clunky. And it's

in whisper's contextual. So it probably be I just have no intention of ever typing again. So

it probably has to be whisper. Everyone similar to that is granola. A few of these granola. And it's

like a app that just records all of your conversations and meetings. Some rives. Everything tells you

what the task are and what the takeaways for the meeting should be. If it's impersonations,

have it on your phone. You throw on the mail. They tell people that you're writing a granola. Sure.

But man, to not have to circulate like meeting notes. It's not used enough for what after the

meeting. Yeah. Yeah. I use plowed for the same thing. If I'm in a conference, I throw it on

there. And it's amazing what it can record. And yeah. All right. Well, we went way past one. But

no, I mean, it's it just shows like where we're at, right? And it's amazing because I don't know any

of those apps that actually existed at 12 months ago, right? Actually, they're all within 12 months.

And it's just like insane to note and even think about another 12 months and 24 months from now.

And like, you know, the convergence of all these things. So it goes back. We'll kind of, you know,

and where we started, which is like that idea of just play, just have fun. Don't expect to create

something perfect, just like literally have fun. And in that translate, it doesn't matter what age

you are. Like if we, I give this advice to one of our 28 year old employees who he literally

came to me, he's like, am I going to have a job in the future? And I'm like, yes, you are. But

you were going to need to, to like really get curious with urgency to use AI. And the next day,

he came back, he's like, guess what? I did last night. He goes, I stayed up till midnight. I was just

playing. And it was so cool. He was just like grinning because he was like excited about what he could

do. And so, well, I want to thank you for your time for building a company that is not just a good

company, but doing a good company is doing good things for the right reasons. And with that,

acknowledging that human first AI forward kind of approach is that we can't afford to just

do this thing to make a lot of money and, and hopefully help our clients and then maybe

destroy the future of generosity, you know, as an unintended consequence. But like, you're very

thoughtful about, okay, what are the actions that we're taking now and how will they promote and

protect trust and keep donors at the center of everything we do? So I just love that. And yeah,

I just want to thank you for really being a beacon in this industry. And, and not only that walking

the talk and in your leadership with just different non-profit boards and giving USA and all the

things that you do to just like really carry the flag. Now, why I'm, I'm grateful and, and saying

to you, I mean, listeners of this will probably know from the conversation. I'm not saying anything

novel on this podcast because half of the smart stuff I say about it from Nathan at some point

in the past. And so, yeah, the work you're doing with fundraising AI and at Virtuous and in

industry pushing the ball forward here, it means a lot. Awesome. All right. Well, thanks Gabe.

Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you on the next episode of the fundraising AI podcast.