Apps, Tools & Tactics & Internal Newsletters Your Staff Will Open

Tony Martignetti
Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I'm your aptly named host and the podfather of your favorite hebdomadal podcast. Oh, I'm glad you're with us. I'd be stricken with dextroclination if I saw that you missed this week's show. Here's our associate producer Kate with what's going on.

Kate Martignetti
Hey Tony, here's what's going on. Apps, tools, and tactics. Jason Shim returns with his annual rundown of the digital resources and tips that'll make your online phone, and app lives easier, more productive, and safer. He's with the Canadian Centre for Nonprofit Digital Resilience. This continues our coverage of the 2026 Nonprofit Technology Conference. Then, internal newsletters your staff will open. From leadership buy-in, practical tips and consistency, to internal partnerships and implementation, Mia Velasco shares strategies that will get your team anticipating your internal newsletter and missing it when it doesn't come. Mia is at Namati. This is also from 26 NTC. On Tony's Take Two,

Tony Martignetti
a priestly ordination.

Kate Martignetti
Here is Apps, Tools, and Tactics.

Tony Martignetti
Welcome back to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio coverage of the 2026 Nonprofit Technology Conference. We're all assembled in Detroit, Michigan. My guest now is Jason Shim. Jason, welcome back.

Jason Shim
Thank you very much for having me.

Tony Martignetti
You're a perennial, and this must be 5, 6 years going.

Jason Shim
Oh yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Sometimes with Meico Marquette Whitlock, but this year you're solo.

Jason Shim
Yep.

Tony Martignetti
And not surprising, your session topic is Apps, Tools, and Tactics. 2026. Give an overview. What do you have for us this year?

Jason Shim
Yeah, so really this is an overview of all the cool apps, tools, and tactics I've come across in the past year. And it's a roundup of the things that I use on a near day-to-day basis, as well as things that have been recommended over time. So it's a curated list of things that I think people may find useful, and they can review it if it may be helpful for them in their day-to-day work as well.

Tony Martignetti
And give us one tease. What's one you can explain quickly? We could even go into more detail, but give us a quick teaser.

Jason Shim
Yeah, so one of the things is I go into— one of the tactics is around prompting. And so the short version is rather than if you're using, say, an AI model, rather than having like a one-shot prompt to try and get the kind of answer that you're looking for, actually splitting it up into 2 pieces. And so you use the AI to help you create a prompt to get a much more comprehensive, what's called a super prompt. And then you copy and paste that, and then you get a much more comprehensive response in that. But I can go into more detail.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, we're going to. All right, that's a tease. All right, thank you. Cool. Well, nice overview. So let's go into a little more detail on that exact one, getting a super prompt. Yeah, please.

Jason Shim
Yeah, so I start off with detailing the basics of how many of the AI language models work. And without getting too far into the weeds, generally that How they work is a lot of the words are assigned a numerical value and the proximity of them to one another helps generate and predict the next word for that. And so when generating a super prompt, I like to invoke the Backstreet Boys. Okay. Because you start off like, you know, you are, and then you know what comes next. It's like, you know, my fire. And so what you do is you think about that. And say, you lead off with, you are—

Tony Martignetti
You are—

Jason Shim
An AI expert. And that's the first phrase that you use. And what that will do is invoke immediately AI expertise and the words related to that for the AI model. And then you follow that up with something else afterwards. So, for example, say, you are an AI expert. You are also an expert nonprofit, say, CFO and a financial planning and analysis expert. And so that's a second, you know, you are again. And then the third part is help me craft a super prompt. And so super prompt is the keyword that you want to be using because that has an embedded meaning with it in that that's a very long comprehensive prompt. And so those things combined for you are an AI expert, you are an expert in the following subject area as well. me craft a super prompt to complete a certain task that you may be looking to do. So, you know, help me craft a super prompt to take budget numbers and craft a narrative for a board of directors meeting, as well as a detailed analysis and explanation of any anomalies that may appear. And what you'll typically get is a super prompt that may be anywhere from 3 to 6 pages long. And then you can verify that or run it by—

Tony Martignetti
Super prompt? It's that long?

Jason Shim
Yeah. Yeah. So it's quite, quite lengthy. Yeah. And you can either respond to that thread with, you know, okay, run with that prompt, use it. Or if you want to keep it a little bit cleaner, you copy that super prompt into a separate chat and then run with that. But it's important to also examine the super prompt to make sure that it covers everything that you're looking for or consult with experts for, you know, say if you're using it for something like finance, you probably want to check in with someone who is a CFO or someone who has like an accounting background. Yeah, please. But it saves having to sit there and having to spend a lot of time necessarily coming up with it from scratch when already a lot of those details could be covered by the AI to help you develop that. So that's a small tactic to help people make better use of their time when they're using an AI model.

Tony Martignetti
It's interesting, you have to tell it that it's an AI expert. I mean, I can see Telling it it's a chief financial officer and a financial planning expert, sure. But you have to tell it it's an AI expert, that there's value in that.

Jason Shim
Yeah, absolutely. Because I—

Tony Martignetti
It doesn't know. It doesn't know what it is.

Jason Shim
Yeah, because all the words are assigned a numerical value. And when you put them in close proximity to one another and ask it to predict what comes next, if you situate like, you're an AI expert, you're also an expert in this, then because all those words have close numerical proximity to one another, then you'll have a higher likelihood of generating something that embodies that expertise across both those areas that

Tony Martignetti
you need, that you're seeking. Okay. Okay. Yeah. No, that's why we're here. 2026 App Tools and Tactics. All right. What's another— I mean, all I'm going to be asking you is what's another one? Because, yeah. All right. And we're not going back and forth between you and Miko this year. So you're on. What else?

Jason Shim
Yeah. So the next one related to that is that in order to get the best response from that kind of super prompt generation and in general is that A frequent question that I receive is like, oh, you know, I don't get great quality responses, you know, when I'm using an AI model, and how do I address that? One of them is that if folks have the default set to automatic, that they are going to get the default model that many of the AI companies are using. And you'll usually get, say, a model that is the quick or the fast one that may hallucinate more. And you have to very carefully select the dropdown if it is available to go to a thinking or a pro model, which isn't always the default. So making sure you select that to get a better quality response.

Tony Martignetti
Is there a fee sometimes for that? Are we beyond the free usage of ChatGPT or one of the other models?

Jason Shim
Yeah, so I generally recommend that folks, if at all possible, look beyond the free models. Across all the major ones currently, there are nonprofit discounts. You know, I think the most notable one is Claude's— Anthropic's Claude model. It's 75% off the team account, which is for like 5 accounts. And so that's, it's a pretty solid deal for nonprofits to have access to it. But then you can select as well between Claude and Gemini as well, Copilot. You can select all the different, you know, thinking or pro models as well.

Tony Martignetti
And it's worth investing in. You're going to see a difference between the free versions and the paid versions.

Jason Shim
Yes. And also for general security and peace of mind that, you know, the information that you're putting into the model is not necessarily being integrated into the training model as well.

Tony Martignetti
Right. You want your data to be siloed off.

Jason Shim
Absolutely.

Tony Martignetti
Right. So that you can only do with a paid subscription.

Jason Shim
Yep.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, okay, right. Yeah, you got to— yeah, we've had many guests admonish us about not putting your proprietary information into the ether for the general consumption of large language models.

Jason Shim
And making sure you're checking the settings to turn off, you know, use my data for part of the training. And you're just going to the settings, making sure, double-checking that it is turned off as well.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, okay, excellent. What else? What else is here?

Jason Shim
So along the lines of paid models, one that I'll call out, so in particular, I'll mention Anthropic's Claude desktop model. So if you download that app for the desktop, it actually will give Claude access to your desktop and to the folders that you designate. And so it's not particular specifically to Claude currently. The other companies are emerging similar kind of desktop models, but Claude is probably the best-known one right now. And so you can do things like, recently I pointed the model at a screenshots folder that I had, and there was like 5,000 images in it that I've accumulated over the years. And you can ask it to examine and categorize all the files and put them into respective folders.

Tony Martignetti
So valuable.

Jason Shim
And it sounds You know, it seems almost downright magical that you know you're able to kind of you know have it analyze all the images and do that for you. But you know that's not just screenshots; it can be like general you know file organization, and over time, you know, while also ensuring all the security protections in place, that you know if you're looking at a drive in which you have you know thousands or tens of thousands of files scattered across, I mean, I know that many organizations you know sometimes have to deal. deal with a lot of files that have been scattered over many, many years and someone needs to kind of take on the organization of all the folders, that can be a helpful tool, Cloud Desktop, specifically the Cowork function.

Tony Martignetti
That's a— oh, okay, the function is called Cowork. That's a mundane task that no person is going to take on. I mean, even your own 5,000 images, you're never going to take the time to categorize those and put them into subfolders.

Jason Shim
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
All right, so that's the kind of mundane routine task that it's like kind of low lift, low-hanging fruit for an AI model.

Jason Shim
Absolutely.

Tony Martignetti
If you have the skepticism that I do about going deeper, listeners know my concern about sacrificing creativity. They've heard me too many times say that I think the most creative act is Staring at a blank page and creating versus allowing the model to do that, and then you become relegated to copy editor. So those are my deep skepticisms. However, for mundane routine tasks like file management, image sorting, I see great benefit. I mean, like I said, that's something you would never do. Yeah. Yeah. You would never bother to do that even for your own 5,000 images. They would just sit.

Jason Shim
Well, it's something that I would tell myself that I may do on a rainy day, but I never get around to it.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, but you're never going to do it because it's too boring. All right, all right. Great one. Okay. Yeah, please.

Jason Shim
But along the lines of creativity, one thing to put out there is there's apps out there, and I'll mention suno.com.

Tony Martignetti
Suno? S-U-N-O? Yeah. And

Jason Shim
that's one that you can prompt it to generate music for you. And so I find this one to be a really interesting one in that, say, if you're an aspiring songwriter and you have like a whole bunch of lyrics that you've put together, but you don't necessarily have, you know, your backing band or something.

Tony Martignetti
Or you're a poet and not a musician.

Jason Shim
Yeah, exactly. And so as a personal experiment, I put in some Emily Dickinson poetry into it and asked it, you know, set this to music. And it was quite a moving kind of track that it put out afterwards. How

Tony Martignetti
did you prompt it for that?

Jason Shim
I input the poem, Hope Is a Thing with Feathers, and then I prompted, you are a Grammy— well, I used the you are prompt.

Tony Martignetti
You're an AI expert. We've got to channel the Beach Boys. I mean, the Backstreet Boys. Yeah. Even for Emily Dickinson. Yeah. The two worlds, the Backstreet Boys and the classic Emily Dickinson coming together. Yeah. All right. You are an AI expert.

Jason Shim
Yeah. You are an AI expert. You're also an award-winning lyricist. You know, help me craft a super prompt to generate a moving, you know, soundtrack to Emily Dickinson poetry that will evoke, you know, deep resonance for anyone who is listening to it, particularly around feeling wistful and things. Okay. And so you generate a few iterations of it and see what works. And then the ones that do work, you can also run the music back through the AI to analyze, like, okay, how would you describe the track? That you just heard as well. And so kind of doing that back and forth experimentation as well. So for organizations, like, you know, they may find their own personal use cases for it that they may have existing staff with creative inclinations that are looking to perhaps have some additional personalization for events or, you know, having a small like internal jingle for something or maybe for, you know how baseball games have like individual soundtracks for like walk-up music before they go up to home plate.

Tony Martignetti
Or 7th inning stretch. Isn't that— that's baseball, isn't it? Yeah. Innings are baseball? Yeah. Okay. Not very good in sports, but they don't have quarters. All right. What else? How about some apps? Do you have some apps? I know you do. Apps, tools, and tactics.

Jason Shim
Yeah, totally. So another one is— an interesting one is gamma.app. And so that one is like a slide deck generator. And so when you sign up, you know, there's some free credits, but it is a paid service as well. And so if anyone, you know, finds themselves struggling with, you know, creating a slide deck and, you know, just the— some people may find it arduous that, you know, gamma.app is an app that may help, you know, create a slide deck. You input the content and then You know, it gives you a scaffold that you can look over.

Tony Martignetti
So you're inputting just narrative and then it breaks it into slides?

Jason Shim
Yeah, it's along a spectrum. So you can—

Tony Martignetti
With art? It includes art?

Jason Shim
Yep, yep. And so it generates the slides for you. You can give a general narrative, you can instruct it with specific bullet points that you want to cover, or you can tell it, you know, I want the text verbatim, do not change any of it. So it's along a sliding scale as Well, as to how, how much control you want over it. The other thing about that too is that Claude has a plugin for PowerPoint as well as Excel. And so, you know, there are multiple ways to approach this. One is through gamma.app. The other is through the Claude plugins that are available for things like PowerPoint and Excel, which can generate the entire deck. Yeah. Microsoft itself has, you know, the built-in designer function too, which is pretty handy that you can click on a slide and then it'll kind of redesign the slide on the fly for you, taking into consideration, you know, what's already there as well. Oh, cool.

Tony Martignetti
That's in Microsoft Designer?

Jason Shim
Yeah, it's directly in Microsoft PowerPoint. And then if you look for the designer button in the top right, then it'll do that.

Tony Martignetti
Oh my gosh. All right. Well, that's why you're here. I don't think people know that. Yeah, it's widely known at all. It's within the PowerPoint app already.

Jason Shim
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. Other apps? I love these.

Jason Shim
Yeah. So what I'll touch upon is something called vibe coding, which was a term that was coined by Andrej Karpathy, who is a researcher.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, I've seen references to vibe coding on LinkedIn.

Jason Shim
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
I don't remember if I ever asked anybody, what are you talking about? I mean, I could look it up myself. Yeah. But all right, so you'll You'll help us.

Jason Shim
Yeah. So vibe coding refers to pretty much coding with the English language. And so you describe what it is that you're looking to do, and then the AI will help generate the code to do the thing. Now, there's a whole bunch of precautions that one needs to be aware of as well, that, you know, you probably don't want to be vibe coding with things that have like super sensitive data, you know, that you have to be pretty aware of, you know, security risks. As well. But that being said, if you're using vibe coding to generate, say, front-end mockups or something that, you know, there are apps like lovable.dev that's, or replit.com that have apps that allow you to generate code very quickly. So you can prompt it to be like, hey, generate me the front page of a website for, say, an organization that provides shelter assistance. And within a few moments, it'll generate something that you can at least respond to and mark up a bit. And so if you're looking to rapidly prototype something as well, that can be a mechanism that you can do that.

Tony Martignetti
What were those 2? Replit is one?

Jason Shim
Lovable.dev was the first one, and Replit.com was the second one.

Tony Martignetti
Replit.

Jason Shim
Yeah, R-E-P-L-I-T.

Tony Martignetti
.com.

Jason Shim
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, cool. All right.

Jason Shim
And so these functions are actually embedded as well into some of the AI models like Gemini. So there's a whole bunch of options that when you select the dropdown within Google's Gemini model, one of them is called Canvas. And Canvas is really neat because it does very similar to what I described for vibe coding. And you can describe what it is that you want and then it can generate a mini app for you or whatever, you or dashboard or whatever you're looking for. So to put that in more concrete terms, I was sharing this with my 7-year-old niece and I asked her, hey, what are you doing in school right now? And she's like, oh, I'm learning how to round to the closest 100. And I was like, hey, would it be interesting if you had a little game to kind of experience this as well? And she's like, yeah, sure, that'd be interesting. And so I sat with her and then I prompted Gemini. I was like, hey, You know, again, you are an AI expert. You are also an expert developer. Help me craft a super prompt that would use vanilla JS, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to create a game that is suitable for a 7-year-old to learn about rounding up or down and make it interactive and fun. And what it generated very quickly in about 60 seconds was a short little interactive where it would present a number and say, you know, do you round up? Or do you round down to the closest 100? And if you round up correctly, a little confetti pops up and then it advances, gives you a star. If you get it wrong, it kindly says, oh, maybe try again. It's actually the other way. And so this kind of thing is incredible in that you can generate this in such a short period of time.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah. What a cool uncle you are too.

Jason Shim
Yeah, well, it was fun to experience that with her.

Tony Martignetti
She loved it, right?

Jason Shim
Yeah, yeah. The application that it has for organizations is that there's a lot of interesting open datasets that are out there, but sometimes the data is locked away in spreadsheets. And what I have used some of the vibe coding for is giving it the dataset and prompting the AI, the canvas in Gemini, to create me a dashboard visualize this data. And one of the datasets I was looking at was the number of pet registrations that are in Toronto, where I live. And it very quickly created a dashboard of all the pet registrations in Toronto, how many dogs there are, how many cats there are, with a breakdown by breed, as well as the forward sortation area for postal codes so that you could also see which postal code has the highest concentration of any given breed. So if you want to see, you know, which part of Toronto has the highest concentration of Chihuahuas, if that is important to you, that you could visualize it very quickly. But it would have been quite difficult to get that out purely from the spreadsheet. And so being able to do that very quickly as well, to work with some of the open datasets or whichever dataset, is quite powerful.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, yeah, amazing. I know there's more.

Jason Shim
Oh, absolutely. There's tons. The other one is the Shortcuts app in the Mac or Power Automate Desktop for Windows. And so this is one that I have not seen frequently used necessarily, but once people are aware of it, you can do a whole bunch of interesting things with it.

Tony Martignetti
Is this also for iPhone?

Jason Shim
Yes, there's a Shortcuts app for the iPhone as well.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. Yeah.

Jason Shim
So, you know, when I boot up my computer in the morning, you know, there's about a sequence Depending on the time of day, there may be a sequence of like 10 apps that I may have to open to just kind of have across multiple monitors. And so I can put this into a shortcuts app and map it to a single shortcut key and be like, open these 10 apps when I press this key. But also, if you're working across multiple organizations with multiple Google accounts or Chrome profiles, if you go in and you

Tony Martignetti
Like a consultant might be doing.

Jason Shim
Yeah, exactly. You can go in and adjust what's called a bash script. So this requires a little scripting, but you can Google it to see how you can open multiple Chrome profiles at the same time and have it color-coded and have it neatly organized. And one of the additional things is that it's called a Stream Deck. This is a device that many video streamers use. Use or something similar where it's a device that has buttons that have like little video LEDs behind them and that you can map the shortcut key to one of these buttons so that you can press it and it'll launch, you know, the 10 programs. But you can also map it to do other things. So if you're in a Zoom call, you can have a little mini control panel at your fingertips that will automatically switch to, you know, here's your mute button, here's your video on or off button, here's the emoji buttons that you can just tap very quickly and shoot an emoji during the Zoom call or a Teams call.

Tony Martignetti
So this is a device that you're using through the Shortcuts app?

Jason Shim
Yes.

Tony Martignetti
Now you're talking about desktop?

Jason Shim
Yeah, we're talking about like a physical—

Tony Martignetti
And right, and what's this device called? The little touchpad?

Jason Shim
The best-known one is called a Stream Deck.

Tony Martignetti
Stream Deck.

Jason Shim
Yeah, but there's a whole bunch of other ones that are similar to Stream Deck as well with other brand names. Okay. As well. Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Let's go generic now. I don't want to— I mean, I'm a Mac lover since 1984. Yeah. But I don't want to— I don't want Android and Lenovo laptop users to be upset at us. So yeah, let's go generic.

Jason Shim
Yeah. So the Windows version of that is also Power Automate Desktop. So if you're on Windows, Power Automate Desktop, it's offered by Microsoft as well. And You can use that and also map that to the Stream Deck too.

Tony Martignetti
Okay.

Jason Shim
Next up, I'd say clipboard history. So this isn't necessarily on by default, and so it's a little hidden tactic that if you're having to find yourself copying and pasting back and forth between things, there's a way that you can turn on a setting within Windows so that you can copy multiple things into your clipboard and then paste multiple things. Oh,

Tony Martignetti
right, because the default is one thing at a time. One thing at a time. Exactly. You copy something else and you lost the previous one.

Jason Shim
Yeah, you have to go back and forth, back and forth.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, this is only— this is— all right, we're in Windows right now. Yes. Okay, so where do we change this? This is good.

Jason Shim
So if you go to System Settings and then you select Clipboard, there's going to be a little setting called Clipboard history, and you can toggle that on or off. And once you toggle that on, then you can press Windows key V. And what that will enable is that you can be in a document and you can copy, say, 5 things in quick succession. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you know, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+C, right? And then go into the document where you're looking to paste all that stuff and say Ctrl+V and/or Ctrl— or sorry, not Ctrl+V, um, Windows key V, and then use your directional arrows to cycle through the things that you just pasted in. So it gives you a multi-layered copy and paste.

Tony Martignetti
And it's showing you, it's showing you a little preview of each one as you use the arrow keys to cycle through? Yeah.

Jason Shim
Yeah. And the Mac equivalent, the open source program is called Flycut. So it's Clipboard History for Windows or Flycut for Mac.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. Is Flycut already included in the Mac OS?

Jason Shim
No, but you have to download it.

Tony Martignetti
Okay.

Jason Shim
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. Yeah.

Jason Shim
All

Tony Martignetti
right.

Jason Shim
And yeah, in terms of other things that may be of interest to, say, those who are listening who may be consultants or for general usage is syncing across multiple calendars. So, you know, the instance in which, you know, people may have inadvertently double booked or been double booked into multiple meetings. I discovered this app called Calendar Bridge, and it's quite useful. It is a paid app, so you do have to pay. I'm trying to think— the subscription, I think, is like $8 to $10 a month. But for what it saves in double booking headaches, it's quite valuable.

Tony Martignetti
So if you've got your Apple Calendar or your Teams calendar and you've got Google Calendar, maybe you've got multiple calendars for multiple clients if you are a consultant, this will Yes. We'll sync them.

Jason Shim
Yep. So you could have like 4 to 5 calendars, and then the moment that someone sends an invite to one of the calendars, it'll automatically preserve the privacy for all the other calendars, but block it off and mark it off as busy across all the other calendars simultaneously. And so it saves a ton of time for calendar coordination and having to manually like, oh, this one got booked, and then having to manually go into all the other calendars and block them. block them off, or if something gets canceled, then having to also subsequently clear out the calendars on the other side.

Tony Martignetti
I've had a calendar disaster a couple of times. You'd think I would have learned after the first time, but I didn't. It took like 3 times with a client because they send— I guess they send a Windows— maybe they send a Teams invitation or something. Teams invite. Mm-hmm. And I have— okay, so I accepted on their laptop, but then I forwarded it to my tonymartignetti.com so that I could add it to my Apple Calendar. I use the Apple— I don't use Google Calendar, I use the Apple Calendar. So I accepted it over there, and then something happened and I deleted one, and then everybody got a calendar invitation to delete that event. And I was like, oh, because I couldn't make one. I think. So I deleted one on Apple and everybody from the team's invite got the deletion invitation. So they were upset at me like 3 times. And the 3rd time I realized I have to stop doing that.

Jason Shim
I feel like we've all been there at some point. It's a rite of passage.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, even because you don't always get the delete and notify option. Sometimes you delete and it just has repercussions, second-order effects that I don't know. I mean, sometimes you get the delete and notify, and I say no, delete and don't notify. But in this instance with that client, I didn't get the option, and I was yelled at 3 times.

Jason Shim
They really should have a button that's like—

Tony Martignetti
It was the 3rd time I learned.

Jason Shim
Surprise, we're going to notify everyone.

Tony Martignetti
That's the real button. Help us. Help those of us who are calendar challenged. Maybe it only took me twice. I learned on the 3rd time. I think that's what it was. So I only got yelled at twice. In any case, calendar syncing. Okay. Yeah. Calendar Bridge. Excellent one. Thank you.

Jason Shim
The other one I'll mention is Loom and Vidyard. So I've mentioned this one before, but the use case I'll mention is a little bit different. So Loom or Vidyard is often used for doing screen recordings or recording video messages. But if any of you ever have to deal with tech support, that you will save yourself a ton of time going back and forth with either internal tech support or even external tech support. Like if you're trying to get support with an app and it's not working, that I have actually had tech support reps feedback to me after I send a video recording of what I'm experiencing with a step-by-step in detail. Here's what I'm clicking on and I'm narrating like, here's what's happened. Here's what I expect to happen. It's not happening. By the way, here's the video. And the response I got was like, This was awesome. Thank you so much for sending a video, and we can solve it in one shot for you rather than having to do five or six email exchanges. And so I recommend this to it's loom.com. You can get a nonprofit.

Tony Martignetti
Loom.com. Okay. And Vidyard.

Jason Shim
Vidyard. Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Vidyard. Vidyard.

Jason Shim
Yep.

Tony Martignetti
Dot com.

Jason Shim
Yep.

Tony Martignetti
All right. And so you can do you can do videos from a laptop, desktop, or phone.

Jason Shim
Yep. Yeah. And they have free tiers for each, but Loom also has a nonprofit discount that's available through the Atlassian nonprofit program too.

Tony Martignetti
Also, it could be useful for gamers if they want to take videos.

Jason Shim
It's more for like video messaging or say marketing, or if you're sending an email and want to send, say, a short kind of personalized message too. So if I was sending you an email and I wanted to attach like Hey, Tony, and you give a visual to it as well.

Tony Martignetti
Personalized video. Oh, so it's for shorter videos, like a minute or something, minute, minute and a half, something like that. Not 2-hour gaming sessions, streaming sessions. Okay. Why don't you leave us with one more? Give us the best of all the ones that you haven't mentioned yet.

Jason Shim
Yeah, the one that I'll leave off with is something that is not software, but It's more physical, and it's called a Faraday pouch. And so this is one that I came across when I was actually doing research at a previous organization. And what I was looking into was, you know, how to help students stay more focused. And one of the pieces of feedback was, you know, I don't want to turn off my phone, but I don't want my phone next to me either. And so if there's some way that I could keep my phone separate so that I'm not looking at it so I can focus. And so what we found was that there's something called a Faraday pouch that you can put your phone inside and the pouch is shielded so that it blocks out all cell phone signals so that no Wi-Fi can get through, no cell signals can get through, but you don't have to turn off the phone. So you just put it in the pouch, seal it off, and it gives a physical removal of like, all right, it's time to focus and Yeah, so it's a handy little physical tool that you don't have to rely purely on just, you know, your mental willpower alone and leave your phone next to you. That, you know, at least you can Velcro it and it gives a little bit of physical barrier to your phone. So yeah, the one I'll leave off with is more physically grounded in a Faraday pouch.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, a Faraday pouch. Cool. All right. I love these. Jason, we'll see you next year. Yeah, maybe with Miko. Maybe Miko Marquette will Lock will join us again. But this is Jason Shim, Chief Digital Officer at Canadian Center for Nonprofit Digital Resilience. Always a pleasure. Thank you very much, Jason.

Jason Shim
Thanks for having me.

Tony Martignetti
And thank you for being with Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio coverage of the 2026 Nonprofit Technology Conference.

Kate Martignetti
It's time for Tony's Take Two.

Tony Martignetti
Thank you, Kate. I spent last week in Omaha, Nebraska, for the ordination, the priestly ordination of a longtime friend's son. And while I am not particularly religious, which means not really at all, it was still, it was very moving. There was the bishop there, the The bishop of the diocese of Omaha, Nebraska. And, you know, they're all in their very ornate vestments. It was a long ceremony. It's about a 4-hour ordination ceremony. It was in Latin, which I don't speak or understand, but they give you a little guidebook. You can sort of follow along. Wow. There's a lot you can't hear. But it was just, you know, it's a lot of pomp and circumstance. It's a very— it's a major event in a young man's life to be ordained a priest and devoting his life to God and to the parishioners that he'll be serving. Yeah. So it's really very moving. And then the next day after that, first Mass. So I went to his first Mass. That was just 2 hours, also in Latin. So that was the short one. But still, you know, very significant for him. I mean, you know, you're there to celebrate for the person with the family. And he Spent seven years in the seminary outside Lincoln, Nebraska. So the the commitment is it's it's it's honorable. It's it's and it's and it lasts for eternity. They make the point that this is eternal, not just for life, but beyond life for eternity. Like marriages. That's for life, right? Till death do us part. Not so with ordination. This is for eternity. So it was— I was just very glad to be there, celebrate with the family, and witness something that I had never seen before, very likely won't again. Something very significant, meaningful. That's beautiful. Deep when you talk about his, uh, his commitment to the, to the priesthood. And that's Tony's Take 2. Kate?

Kate Martignetti
So my mom is from Nebraska. Is it true that it's all like trees and mountains?

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, I spent 5 minutes talking about a priestly ordination. You're asking about the landscape of Nebraska. I don't know. Trees and mountains? No, it's pretty flat. I mean, there are trees. Nebraska has trees, I'm sure. I saw some. I saw some trees. Yes. Mountains? No, not in the part of Nebraska where I was. I was in Omaha and then also Lincoln. I had a meeting in Lincoln. And I visited the seminary, which is near Lincoln, Nebraska. That is— Oh, okay. Southeastern Nebraska. No, I wouldn't say mountainous there. I cannot speak to the remaining landscape and terrain of the state of Nebraska. I only visited that little part around the Omaha-Lincoln area.

Kate Martignetti
Well, we've gone cuckoo, but loads more time. Here is internal newsletters your staff will open.

Tony Martignetti
Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio coverage of 26NTC, the 2026 Nonprofit Technology Conference. We're all gathered in Detroit, Michigan. My guest now is Mia Velasco. Mia is Deputy Director of Global Operations at Namati. Mia's subject for her session is Creating internal newsletters your staff will actually open. Mia, welcome to Nonprofit Radio.

Mia Velasco
Thanks so much, Tony. Great to be here.

Tony Martignetti
Pleasure to have you.

Mia Velasco
Thank you.

Tony Martignetti
Everything's fine. Take a deep breath. You're going to do well. Just give us a little overview of the topic. We have plenty of time to go into detail, but what could we be doing better with our internal newsletters so that people actually would open them?

Mia Velasco
Sure. So my session is talking about a project that I've worked on over the past 3 years in my organization, where I partnered with our communications team and our leadership to publish a weekly staff newsletter. So I talk about some lessons learned and tips from our past 3 years of our experience. And I think some ways that we could be doing better communicating with staff So that they actually want to read our emails comes down to a few things. Really having leadership buy-in, that they sort of create the buy-in, the engagement from the outset, that it really has to come from the top. Yeah. That they create that expectation. I think you also have to bring in a variety of voices from across the organization. So you have to balance both, like, the leadership creating that expectation, but also the inclusion. So it's not just leadership talking at staff, but they're also hearing from voices across the organization.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. All right. And we'll have a chance to go into that in detail. That's excellent. Thank you very much for an insightful overview. You have some excellent results. You get like, well, I'll let you say the headline. What kind of open rate did you— you were seeing over 2 years?

Mia Velasco
Yeah, so it's actually now since I submitted the session proposal, we've now just closed out at 3 years, and we've maintained an average of a 76% open rate over the past 3 years.

Tony Martignetti
And what had it been before this initiative?

Mia Velasco
We didn't have a staff newsletter before.

Tony Martignetti
Zero. There wasn't an email list.

Mia Velasco
It was zero, yeah.

Tony Martignetti
There wasn't even one for you to open?

Mia Velasco
No.

Tony Martignetti
The opportunity didn't exist? No, no. Okay. Why did you feel a staff newsletter is important? If you didn't have one in the past, why did it become important to start one?

Mia Velasco
Yeah, I think we were really seeing 2 main issues internally in terms of our communications. One being that there are information silos. We knew that there were people in pockets within the organization that were close to key decision makers and sources of power in the organization, that they had access to lots of information. And then there were other areas of the organization that were further away from those decision makers and didn't have as much access to that information. So one goal with this newsletter was to ensure that everyone had the same access to that information to sort of—

Tony Martignetti
Because information is power.

Mia Velasco
Yes. And, you know, people needed to know key organizational information to inform their day-to-day work. So we wanted to deliver that to them. The other issue we identified, and I think a lot of nonprofits can identify with this, is we were seeing work messages Like distributed across multiple channels— email, Slack, WhatsApp, Zoom, embedded in Google Docs, everywhere. And people didn't know where to go to find what they needed. So we wanted to streamline, have one central channel where they knew, in this newsletter, I'm going to find out the key information that I need to know, the most important things from our leadership. I'm going to know what's currently happening in the organization. I'm going to find out about Our next staff meeting, I'm gonna— like, the most important things are in that newsletter and they know that's the place to go. So that was our other goal as well.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. It sounds like it was very disjointed.

Mia Velasco
Yes.

Tony Martignetti
Before, like you say, from Slack to Zoom to WhatsApp.

Mia Velasco
Absolutely.

Tony Martignetti
All right. So some leadership buy-in. So does that mean, did you have to persuade your CEO of the value of creating an internal newsletter first?

Mia Velasco
In this case, I think we were actually pretty fortunate. It was actually a partnership between myself and our COO. So from day one, we really had that leadership buy-in, and from there the CEO was brought on board with it, and he really became the champion of this newsletter in all of his meetings with our team. leads, he was really cheerleading this effort and making sure that the teams were opening the emails and encouraging people to also be authors of some of the newsletters. So we really had that from early on.

Tony Martignetti
What's the work of Namati?

Mia Velasco
We are a global grassroots justice organization. Our mission is to put the power of the law in the hands of people. We specifically focus on land and environmental justice, on Also citizenship and the right to health.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, and how many employees?

Mia Velasco
Roughly 180 globally.

Tony Martignetti
This is a good size. Oh, and global too. So distributed. Another reason for a centralized channel of communication, right, to 180 employees?

Mia Velasco
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, good. And in terms of inclusion, you said You said early on, leadership buy-in. Sounds like that was not too difficult. If you have the COO on your side, that helps. It helps a lot. It helps to have an ally, but if it's the COO, it helps even more. And then the inclusion. Talk more about how did you get different voices involved in the newsletter?

Mia Velasco
Yeah. I would say 2 things. First, so within our organization, we have 2 formally recognized working languages. English and Portuguese. So in terms of accessibility and inclusion, the newsletter is published in both languages. So we wanted to make sure that first and foremost, all of our staff have access to the newsletter. And so we just want to make sure that everyone is included. And so our staff in Mozambique who speak Portuguese, they can actually write, like they can co-author issues of the newsletter in Portuguese, and we will get it translated in English for the English version of our newsletter as well. And then a lot of it, the role that I play is really like behind the scenes as the publisher. So what I do is really like cultivate, and I'm constantly looking for the sources of information, sort of working on our content calendar. So I am constantly reaching out to our team leads, kind of have my ear on the ground hearing about what's happening across the organization. I'm reaching out to various people and I'm tapping them to say, hey, I heard that you did this event, or I know that this is going on. Can you write for the Namati? And that's the name of our newsletter. And do you think you can write an issue next month? And I'm happy to work with you on it. So I'm just constantly sort of churning To get people, yeah, to write.

Tony Martignetti
Work with me. So why is it with you? You're Deputy Director, so you're Global Operations. Why is it with you instead of Communications?

Mia Velasco
Yeah, it's interesting. So I, when this started 3 years ago, I was in a slightly different role. I was an Operations Manager of Special Projects. So I was both Global Operations, but also kind of in a, like, a right hand to the COO function before we had an executive, like, operations team. We actually just this year have formed an executive operations team. So our internal communications may actually be shifting to that team. Our official sort of communications marketing team does all of our external communications. You know, communications to our peers, funder, you know, they maintain our website. So they're not focused so much on our, you know, internal communications.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. I think you make the point that consistency is important. You mentioned that even if it's just a cat picture. Yeah. All right. So commitment to consistency. Share your thinking there.

Mia Velasco
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Why that's important.

Mia Velasco
Yeah, it's been a really interesting experience for us. So when we started this, it was actually the COO's preference that she wanted to publish weekly. She was the first, like, primary author writing to the organization on a weekly basis. And I actually really questioned whether or not we could maintain that frequency because we had never before— like, I'd never seen senior leadership communicate that frequently to the organization. You know, it was mainly on, like, a quarterly basis. Yeah. Quarterly basis, even if that. So to go from quarterly to weekly, I was like, really? We're going to do this? But she was like, no, if I don't have that discipline, it's not going to happen. And she has really proven me wrong, because we consistently send out an email every week. And a funny side effect of that is she started communicating early on to staff that either if we have If we're having trouble pulling together content, if it's a busy week for us, or if it's a down week, there's not a lot going on in the organization, it's just going to be a cat week. And we will share photos of, you know, staff who have cats. We will share a cat meme. And we have done that. And in my slides, my presentation that is on Friday, I share an example of one of our cat week emails that we sent out, and it's just become a running joke the last few years with staff that sometimes it's just a cat week and that's okay. And we will come back next Friday in your inbox with something hopefully more substantive. But, you know, that's, you know, that happens sometimes and that's life.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. And you feel the consistency is important to this 76% open rate?

Mia Velasco
Yeah. And I think it's actually—

Tony Martignetti
People look forward to it by now.

Mia Velasco
They look forward to it.

Tony Martignetti
If you missed a week, You're going to get a bunch of emails like, where the heck is our— where's the Namati?

Mia Velasco
Yeah. We have heard from staff, because they receive it Friday morning, that they actually look forward to sitting down at their desk with their cup of coffee, tea, and reading the newsletter. That's how they start their mornings on Fridays. It tends to be a slow day in terms of meetings, and they just enjoy that sort of start to their day. From our perspective, being on the publishing sort of writing side, we've also found that that weekly cadence, we've learned that the stakes are not as high for us because we write to staff so often. And it's actually been a really nice counter to a part of our organizational culture where we tend to be a little bit of perfectionists. We really want to get things right. Right. And in this practice, we've learned that it's less about getting things right, and it's more about we're just trying to get it done. We're just trying to get it out. And so that's the most important thing. And so we've been able to just like lower the expectations of what does perfect look like in this case. And we know like if we get something wrong, if we need to make a correction, we can do that like next Friday. We can do that. And that's where like the cat week thing has come in is like some weeks we just can't, you know, put something together and that's, that's going to be okay.

Tony Martignetti
It's interesting how, you know, it's less pressure when it's weekly versus quarterly. It's sort of counterintuitive, right? You would think that quarterly is going to be much less, you know, much less burdensome because it's only 4 times a year. You're doing it like 50 times a year and you feel less of a burden.

Mia Velasco
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Interesting. Yeah. Because, yeah, I mean, one week it could be cats, next week you can correct the last week. It's not like it doesn't— you've redefined perfection. Yeah. Interesting. All right. What you're saying is even sort of countercultural to the organization, which tends to be very detail-oriented. Yeah. So what else are you going to share with folks on Friday? Whatever we talked about yet that you want to let listeners in on.

Mia Velasco
Yeah, I'm going to share a couple of tips from the publisher perspective as well, and also working within our CRM platform, which is what we use to send out the email. Just some tips in terms of what helps me maintain—

Tony Martignetti
This is not an email.

Mia Velasco
We use within HubSpot CRM, CRM, they have a marketing functionality where you can send out marketing emails. So we do use their marketing email tool, which is typically meant for like external emails, but we use it for our own internal.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, okay. Yeah, it's email.

Mia Velasco
Yeah, it is email.

Tony Martignetti
I'm sorry.

Mia Velasco
Yeah. So I share some like practical tips for like how I make my life easier Creating and publishing the email in HubSpot on a weekly basis, like just using a consistent template, cloning it, sort of copy-paste, just practical things like that. I also talk about another tip just in terms of how we think about writing to our staff. One of our guiding principles One of our goals is really to keep our emails short, lighthearted, and visual. So that's something I will, I will talk about as well.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. Well, share some of the— share some of these other practical tips. Like templating is a good idea.

Mia Velasco
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
What else? Copy paste, duplicate from the week before. And what else?

Mia Velasco
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Let us in on some of your pro tips.

Mia Velasco
I use consistent section headers. And these are section headers I designed in Canva. I'm not a graphic designer. They're super simple, and I keep them in the email from week to week, and I just clone that email so they stay in there. It both, like, makes my life easier, but it also helps to signal to staff where they can find, you know, the consistent information that they're looking for. So we have one section that's called Happenings. Happenings, which is essentially like current events. And that's information that staff send to me to share about what's happening in their teams and different countries. So if someone is just skimming that week's email and they just want to know like what's happened over the past week, they know under the Happenings section, that's where they'll find it. I also have in Canva— I worked with our communications team early on. They helped me both set up my initial, like, HubSpot email template, but also this really beautiful email header using Canva, um, that I just swap out the background image. So it's the same file in Canva. I just clone the, um, the page every week, and I just swap out the background, and that's what I put in the email.

Tony Martignetti
Canva is a really good tool.

Mia Velasco
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
You don't have to be a designer.

Mia Velasco
No, no, but you feel like one.

Tony Martignetti
And your product looks like one.

Mia Velasco
Yes.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah. How about other ideas, other things you're going to talk about that we haven't talked about here yet?

Mia Velasco
Yeah, I would say the other one that I mentioned was how we communicate, is keeping it short, lighthearted, and visual for our staff.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. Okay. All right. So you can get people to read your internal newsletter. I mean, you went from zero to— 0 to 76%. No newsletter to 76%. So, all right. Anything you want to leave folks with? A little encouragement for the end?

Mia Velasco
Yeah, I would say if you are considering either starting your own internal staff newsletter or any other type of internal communication strategy, I would say that it's worthwhile. You know, the fee The feedback we've received over the past year, or past 3 years, has been overwhelmingly positive. I think it's definitely manageable. You know, what I'm talking about here, you know, the weekly cadence, it may not be— it may not fit within the context of every organization, especially, you know, much smaller nonprofits than ours. So, you know, I think Think about what makes sense in your context. Maybe it's biweekly, maybe it's monthly. Maybe, you know, if it's not a newsletter, maybe you're on Slack. Like, maybe it's, you know, Slack posts every, you know, couple of weeks from your leadership. Something like that. You know, I think there's different creative ways to think about your internal communications.

Tony Martignetti
Perfect. All right. Thank you. Mia Velasco, Deputy Director of Global Operations at Namati. Thank you very much for sharing, Mia.

Mia Velasco
Yeah, thank you, Tony.

Tony Martignetti
All right, pleasure. And thank you for being with Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio coverage of the 2026 Nonprofit Technology Conference.

Kate Martignetti
Next week, your successful giving day and biases in prospect identification. If you missed any part of this week's show,

Tony Martignetti
I beseech you, find it at tonymartignetti.com. I also beseech you to ask your mom about the landscape and terrain of Nebraska.

Kate Martignetti
Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I'm your associate producer, Kate Martignetti. The show social media is by Susan Chavez. Marc Silverman is our web guy, and this music Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty.

Tony Martignetti
Be with us next week for Nonprofit Radio, Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%. Go out and be great. Thank you for joining us.