Carlos Morales: Improve Your Communications With AI
Carlos Morales, from Viva Technology, shares how to use specific ChatGPT prompts to accelerate your written drafts; optimize your messaging for clarity and audience; and, personalize your outreach as you maintain a consistent voice, tone and brand. All through artificial intelligence. (This was recorded at the 2024 Nonprofit Technology Conference, hosted by NTEN.)
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Welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be stricken with dysphasia. Not last week’s dysphagia, dysphasia. If I had to speak the words you missed this week’s show. Our associate producer, Kate is away this week. It’s all me. We’ll get through it. Hey tone. Oh, sorry. Continuing our 2024 nonprofit technology conference coverage this week. It’s improve your communications with A I. Carlos Morales from Viva technology shares. How to use specific chat GP T prompts to accelerate your written drafts. Optimize your messaging for clarity and audience and personalize your outreach as you maintain a consistent voice tone and brand all through artificial intelligence. I’m Tony Steak too. Giving usa why do we have to wait six months? We’re sponsored by Virtuous, virtuous, gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising volunteer and marketing tools. You need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving virtuous.org and by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box. I’m channeling Kate fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org. This isn’t so hard here is improve your communications with A I. Welcome back to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 24 NTC. You know that that’s the 2024 nonprofit technology conference. And we are in Portland, Oregon at the Oregon Convention Center. We’re sponsored here by Heller Consulting, technology strategy and implementation for non profits. With me now is Carlos Morales, digital marketing strategist at Viva Technology. Carlos. Welcome to nonprofit radio. Thank you so much. I’m glad to be here. Pleasure. Thank you. How’s the conference going? Are you enjoying? Oh, I’m loving it. This is very good. Is this your uh this is actually, this is my second one in like in the last 14 years. And so it has been a while. It’s been a while since you came, you miss them. I mean, NTC is a very good conference. It is. It is, I mean, great, great information, great sessions and great networking opportunity, meeting awesome people learning from a lot of people as well. Yeah. Have you done your session? I did, I did yesterday. People learned from you and now you’re learning from others as well. This is the community, the N 10 community. It is. It is. And uh your session that you did yesterday is accelerating nonprofit communications draft, refine and personalize with A I, correct. All right, personalization. It’s possible. It is, it is. Well, give us the overview first. Why, why did you feel we needed this session? Sure. Uh Well, as you know, A I is sort of actually now the uh the talk of the town, right. And so a lot of organizations are using A I or want to learn how to use A I to actually communicate better, to market better and to reach their audiences better. And so it’s a great tool. It allows to save, uh save us a lot of time. It can give us great ideas and how to do our job better. We can be more efficient. And so the whole purpose of decision is actually to give practical tip hands on uh tips and how to use chat G BT in this case, uh effectively for nonprofit organizations uh create some efficient and effective communication strategies. So, yeah. Alright. So uh you say, you know, draft, refined and personalized. So why don’t we take those in order, drafting comes first before we’re writing? So what’s, what’s your advice around the use of A I drafting? Sure. So when we’re talking about drafting, communication is basically let’s, let’s uh let’s talk about CG BT as being the tool that he actually we talked about yesterday. It’s going into chat GP T uh and prompting or giving instructions to cha G BT on a specific task. For example, help me write an email about fund raising for my donors. Um And you know, I want this email to be very uh to have a grateful tone. Um And I want you to cover, you know, mention all the goals that we were able to achieve based on our fundraising strategies. It’s just, it’s just a simple prompt. This is a simple instruction. Now, Judge GP T is gonna come up with, OK, here’s the email based on the instruction that you gave me as you actually read the first draft of the email, right? What you’re getting is basically, that’s the first thing that’s the draft based on one instruction, the email comes up and then you’re gonna actually now refine it. But the whole idea right now is just to start getting some ideas, brainstorming and what would be the best email I can send out to my donors? That’s it. So I’m just giving you one instruction, you create the task and then from there we’ll go and improve it. So that’s the draft piece and, and we’re gonna, we’re gonna, we’re gonna improve it with future with additional instructions exactly in a prompt. And so that’s when the refining piece comes along because then as after I looked the draft, I can say, well, this is great, but I want you to be more specific. And so, and I want you to address the donors that actually donated between five and $10,000 for example. Um and I want, and I wanna make sure that uh you know, as you were thinking them, I wanna make sure that we actually put a link where they actually can go and click on it so they know how their money is being used. So now we’re actually adding more instructions to be able to actually refine that email. Now, maybe the first draft was not what you wanted. Maybe the first draft was too vague, too general. Well, the refining piece is giving more context, more detail to cha GP T. So you can actually get better results and you go from there. So this is obviously an iterative process, you know, using A I in G BT or any other language model is not a one time thing. It’s not like giving instruction once you’re gonna come up with, you know, with the best idea, the best email, the best marketing communication is not gonna happen. So you have to continue talking at it providing the context or the additional information for that, you know, for cha GP T to give you the best result possible. OK. Yeah. So you know, we’re talking about prompt engineering, which is a fancy way of saying, you know, learn how to talk to A I by giving actually the right prompts the right instructions. That’s what that is. And we had a session yesterday, a conversation about prompt engineering with uh with two other guys. Um All right. So is that enough? I mean draft refine and then personalize right, the personalized piece though, after you are refining after you’re enhancing your communication that email. Now, we wanna make sure that we are personalizing, right? Remember that I said donors that actually donated between five and $10,000 that piece of it. There you are segmenting you are, you are sort of actually personalizing your message to a specific specific segment of your audience, right? Because the language that you’re using is gonna be different for someone who probably donated about $1000 right? Because that money might go to a different cost. And so that’s the personalizing piece. The other thing too is that you can actually train cha GP T to adopt the tone, the brand voice of your organization. For example, you can actually give them documents, you know, past emails or a specific flyers in which you say I want you to look at the way that we have written this communication pieces to donors and I want you to actually adapt or a adopt that specific tone into the email. So that’s where the personalization and keeping your brand voice comes in. So that’s, that’s the piece about personalizing it. But you’re gonna, when we talk about personalizing it, it’s pretty much talking, you know, we’re talking about let’s let’s communicate with a specific type of audience. No, in this case, we’re talking about donors, it could be parents, it could be youth, depends who, who, who your target audience is. Yeah. OK. And right. And the personalization also comes from you giving it text to train itself to you, to train it to adopt my tone. Use this ii I don’t know, use some of the maybe use the language of the second paragraph, you know, or things like that. It’s time for a break. Virtuous is a software company committed to helping nonprofits grow generosity. Virtuous believes that generosity has the power to create profound change in the world and in the heart of the giver, it’s their mission to move the needle on global generosity by helping nonprofits better connect with and inspire their givers. Responsive fundraising puts the donor at the center of fundraising and grows giving through personalized donor journeys that respond to the needs of each individual. Virtuous is the only responsive nonprofit CRM designed to help you build deeper relationships with every donor at scale. Virtuous. Gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising, volunteer marketing and automation tools. You need to create responsive experiences that build trust and grow impact virtuous.org. This is uh it gets a little tiring now back to improve your communications with A I I think we’re doing OK though. Uh you mentioned a link. Now, how would we a link? So donors can see how their gift was used. How’s that gonna work? So basically, you can actually do that. You can actually say well and I want in the email to for them to go to my website, give them, give it the URL, give it to your RL and then that will be included in the email that Chad G BT generates. Alright, I mean uh there must be more to talk about because you had a session we just did draft or fine and personalized. Um What what what, what more, what more do we need to talk about? Sure. Well, I think we look what we’re talking about actually communicating with JG BT. The whole thing is about prompting is actually about, you know, making sure that you know, exactly or you learn how to actually talk to it, give the right instructions. So one of the things that we talked about is OK, we actually came up with a basic structure, right? In other words, first thing that you wanna do is actually just state what your uh goal and the communication type is. So in other words, if you’re asking to write an email, that’s a communication type, the goal is to actually raise awareness about a specific, about a specific cause. You wanna also give context, tell cha GP T why this is important. You wanna also highlight the audience who is the audience going to be. So in other words, if the email is going to donors, that is my audience, you know, donors that actually donated between five and $10,000 for example, right. And what’s the call to action when I want them to actually go to a specific website for them to actually see how their money, how their funds are being used So that’s the structure, right? Basic structure that a prompt should have. When you actually have that structure, then you actually come up with a very good draft. In fact, we actually put it in practice yesterday. And when people actually saw that email, the first draft, they say, well, that’s a pretty good one. So when, when you actually come back into an editing mode, you’re refining it. Obviously, you spend a lot less time. Why? Because you were specific in the first try. If the promise to beg you’re gonna come, you know, you’re gonna have an output, you’re gonna have an answer more, more generic. So you’re gonna end up editing a lot more. So that’s the whole, that’s the whole, uh you know, kind of the whole idea is to actually learn how to talk to it. Now, I’m just mentioning, you know, email, but you’re gonna use it for marketing, how to create effective social media post. You can fact give it a, you know, if there’s a social media post, for example, either from your organization or another organization that actually has created a lot of engagement, you can grab that post, give it to chat GP T and say this post generating, you know, 25 shares had about 1000 views, whatever, whatever the metrics that actually you get from that post, you feed it to chat GP T and say I want to create something similar. But my audience is Xy and Z right, please adopt the best practices that you found from this post to generate one that is actually gonna work for me. Do you need to say please, you know, GP T just do it right. So it’s interesting because we, we, we were talking about it and one of the decisions like, well, you know, che GP T appreciates when you are polite and say please and thank you because you know, there’s been some research where this actually shows that when you are polite, you know, it’s end up producing better results for you. There’s research. Yes. However, however, the nice thing about this, you can actually read all this research in the world, but you can actually test it yourself. Is there been instances on my, on my end where I haven’t said please and then the results versus versus an instruction when I say please doesn’t change much. OK? So in my experience, you know, this is, this is one of the things that I’ve done. I get frustrated with cha GP T and you know what I’ve done is like you did not do what I asked you, you are making stuff up, you’re hallucinating because that’s the term that we use. So you’re making stuff up, please. OK. Revise the instructions and pay attention to details. All right. So I use the, please, then I draft the same prompt, same instruction without the plea and I pretty much get the same result right. There’s some instances when the results varies. A little, a little bit, right? But with a GP T, I’m gonna be honest with you, you can use the same prompt right now. Uh And then 10 minutes later you get a different, a different, um a different result. I’m gonna give you an example. So yesterday, someone asked at my session, OK, what happened if you actually say to chat G BT, write this email based on the target audience, you give it an audience and, and, and, and, and all the criteria. But then for the second prom, you say write an original email. What’s the difference between those two? Actually, there’s none because when you’re asking chai to write something, it’s going to be original. He’s actually creating the text for you. All right, you can edit it, you can change it, you can go back and forth, right? So, so we tested it out. So we tested it out. And so basically, we’re asking the same thing and one prompt, you know, uh we didn’t say original, the other one, we did. Obviously we had two different answers, right? Because because just one word that we changed now, what happened when you actually use the same instruction? The same one, no changes whatsoever, identical prompts, we also get different answers, but they were close but different answers. Here’s what happens when you can grab both, both of those answers. And you can say, oh my God those are good. What I can actually take from each of them to make one that is actually better and what you can do, you can give both answers to Cha J BT. And I said, I like both of them mention what you like about it. And now I want you to create one final email based on the instruction based on this criteria to make sure that is the best of the both versions that you gave me. So see all the things that we can do with it. And I’m just talking about text based, but we can do a lot of stuff, we can ask it to help us create prompt, to create images um to analyze data. Um You know, for nonprofits, for example, yesterday, we talked about let’s talk about different roles that you have in the nonprofits, right? You have a grant writer. How can you use a GP T to actually write a grant that’s very useful, you can actually fit in the whole information of the grant application, right? And then you can actually give a specific instructions and to tell you, you know how to actually answer those sections from the grant application with the tone of your organization. Make sure that actually highlights or give more importance to some of the sections of the grant of the grant application that it needs to be given importance to. But making sure that it maintains the whole brand’s voice, right? Obviously, it’s gonna come up with an answer. It’s not gonna be a perfect one. That’s where you actually go and start refining it and going back and forth. That’s, that’s just one, you know, one practical way of doing it. It’s time for a break. Imagine a fundraising partner that not only helps you raise more money but also supports you in retaining your donors, a partner that helps you raise funds both online and on location so you can grow your impact faster. That’s Donor box, a comprehensive suite of tools, services and resources that gives fundraisers. Just like you a custom solution to tackle your unique challenges, helping you achieve the growth and sustainability, your organization needs, helping you help others visit donor box.org to learn more. It’s time for Tony’s take two giving USA. Why do we have to wait six months for a report about fundraising the previous year giving USA comes out each June 6 months after the end of the year, we used to have a far far superior product. It was the Atlas of giving longtime listeners to the show. May recall that the Atlas of giving Ceo Rob Mitchell was on the show several times, usually maybe always in January because the Atlas had and he was announcing the report on fundraising from the previous year in January. And on top of that, very importantly, he came with the forecast, the quantitative forecast of fundraising for the coming year and he had this report from the previous year and the forecast by sector, meaning nonprofit mission sector. He used to say, sector source, the source of the giving and state state, he could break down giving by state. He could tell you that last year, what the dollar amount was of arts fundraising in the state of Wisconsin. And in the forecast, he could tell you what the religious fundraising is going to be for the coming year in the state of Maine. That’s how robust and detailed and sophisticated the Atlas of giving was giving USA doesn’t even come close to this and we have to wait six months for it. And the forecast you get from giving USA is qualitative like uh the election and inflation and donors perceptions will impact fundraising this year. Oh What, what brilliant insight. So, so, so deep, the analysis and, and so actionable for us, it’s worthless. Uh OK, so what happened to the Atlas of giving? Uh it, it, it fell away, you know, so if, if I here I am saying it was far superior, why didn’t it survive? Well, the best products don’t always survive. Um In this case, it may have been underfunded. So the marketing and promotion was not adequate giving USA has its relationship with the University of Indiana and the Lily School of philanthropy which lends it uh undeserved uh credibility. And so, you know, puts those institutions imprimatur on the, on the giving USA product uh I believe it’s misplaced, but anyway, it’s there. So, but I, I really don’t have a complete answer as to why the Atlas of giving didn’t survive. I think the last report was 2017. So I think the last time Rob Mitchell was on was January of 2018 with the report from 2017, again, such deep analysis by sector source and state. And also, of course, then he had the forecast for 2018. I guess I’m voicing frustration and lament that we don’t have a better product. And uh I lament the loss of the Atlas of giving. That is Tony’s take two, Kate. No, of course, Kate’s not here. We’ve got just about a butt load more time this week. Here’s the rest of improve your communications with A I. Again, when you say use, use our tone, our voice, you can train it with your own text. You can even give it URL si mean, maybe a blog post or you can copy and paste or whatever. Well, and Tony, here’s the thing about it that you said give it a blog post. Somebody actually asked yesterday can actually, can I give cha G BT a link to my page? So he knows a little bit about me about my organization and ask him based on that information to actually write an email, making sure that he’s skipping that brand’s voice, that has a little bit of background of who the organization is. And use that when it’s actually drafting that email, right? And so, um, and you can certainly do that. You can certainly do that. And so, um, so it’s powerful, there’s so many things that we can do with it. You know, I’m gonna share with you a, a concern that I have that I shared with the, the, the two, um, the two technologists who were talking about the prompt engineering yesterday. And I’ve shared this with other folks too. I, I’m interested in your reaction. Um My, my concern about the use of chat GP T or any of the, the generative A I tools is that we’re, we’re seeing away our most creative time, which is the blank page, the creation of the draft. We’re staring at the blank screen. How do I get started? Um You know, where should I start with my ending or should I start with my call to action in the middle or, you know, but where that to me is the most creative that we can, we can be and then less creative than that is refining editing, you know, copy editing, uh proofreading naturally, you know. Um So, so to summarize it, like my concern is that we’re, we’re gonna become less creative, we’re giving away our most creative moment. That blank screen moment. What’s your reaction to that? You know, I don’t know what kind of answers you get in regards to that, but I have found myself to be more creative by using Chat G BT. And the reason why is because now I’ve learned how to be more effective at communicating and given a specific instructions. Not only that though, but as I’m actually seeing the answers, I start thinking of ideas that I actually can use to enhance the final product that I want from cha GP T. So in other words, to me, for example, if I’m looking, I’m gonna give you example, I did, I did my workshop yesterday. Did I use C GP T to create an outline for my workshop? What do you think the answer to that is, of course, I did have I done workshops before on marketing and social media and uh and technology. Yes, I have prior to chat GP T. What did I do to create an outline for a workshop that I was about to present? What do people do? You go to Google? Right? You do a little bit of research, you can come up with an outlet yourself, but then you go to Google and you start actually looking at case studies, you start looking at concepts you start looking at and then you start putting all the information together. What Cha GP T does is basically grab all the information that he knows that exist and actually put it in a package for you in front of your screen based on the instruction that you give it. That’s what it does, right? So, so to a certain point is like if I want to write an email, for example, I would say to cha GP T I need to write an email, right? Um Ask me clarifying questions to get more context before proceeding. That’s it. Then cha G BT will say, all right, you, I I understand you need to write an email. Now tell me who the audience is. What’s the type of tone that you wanna use in the email? What are the key messages that you want to convey? These are things that well, we, we already know that we need to write on an email. But what chat G BT is helping me is kind of actually be more organized if there are things that I’m seeing there that I hadn’t thought about. And then once I see it is, oh my God, I forgot this. Now, now chat G BT is prompting you exactly is prompting me instead of actually thinking and being a little bit more creative and how I can enhance that process. And so that’s the way that actually I see it. Um So I don’t think the creative process is gonna go away. What is actually happened with shifting and how to be creative in a different way by using technology. And so, and that’s, and that’s the way that I, that I see it. That’s actually I see it with the people that I work with and how we have applied A, I thank you. Creativity in a different way. Yes, definitely. Um What else do you want to talk about? We, uh we could still spend some more time. What, what haven’t we gone deep enough on or? Well, yeah, I think, uh you know, for nonprofits, for example, but this is the audience of your, of your podcast. It’s like the question is, how do we actually use a tool like cha GP T to be more efficient? Well, you know, I gave you prior examples and how it can help you save lots of hours. You know, one of the things that we talked about yesterday was like, you know, if you want to write a blog post and you want to write a blog post about um mental health issues for teens uh in your, in your local area, for example, and the purpose of the blog post is to educate parents and provide resources well, prior to cha GP T, you probably would think and you will look at the blank screen going back to your, to your concern and you probably spend about eight hours trying to write, to write a very good blog post. Right? Well, with J GP T, we can certainly actually spend between 2 to 2 and four hours and actually write a very good blog post. Now, what happened with the other four hours, the other four hours that I’m not spending now and writing a blog post can be used in the marketing piece of the blog post. Now that I have written it, what can I do to actually promote it better and making sure that parents actually get to see it and get to apply what I have I have written for them to do or the tips that are provided for them in terms of mental health and, and, and, and, and how to deal with that with, with their, with their Children, for example, with their kids. And so notice how technology now is being used more efficient and we become more, I mean, uh more efficient on time, but more effective in the way that actually we produce results. So those are some of the things that I think is important for if you are a for nonprofits, if you ask the question, OK, what are the number one thing that you want cha GP T to help you with a lot of people are gonna raise their hands, they’re gonna say content creation, how to create more engaging content on social media. For example, my goodness, you have these tools, it’s gonna help you do that, right? And so when we’re talking about, you know, uh you know, using a GP T more for the nonprofit organizations, you know, one of the things that I would say is like get good at prompting. But on the other hand, just yesterday, I was reading an article where prompting in a few months is not gonna be something that it’s gonna be needed because what’s happening is as this technology advances, um the la language model is actually by just giving an instruction, the language model is gonna be able to actually predict what exactly is it that you want. So, and so basically, it’s not gonna be, you know, you’re not gonna need to be more detail than necessary sometimes. And so, so it’s a dancing rapidly, right? You actually go and go to websites and grab uh you know, uh prompts library for any type of role that you want. And then what you do is just copy and paste it and edit it based on your own needs. Prompt library. Oh yes, yes. So you want you, you know, you copyright it. Yeah. If you actually are a graphic designer, uh data analyst, there are actually prompt libraries in which you actually for anything pretty much that you want, you can copy it and paste it, edit it as you see fit and it will allow you to get more results faster, right? And so, so, you know, for nonprofit organizations, one of the things that I say is like, let’s get good at the basics first. If you get good at the basics, you’re gonna, you’re gonna see right away. Very good results. You’re, you’re gonna actually produce some tangible results, great results for your organization and then you’re gonna be able to now promote, better, communicate better. Um you know, if you are using uh cha GP T to create content on social media, you’re gonna be able to actually see the results of that by the content being more personalized, remember, personalizing and refining. And so those are the things that I think will be beneficial for fund raising. My goodness. If you’re, you’re fund raising and you have a database of donors, you feed that to cha GP T and you start segmenting your donors based on the amount of money that they actually have given you. Not only that, then you personalize that email, like I told you at the beginning based on that, not only that those that are actually have not engaged with you or for some reason, they haven’t donated with you in a while. How do we re engage them? How do we make sure that we remind them of the cause that at some point they actually, you know, believed or they engage with us at the first, but they haven’t done in a while. How do we re engagement? How do we actually make sure that actually they, you know, they donate, they come back. So look at all the great benefits that you can actually as a nonprofit can reap from this technology. It’s just knowing how to use it, right? It’s key. But you know, but as you, as you’re learning how to use it, the creative, the creative actually thought comes to you and say, oh my God this is just one tip of the iceberg. Now we can do this, this and that. So that’s what I say is technology for me had to allow me to actually be more creative in the way that I do things. All right. Yeah. All right, Carlos, we’re gonna leave it there. All right. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Thank you, Carlos Morales, digital marketing strategist at Viva Technology. Thank you very much again for sharing, Carlos. My pleasure. Thank you and thank you for being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 24 NTC where we’re sponsored by Heller consulting, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits next week, exploiting conflict and intuition makes better products. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com. We’re sponsored by Virtuous. Virtuous. Like I’m 14. My voice breaks, virtuous gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising volunteer and marketing tools. You need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving, virtuous.org and by donor box. Outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org. Love that alliteration. This does get a little tiring doing my per one person. II, I must be out of practice doing it by myself. It’s been over a year. Our creative producer is Clare Meyerhoff. I’m your No, no. The show’s social media is by Susan Chavez Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation. Scotty be with us next week for nonprofit radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.
