Jason Shim: Apps, Tools & 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.)
Mia Velasco: 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 26NTC.)
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And 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 hebdominal 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. 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 Center for Nonprofit Digital Resilience. This continues our coverage of the 2026 nonprofit Technology conference. Then Internal newsletters, your staff will open. From a 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 2. A priestly ordination. Here is apps, tools, and tactics. 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. Thank you very much for having me. You’re a perennial and this must be 56 years going. Sometimes with Miko Marquette Whitlock, but this year you’re solo, and not surprising, uh, your session topic is apps, tools and tactics 2026. Give an overview. What, what do you, what do you, what do you have for us this year? Yeah, so really, really this is an overview of all the, the cool apps, tools and tactics I’ve come across in the past year, and it’s a roundup of the things that I, you know, I use uh 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, you know, I think people may find useful and they can, uh, review it if it may, uh, you know, be helpful for them in, in their day to day work as well. And give us one tease. What’s a, what’s a, what’s one you can explain quickly and then we could even go into more detail, but give us a quick teaser. Yeah, so, so 11 of the things is I, I, I, I go into, um, one of the tactics is around, uh, prompting, and so, uh, the, the short version is rather than, uh, if you’re using say an AI model rather than having like a one-shot prompt, uh, to try and get the, the kind of answer that you’re looking for actually splitting it up into two 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 uh comprehensive response in that, but I, I can go into more details. Yeah, we’re going to, that’s a tease. Alright, thank you. Cool, nice, uh, nice overview. Um, so, let’s go into a little more detail on that exact one, getting a super prompt. Yeah, please. Yeah, so, uh, I, I, I start off with, uh, detailing, uh, you know, the basics of, you know, how many of the AI language models work and without getting too far into the weeds, you know, generally that. Uh, but how they work is a lot of the words are assigned a numerical value and the proximity of them to one another, uh, helps generate and predict the next, uh, the next word, uh, for that. And so when generating a super prompt, uh, I, I like to invoke the Backstreet Boys. Cause you start off, you know, you are, and you know what comes next and it’s like, you know, my fire and so what you do is you, you think about that and say you lead off with you are an AI expert and and that that’s the first phrase that you use and that will, what that will do is invoke immediately like, you know, AI expertise and the words related to that for the AI model and then you follow that up with something else afterwards. So you know, for example, say you know you are an AI expert, you are also An expert, uh, nonprofit, say CFO and a financial planning and and analysis expert, um, and, uh, and so that’s the 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, uh, wanna be using cause that, uh, has an embedded meaning with it in that that’s a very long comprehensive prompt. And so those things, uh, combined for you’re an AI expert you are an expert in the following subject area as well. Help me craft a super prompt to complete a certain task that you may be looking to do. So you know, uh, help me craft a super prompt to take, uh, uh, budget numbers and, uh, 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. Yeah, yeah. So it’s quite, quite lengthy and you can either respond to that thread uh with, you know, OK, run with that prompt, use it or if you wanna 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, uh, for, you know, say if you’re using it for something like finance, you probably wanna check in with someone who is a CFO or someone who has like an accounting background, um, but it, it saves having to like sit there. And um having to spend a lot of uh time necessarily uh you know 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 that’s a a small tactic to help people make better use um of their time when they’re using uh an AI model. It’s interesting you have to tell it that it’s an. AI expert. I mean I can see telling it it’s a it’s a chief financial officer and a and a financial planning expert, sure, but you have to tell it it’s an AI expert that there’s value in that. Yeah, absolutely, because it doesn’t know, it doesn’t know what it is. 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 AA 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. OK, OK, yeah, no, that’s why we’re here. 2026 tools and tactics. Um, what’s, I mean, all I’m gonna be asking you is what’s another one? Because, uh, and we’re not going back and forth between you and Miko this year, so you’re, you’re on. What, what else? Yeah, so the next one related to that is that. In order to get the best response from that kind of super pump generation and in general is that uh 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, how do I address that. One of them is that if, uh, folks have the default set to automatic that they’re going to get, uh, uh, the default model that many of the, the AI companies, uh, are, are using, and you’ll, you’ll usually get. Um, say a model that is, uh, the quick or the fast one that may hallucinate more and you have to very carefully select the dropdown if it is available, uh, 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. Is there a fee sometimes for that? Or are are we beyond the uh the free usage of chat or one of the other models? So I, I generally recommend that folks, uh, if at all possible, uh, look beyond the free models, uh, across all the major ones currently there are nonprofit discounts, uh, you know, of, uh, I think the most notable one is, uh, uh, cloud’s, um, anthropic’s cloud model. Uh, it’s 75% off the, the team account which is for like 5 accounts, and so it’s, it’s a pretty solid, uh, deal for, for nonprofits to have access to it. But then you can select. Uh, as well, uh, between, you know, Claude, Gemini as well, co-pilot, uh, you can select all the different, um, you know, uh, thinking or pro models as well. And it’s worth investing in. You you’re gonna see a difference between the free versions and the paid versions. Yes, and and also for, for general, uh, security and, and a peace of mind that, you know, the, the information that you’re putting into the model is not necessarily being integrated into the training model as well. So yeah, you want you want your data to be. Siloed off, right, so that, that you can only do with a paid, a paid subscription, yeah, yeah, yeah, you gotta, yeah, we’ve had many guests admonish us about not putting your proprietary information into the, into the ether for the general consumption of large language. Mhm. And making sure you’re checking the settings to uh turn off, uh, you know, uh, 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. OK excellent. What else so along the lines of, of paid models, 11 that I’ll call out, um, so in particular I’ll, I’ll mention Anthropic’s cloud, uh, desktop model. Um, so if you download that app, uh, for the desktop, uh, it actually will give cloud access to your desktop and to the, uh, folders that you designate, and so it’s not particular specifically to, uh, cloud, uh, currently, um, the, the other, uh, companies, uh, are, uh, emerging, uh, similar kind of desktop models, but cloud is probably the, the best known one right now. And so you can do things like um recently I, I, I pointed the model at a screenshots folder that I had and there was like 5000 images in it that I’ve accumulated over the years and you can ask it to uh examine and categorize uh all the files and put them. Into respective folders and it 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, uh, file or organization and over time, you know, while also ensuring all the 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 with, you know, a lot of files have been scattered over many, many years, and, uh, you know, someone, uh, needs to kind of take on the organization of all the, the folders, um, that, that can be a helpful tool, uh, cloud, um, uh, desktop, specifically the cowork function. That’s a, oh, OK, the function is called co-work. That that’s a mundane task that no person is going to take on. I mean, even your own 5000 images. You’re, you’re never gonna take the time to categorize those and put them into subfolders. So that’s the kind of mundane routine task that it’s like kind of low lift, low hanging fruit for an, for an AI model. If you, if you have the, um. The the uh skepticism that I do about going deeper listeners know my concern about sacrificing creativity. Um, 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. Uh, so those are my deep, uh, skepticisms. However, for mundane routine tasks like file management, uh, image sorting, I, I, I see great benefit. That like I said, that’s something you, you would never do. You would never bother to do that even for your own 5000 images. They would just sit. Well, it’s something that I would tell myself that I may do on a rainy day, but I never get around to it. I never got to do it because it’s too, it’s too boring. All right, all right, good, great one. OK. Yeah, please. But, but along the lines of creativity, you know, one thing to, to put out there is, um, you know, there, there, there’s apps out there, uh, and I’ll mention uh Suno.com uh.com. And that’s one that you can prompt it to uh generate music uh for you. And so I, I find this one to be a really interesting one in that say if you’re an aspiring, um, you know, songwriter and you have like a whole bunch of lyrics that you’ve put together but you don’t necessarily have, you know, the, uh, your backing band or something you’re a poet and a musician. Yeah, exactly. And, and so it’s a personal experiment. I, I put in some, uh, Emily Dickinson poetry into it and asked, you know, can you set this to music and you know it was quite a a moving uh kind of Uh, uh, uh, uh, kind of track that it that it put out afterwards and so I, I, how did you prompt it for that? I, I, I input, uh, the poem, um, it was, uh, Hope is a thing with feathers, and then. I, I prompted, uh, you are a Grammy, um, well, I, I use the you are prompt AI expert. You are the Beach Boys, um, I mean the Backstreet Boys, even for Emily Dickinson, the two, the two worlds, the Backstreet Boys and the classic Emily Dickinson coming together. Alright, you are an AI expert. Yeah, you’re an AI expert. You’re also an award-winning lyricist, um, you know, help me craft a super pump to generate. Uh, uh, a, a moving, um, you know, soundtrack to Emily Dickinson poetry that will, uh, evoke, uh, you know, uh, deep resonance, uh, for anyone who is listening to it, uh, particularly, uh, around, uh, you know, feeling, you know, wistful and, and things, and so, you know, uh, you, you generate a few kind of iterations of it and see what works and then you, um, the ones that do work, you kind of Um, you can also run the music, uh, back through the the AI to analyze like, OK, what, um, how would you describe the, uh, the track that you just heard as well. And so it kind of doing that back and forth, uh, experimentation. Uh, as well, so for organizations like, you know, they, they may find their own personal use cases, uh, for it that they, they may have existing staff with, uh, creative inclinations that are looking to perhaps have some additional personalization for events or, you know, having a small like internal jingle for, uh, for something or maybe for. And you know how baseball games have like individual um soundtracks for uh like walk up music before they go up to uh to home plate. Yeah. Or the 7th inning stretch is that that’s baseball, isn’t it? innings of baseball? OK, not very good in sports but uh they don’t have quarters. Alright, um, what else? How about some uh some apps? Do you have some apps I I know you do. Apps, tools and tactics. Yeah, totally. So another one is, uh, an interesting one is uh gamma.app, uh, and so that one is like a slide deck generator, uh, and so, uh, there is when you sign up, you know, there, there’s some free credits, but it is a paid service, uh, as well. And so, uh, if, if anyone. You know, find themselves struggling with, you know, the creating a slide deck, uh, and you know, just the some people may find it arduous that, you know, gamma.app is, uh, an app that may help, uh, you know, create a slide deck. You, you input the content and then, you know, it gives you a scaffold that you can. Uh, look over and you’re you’re narrative and then it breaks it into, into uh slides. Yeah, it’s a long a spectrum, so you, you can, yup, yep, and so it generates the slides for you. Um, you can give a general narrative, you can, uh, instruct it with specific bullet points that you want to cover or you can tell that, you know, I want the text verbatim, do not change any of it. Uh, so it’s along a sliding scale as well as to how, how much, uh, control you want over it. The other thing about that too is that uh cloud has a plug-in for uh PowerPoint uh as well as Excel and so, uh, you know, there are multiple ways to approach this. One is through Gamma. app. The other is through, uh, the, the cloud, um, plug-ins that are available for, uh, things like PowerPoint, uh, and Excel which can generate the, the entire deck, um. Microsoft itself has, uh, you know, the, the built-in designer function, uh, too, which is pretty handy, uh, that you can click on a slide and then they’ll, uh, kind of redesign the slide on the fly for you. Uh, take into consideration, you know, what’s already there as well. That’s Microsoft. Uh, yeah, it’s it’s it’s directly in Microsoft PowerPoint and then uh if you look for the designer button in the top right, uh, then it’ll, uh, it’ll do that. Oh my gosh, alright, well, that’s why you’re here. I don’t think people know that. It’s widely known at all. It’s within the PowerPoint app already. OK. Are there other apps? I love these. Yeah, so the, the, the what I’ll touch upon is um something called uh vibe coding which was a term that was coined by Andre Carpathi, who is a researcher. Yeah, I’ve seen references to vibe coding on LinkedIn. I don’t remember if I ever asked anybody. What are you talking about? I mean, I could look it up myself. But alright, so you’ll you’ll help us. Yeah. So, so vibe coding refers to uh 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 to do the thing. Now there there’s a whole bunch of um uh precautions that one needs to be aware of as well that you know if you probably don’t wanna 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 um as as well but that being said, if you’re using vibe coding to generate say front end mockups or something that. Uh, you know, there are apps like lovable.dev, uh, that’s, uh, or replit.com that have, uh, apps that allow you to generate, uh, code very quickly so you can prompt it to be like, hey, generate me, uh, the front page of a website for, uh, say an organization that provides, uh, shelter assistance, and, uh, within a few moments, uh, you know, generate, you know, something. That you can at least respond to and mark up a bit. And so if you’re looking to um you know kind of rapidly prototype something as well that that can uh be a mechanism that you can do that. What were those two? Replic lovable.dev was the first one and uh replit.com was the second one. Yeah, R E P L I T dot com. Yeah. OK, cool. And, and so these functions are actually embedded as well into uh some of the AI models uh like Gemini. So, uh, there’s a whole bunch of options that when you select the dropdown within, uh, uh, Google’s Gemini, uh, model. One of them is called Canvas, and Canvas is really neat because it, 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 know or a dashboard or whatever you’re looking for. So to put that in more concrete terms, I, I was sharing this with my, uh, 7 year old niece, and I asked her, Hey, what, what are you doing in school right now? And she’s like, Oh, I’m learning how to round, um, to the closest 100, and, um, uh, I was like, Hey, would, would it be interesting, you know, if you had a little game to kind of experience this as well. And she’s like, Yeah, sure, that, that’d be interesting. And so, uh, I, I sat with her, and then I prompted Gemini. I was like, Hey, um, you know, again, you’re an AI expert. You’re also an expert, uh, developer. Um, help me craft a super prompt that would use, uh, Vanilla JS, uh, JavaScript, uh, HTML and CSS to create a game that is suitable for a seven 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, you know, a little confetti pops up and then you advances, gives you a star. If you get it wrong, it kindly says, oh, maybe try again, you know, this is, uh, it’s actually the other way. And so this kind of thing is, is incredible and that you can generate this in such a short period of time. And, and so, yeah, it was fun to experience that with them, yeah, yeah. And um the the application that it has uh for organizations is that there’s a lot of interesting open data sets that out there but sometimes the data is locked away in, you know, spreadsheets um and uh what I have used some of the vibe coding for is, uh, giving it the data set and prompting the AI, uh, the Canvas and Gemini to, uh, create me a dashboard to visualize this data. And uh one of the data sets I was looking at was the number of pet registrations that are in Toronto, uh where I live. And uh 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 Ford’s rotation 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 data sets or whichever data set um is quite powerful. I know there’s more. Oh, absolutely, there, there’s tons. Um, the, the other one is, uh, the, the Shortcuts app in, in, in the Mac, uh, or Power Automate desktop for, uh, Windows. And so this is, uh, one that I have not seen, uh, frequently used necessarily, but once people are aware of it, you can do a whole bunch of interesting things with it. Is this also for, uh, iPhone? Uh, yes, there’s a shortcuts out for the iPhone as well. Yeah, so, you know, when, when I boot up my computer in the morning, you know, there’s about a sequence, uh, depending on the time of day, there may be a sequence of like 10 apps that I may have to open to, to just kinda have across, uh, multiple monitors. And so, um, I, uh, can put this into a shortcuts app and, and map it to a single shortcut key and be like you open these 10 apps, uh, when I, I press this key. Um, but also if you’re working across multiple organizations with multiple, uh, Google accounts or Chrome profiles, uh, if you go in and use a consultant, yeah, exactly. Uh, you can go in and adjust what’s called a bash script. Uh, so this requires a little scripting, but you can Google it to, uh, see how you can open multiple Chrome profiles at the same time and have it color coded, uh, and have it, you know, neatly organized. And one of the additional things is that um uh it’s called a stream deck. This is a device that uh many uh video streamers uh use or something similar where it’s a device that has uh buttons that have like uh little video um uh 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, uh, during the, the. A Zoom call or a Teams call. So this is a device that you’re using through the Shortcuts app on on now we’re talking about desktop. Yeah, we’re talking about like a what’s this device? What’s the device called pad. The best known one is it’s called a stream deck. Stream stream deck. Yeah, but there’s a whole bunch of other ones that are similar to Stream deck as well with other other brand names as well. Yeah. Um, let’s go generic now. I don’t wanna, I mean, I’m a Mac lover since 1984, but I don’t wanna. I don’t want Android and uh uh Lenovo laptop users to to be upset at us, so let’s let’s go generic. Yeah, so so the Windows version of that is also uh Power Automate desktop. Uh, so if you’re on Windows, um, you know, Power Automate desktop, uh, it’s part it’s offered by uh Microsoft as well and uh you can use that and also map that to the stream deck, uh, too. Yeah, um, the, the next up, uh, I’ll tell you, uh, uh, clipboard history. So, uh, this isn’t necessarily on by default, uh, and so it’s a little hidden, uh, tactic that, uh, if you’re having to find yourself, uh, 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, uh, your, uh, your clipboard and then paste multiple things and so the default is. One thing one thing at a time and you, you copy something else and you lost the previous one. You have to go back and forth, back and forth. OK, this is only, this is, we’re in Windows right now. OK, so where do we change this? This is good. So if you, if you go to a system settings, uh, and then you select a clipboard, uh, there’s gonna 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 12345, you know, control C, control C control C, and then go into the document where you’re looking to paste all that stuff and say control V or control or sorry not control 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. 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. Yeah, and and the Mac equivalent, uh, the open-source program is called Fly Cut. So it’s a clipboard history for Windows or Fly Cut for Mac. OK, is Fly Cut already included in, in, in the Mac OS? No, you have to download it. OK, yeah, OK, yeah. And uh yeah in terms of other things that may be of interest uh to say the those who are listening who may be consultants or for general usage is syncing across multiple calendars. So you know the the instance in which you know people may have inadvertently uh double booked or been double booked into multiple meetings. Um, I, I discovered this, uh, app called Calendar Bridge, and it’s, it’s quite useful. It is a paid app, so you do have to pay, um, I’m trying to think the subscription, I think it’s like $8 to $10 a month. Uh, but for what it saves in double booking, um, headaches, uh, it’s quite valuable. So if you’ve got your Apple Calendar or your Teams calendar and you’ve got Google Calendar. Uh, maybe you’ve got multiple calendars for multiple clients if, if you are a consultant. This will bridge them calendar bridge. We’ll sync them. Yeah. So you could have like 4 to 5 calendars and then the moment that someone, uh, 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, uh, simultaneously and so it Uh, 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 off or if something gets canceled then having to also subsequently clear out the calendars on the other side. Yeah, I’ve had a calendar disaster a couple of times. You think I would have learned after the first time, but I didn’t. Uh, it took like 3 times with a client, um, because they send, they I guess they send. They send uh windows. A team, maybe they send a team’s invitation or a team’s invite and, and I have, OK, so I accepted on their laptop, but then I forwarded it to my, my Tony Martignetti.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 uh something, something happened and I deleted one and then everybody got a, everybody got a calendar. 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 got the the deletion invitation so they were upset at me like 3 times and then the third time I realized I’ve stopped doing it. I feel like we’ve all been there at some point. It’s a rite of passage even, even because you don’t always get the delete and notify option. Sometimes you delete and, and it just has repercussions. Second order effects that I that I don’t know. I mean sometimes you get the delete and notify and I say no, you know, delete and don’t notify, but in this instance with that client I didn’t get the option and I was yelled at, uh, 3 times. They really should have a button that’s like the 3rd time I learned, we’re gonna notify everyone. That’s the real button. I don’t know. Help us, help, help those of us who are calendar challenged. Maybe I, maybe I only took me twice. I learned that the 3rd time. I think that’s what it was, so I only got yelled at twice, but. Uh, because in any case, calendar syncing, OK, uh, calendar bridge, excellent one. Thank you. Um, the other one I’ll mention is a loom and a vineyard. So I, I’ve mentioned this one before, but the, the use case I’ll mention is a little bit different. So, uh, loom or uh vineyard, uh. It’s often used for uh doing screen recordings or recording video messages. But if any of you ever have to deal with uh tech support, uh, 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’ve actually had tech support reps, uh, uh, 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 5 or 6 email exchanges. And so I, I recommend this to, to uh it’s loom.com. Uh you can get a nonprofit.com. OK. V I D Y A R Dard.com. Alright, and so you can do, uh, you can do videos from a laptop, desktop or a phone. Yeah, yeah, and they have free tiers for each, but Loom also has a nonprofit discount that’s available through the uh the Atlassian nonprofit program too. And also, uh, could be useful for gamers if they wanna take videos. Uh, it’s more for, um, like video, video messaging or say marketing or if, if you’re sending an email and wanna, uh, send, say, a short, um, kind of personalized message too. So if I was sending you an email and I want to attach like hey Tony and you give a visual to it as well. Personalized video. Oh, so it’s for shorter, shorter videos, like 1 minute or something, 11 minute and a half, something like that. OK, not, not 2 hour gaming sessions, streaming sessions. OK. OK. Um, why don’t you leave us with one more? Give us the best of the best of all the ones that you haven’t mentioned yet. Yeah, the, the one I’ll leave off with is, um, uh, something that is, uh, not software but, uh, it’s more physical and it’s, it’s called a Faraday pouch. Uh, and so this is one that I, I came across when I was actually doing research at a, a previous, um, uh, uh, organization, and it, it, it what I was looking into was, you know, how, uh, how to help students stay more focused, and one of the pieces of feedback was, you know, I don’t wanna 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, um, 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 um you can put your phone inside and the the pouch is shielded so that it blocks out all cell phone signals so that it um no Wi Fi can get through, no 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 Uh, yeah, so it’s, it’s a handy little physical tool, uh, 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, to your phone. So, uh, yeah, the, the one I’ll leave off with is more physically grounded in a Faraday pouch. OK, a Faraday pouch. Cool. Alright. I love these, Jason, we’ll see you next year. Maybe with Miko, maybe Miko Marquette Whitlock will join us again, but, uh, this is Jason Shim, Chief digital Officer at Canadian Center for Nonprofit Digital Resilience. Always a pleasure. Thank you very much, Jason. Thanks for having me. And thank you for being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2026 nonprofit Technology conference. It’s time for Tony’s take 2. 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. Um, it was still, it was very moving. Um, the, there was the bishop there, the The, the bishop of the The diocese of Omaha, Nebraska. And, you know, they’re, they’re all in their very ornate vestments. It was a long ceremony. It’s about 4-hour ordination ceremony. Uh, it was in Latin, which I don’t speak or understand, uh, but they give you a little guidebook, you can sort of follow along. There’s, there’s a lot you can’t hear, but it was just, uh, you know, it’s a lot of pomp and circumstance. Uh, it’s, it’s a very, it’s a, it’s a major event in a young man’s life to be. ordained a priest and, and devoting his life to God and to the parishioners that he’ll be servinging. So it’s, uh, 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, you know, you’re there to celebrate for the person, with the family. And he Spent 7 years in the seminary. Outside Lincoln, Nebraska. So the, the commitment is, um, it’s, it’s, it’s honorable. It’s, uh, 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, I was just very glad to be there, celebrate with the family. And witnessed something that I had never seen before, very likely not, won’t again. Something very. Significant, meaningful, deep. When you talk about his, uh, his commitment to the, to the priesthood. And that’s Tony’s take too. Kate, So my mom is from Nebraska. Is it true that it’s all like trees and mountains? I spent 5 minutes talking about a priestly ordination. You’re asking about the, the landscape of Nebraska. Uh, I don’t know. Uh, trees and mountains? No, it’s pretty flat. I mean, there are trees. I’m not, Nebraska has trees, I’m sure. I saw some. I saw some trees, yes. Uh, mountains, no, not in the part of Nebraska where I was. Lin, I was in Omaha and then also Lincoln. I had a, a meeting in Lincoln. And I visited the seminary, which is near Lincoln, Nebraska. That is, uh, southeastern Nebraska. No, I wouldn’t say mountainous there. I cannot speak to the, uh, remaining landscape and the terrain of, uh, the state of Nebraska. I only visited that little part around the Omaha-Lincoln area. Well, we’ve got fuckoo but loads more time. Here is internal newsletters, your staff will open. Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit radio coverage of 26 NTC, 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 NAT. Mia’s subject for her session is creating internal newsletters your staff will actually open. Mia, welcome to nonprofit Radio. Thanks so much, Tony. Great to be here pleasure to have you. Thank you. Everything’s fine. Take, take a deep breath. She’s gonna be doing well. Um, you’re gonna do well. Just give us a little overview of the topic. We have plenty of time to go into detail, but you know, what could we be doing better with our internal newsletters so, so that people actually would open them. Sure, um, so my session is talking about a project that I’ve worked on over the past 3 years in my organization, um, where I partnered with our communications team and our leadership to publish a weekly staff newsletter. Um, so I talked about some lessons learned and tips from our past 3 years of our experience, um, and I think some ways that we could be doing better communicating with staff, um, so that they actually wanna read our emails comes down to a few things, um, really having leadership buy-in that they sort of create, um. The buy-in, the engagement from the outset, um, that it really has to come, come from the top, um, that they create that expectation. Um, 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. OK, all right, and we’ll have a chance to go into that in detail. That’s excellent. Thank you very much for uh an insightful overview, um. You, you have some excellent results. You get like, well, I’ll let you say the headline. What, what kind of open rate did you, you were seeing over two years? Yeah, so it’s actually now since I submitted the session proposal, we’ve now just closed out at 3 years, um. And we’ve maintained an average of a 76% open rate over the past three years. And what had it been before this initiative? We didn’t have a staff newsletter before it was zero. It wasn’t even one for you to open. No, the opportunity didn’t exist. No, no, OK, uh, why? Why do you feel, uh, why did you feel a staff newsletter is important? If you didn’t, you didn’t have one in the past, why did, did it become important to start one? Yeah, I think we, we’re really seeing two main issues internally in terms of our communications, one being, um, that they’re information silos. We knew that there were, um, 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 um that were further away from those decision makers and didn’t have as much access to that information so um one goal with this newsletter was to ensure that everyone had the same access to that information to sort of um because information is power yes and um 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, uh, 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 gonna find out the key information that I need to know the most important things from our leadership. I’m gonna know what’s currently happening in the in the organization. I’m gonna find out about um 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. Uh, it, it sounds like it was very disjointed before, like you say, from Slack to Zoom to WhatsApp. Alright, alright, um. So some leadership buy-in, does that does that mean did you have to persuade your CEO of the value of creating an internal newsletter first? In this case, I think we’re actually pretty fortunate. It was actually a partnership between myself and our COO, um, so from day one we really had that leadership buy-in and from there the CEO was brought on board with it and um he really became the champion of this newsletter and 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, um, we really had that from early on. What’s the work of nominee? We are a global grassroots justice organization. Our mission is to. Who put the power of the law in the hands of people, um, we specifically focus on land and environmental justice, also, um, citizenship and the right to health. OK, and how many employees? Roughly 180 globally. this is a good time. I mean, 00, and global too, so distributed another reason for a centralized channel of communication right to 180 employees. OK, good, um. And uh in terms of inclusion, you said you said early on, you know, leadership buy-in sounds like that was not too difficult. If you have the COO on your side that that helps that helps a lot. It helps to have an ally, but if it’s the COO it helps even more and then the inclusion, talk, talk more about how did you, how did you get different voices involved in the newsletter. Um, I would say two things. First, um, so within our organization we have two formally recognized working languages, English and Portuguese. So in terms of accessibility and inclusion, the newsletter is is published in both languages. Um, so we wanted to make sure that first and foremost all of our staff have access to the newsletter. Um, and so we just wanna make sure that everyone is included, um, and so our staff in Mozambique who speak Portuguese, they can actually write like they, they can co-author issues of the newsletter in Portuguese and we will get it translated in English, um, for the English version of our newsletter as well, um, and then a lot of it, the role that I play is really like behind the scenes as the publisher. Um, 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, have kind of have my ear on the ground hearing about like 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 like, can you write for the Namati and that’s the name of our newsletter, um, and you know, do you think you can write an issue next month and you know, I’m, I’m happy to work with you on it and so I’m just like constantly sort of churning to to get people, yeah, to write with me. So why is it with you, you’re um deputy director, director of, so you’re global operations. Why is it with you instead of communications? Yeah, it’s interesting. So I, um, 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 a right hand to the COO. Function um before we had an executive like operations team we actually just this year um have formed an executive operations team so our internal communications may actually be shifting to that team our official sort of communications marketing team, um. Does all of our external, 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. OK, OK. Um, I think you make the point that the consistency is important. Um, you mentioned that even if it, if it’s just a cat, uh, a picture or something. Alright, so commitment to consistency, you know, share your thinking there. Why that’s important. 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, um, 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’ve never seen senior leadership communicate that frequently to the organization, you know, it was mainly on like a quarterly basis even if that so to go from like quarterly to weekly I was like really we’re gonna do this, but she was like, no, if I don’t have that discipline it’s not gonna happen, um, and she has really proven me wrong because we consistently send out an email every week, um, and a funny like side effect of that is she started communicating early on to staff that um. Either like if we have 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 um in my slides, uh, my presentation is on Friday I share an example of. One of our cat week emails that we send out and it’s just become a running joke over the last few years with staff that sometimes it’s just a cat week and that’s OK 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. OK, and you feel the the consistency is important to this 76% open rate. Yeah, and, and I think it’s actually people look forward to it by now. They look forward to it. If you missed a week, you’re gonna get a bunch of emails like where, where the heck is our where where’s our nomine the nominee? Yeah, they, we have heard from staff because they, they receive it Friday morning that they. Actually look forward to sitting down at their desk, you know, with their cup of coffee, tea, and reading the newsletter. Like 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. Um, 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 like counter to a part of our organizational culture where we tend to be a little bit of perfectionist. We really wanna get things 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 gonna be OK. It’s interesting how, you know, it’s less pressure when it’s weekly versus quarterly. It’s it’s, it’s, it’s sort of counterintuitive. You would think that quarterly is going to be much less, you know, uh, much less burdensome because it’s only 4 times a year, but you’re doing it like 50 times a year and you feel less of a burden. Interesting, yeah, um, 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, you’ve redefined. Perfection interesting. All right, what you’re saying is even sort of counter cultural to the organization which tends to be very. Detail oriented, cool. So what else are you gonna share with uh with folks on Friday? What what we talked about yet that you wanna you wanna let listeners in on? Yeah, I’m gonna share, um, a couple of tips, um, 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. We maintain this is not an email we use um within HubSpot’s CRM they have a marketing functionality where you can send out marketing emails so we do use their marketing um email tool which is typically meant for like external emails but we use it for our own internal yeah yeah it’s it’s yeah it is email yeah um. So I share some like prac 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 um I also talk about um another tip just in terms of how we think about writing to our staff um. One of our guiding principles is really to keep our emails short, lighthearted, and visual. So that’s something I will, I will talk about as well. OK, we’ll share some of the, share some of these other practical tips like templating is a good idea. What else, um, copy paste, duplicate from the, the week before and. What else? Yeah, um, of your tips I use consistent, uh, section headers, and these are section headers I designed in Canva. I’m not a graphic designer. They’re super simple, um, and I keep them in the email from week to week, and I just clone that email so they stay in there. Um, it both like makes my life easier, but it also um 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 which is essentially like current events and that’s. Information that staff send to me to share about what’s happening in their teams in different countries, um, so if someone is just skimming that week’s email and they just wanna know like what’s happened over the past week they know under the happening section that’s where they’ll find it. Um, I also have in Canva, I worked with our communications team early on. They helped me, um, 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. Canva is a really good tool. You don’t have to be a designer. No, no, but you feel like one and your product looks like one, yeah, um, how about other ideas, uh, other things you, you’re gonna talk about that that we haven’t talked about here yet? Yeah, I would say the other one that I uh mentioned was um how we communicate is keeping it short, lighthearted, and, and visual for our staff. OK, OK, alright, so you can get people to read your internal newsletter. I mean you went from 0 to 0 to 76%, no newsletter to 76%, so, all right. Anything you want to leave folks with, uh, a little encouragement for the end? Yeah, I would say if you are considering um either starting your own internal staff newsletter or any other type of internal communication strategy, um, I would say that it’s worthwhile, you know, the feedback we’ve received over the past 1 year or past 3 years has been overwhelmingly positive. Um, I think it’s definitely manageable, you know, the. What I’m talking about here, you know, the weekly cadence, it may not be, may not fit within the context of every organization, especially, you know, much smaller nonprofits than ours, um, so, you know, I think, think about what makes sense in your context, maybe it’s biweekly, maybe it’s monthly. Um, 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, um, something like that, you know, I think there’s different creative ways to think about your internal communications. Perfect. All right, thank you. Mia Velasco, deputy director of global operations at NAT, thank you very much for sharing, Mia. Yeah, thank you, Tony. All right, pleasure, and thank you for being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2026 nonprofit Technology conference. Next week, your successful Giving Day, and biases in prospect identification. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you, find it at Tony Martignetti.com. I also beseech you to ask your mom about the landscape and terrain of Nebraska. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martignetti. 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
