Welcome to our session today about focusing on what matters in the Advancement Office at an independent school. So my name is Amy Smucker and I'm the Assistant Head of School at Berwick Academy, which is a pre-k through 12 school in Southern Maine. I am not an expert in artificial intelligence and I'm just beginning to scratch the surface on how it can help me streamline the work in my office and make my team more effective. I am, however, an expert in working in small shops and in under-resourced environments that have the same operational and aspirational goals as schools of any size, and so prioritization and effective work is incredibly important to me. Thanks, Amy. My name is Simon Tumanksy. I'm the founder and CEO of ChalkBooks ChalkBooks is the only task and communication-centric fundraising platforms built purposely for schools. I am, in fact, a communication and AI expert. Before starting Chalkbooks, I worked 80 years solving some of the hardest communication challenges for millions of knowledge workers at Ring Central and BlueJeans, and I'm bringing those skills to this presentation to hopefully share some interesting insights, but also to building Chalkbooks into the best platform for schools. Awesome. So, I don't want to read this whole presentation, but I'm going to read this quote to you as we start thinking about AI and technology. If we do it right, we might be able to evolve a form of work that taps into our uniquely human capabilities and restores our humanity. The ultimate paradox is that this technology may become a powerful catalyst that we need to reclaim our humanity. We are really thinking about today how to best do the work of building relationships and bringing philanthropy to your school, and how do we use AI or other technologies to help us to actually do that work, because the only people that can actually build relationships are us as advancement professionals. Thanks, Amy. And, you know, the world has changed, and even in the last three years following COVID, the technology adoption has accelerated across all of the industries. Even three years ago, we didn't know what such things as open AI was, and all of this change is actually really pretty scary. But to reach new levels of productivity, it requires us to step out of our comfort zone, which we were operating in for many years, and change how we do things. Now, you might be asking, why is change so difficult? Well, if you think about the human timeline, our modern ancestors have been around for over 200,000 years. And only, you know, less than 10,000 of it was kind of an organized populations and cities and, you know, less than two and a half thousand years and kind of a modern technological revolution. But just in the last maybe 15 to 20 years, the technological progress has expanded and accelerated so much that I think we as humans are having a hard time keeping up with it. And generally, change is weird, scary, and uncomfortable. I think those are all the words that folks use when describing change, even if they cognitively know that the change leads to a positive, better future. So to accept change and to view change positively, most importantly, we have to see the cost of doing nothing, the cost of our inaction or the implication of doing nothing as greater than our current status quo. And so we'll talk about a few ways that we can go from how we do things to being more productive. And let me go ahead and go to the next slide. Awesome. So I'm just going to walk you through the roadmap for today. And we're really just going to scratch the surface on the ways in which you can start thinking about utilizing different ways to do the work in your office. But we're going to talk a little bit about communication and relationship building and give a couple of examples. We're going to talk about stewardship and then managing trustees in a campaign. So relationship building, obviously, is a priority of all of ours. And it is really what is the driver of philanthropy at your school. It sets us apart because it fuels our mission and vision beyond what the market will bear. So beyond what the tuition your families can pay. Philanthropy sort of doesn't just fill in that gap, it makes your school unique and special. But successful and sustainable philanthropy is not all about the money. Philanthropy is not all about the money. Sustainable philanthropy is not possible without strong relationships that bring all these people, alumni, parents, friends, closer to your mission. And technology can allow us to move forward with greater focus and clarity that impacts our schools. So I'm going to talk about common roadblocks in the next slide. So this slide is like overwhelming. And I think I'm having Simon do like a ton of different click throughs to get all these on here. But these are all different jobs that require really simple expertise in offices. So if we had a huge advancement office, we would have someone who just focuses on campaign management, or maybe just focuses on plans giving. But for most of us, that's just not what our schools look like. We have to take care of all of these things with a really small amount of people. And so how do we come over the roadblocks that a lot of these different aspects of advancement create for us to be able to build relationships. So the common roadblocks that I see are planning events that we've been doing forever, because that's just what our school does. Writing articles for a magazine that we send, because that's just how we've always done it. Crafting appeal letters, thanking donors, setting up meetings, how much time do we spend crafting emails to set up a meeting. So if we're not careful, we let this doing work, keep us for meaningful conversations. And so what we're going to talk about a little bit is sort of how do you go through the process of evaluating the success and ROI of all these things that you're doing, and making data driven decisions so that the time that you're spending has the greatest amount of impact. So I always love to show this slide. This is called Eat the Frog. This guy named Brian Tracy wrote a book, and it was actually about procrastination. And I am certainly not a procrastinator. But I was finding that I was spending a lot of time planning events, looking at spreadsheets, which is, of course, all very important work. And I was leaving my donor contacts until the end of the day, or maybe I wouldn't get to it. And I wasn't able to have all those meaningful conversations. And so I have bought these plastic frogs for everyone in my office, and I have five on my desk. And every day, my goal is to have five meaningful outreaches to people, which means that I have to put some of the doing work that I've been doing on to other technologies, so that I can actually have these meaningful conversations. Thanks, Amy. I love the Eat the Frog idea. I remember seeing your presentation at CASE and coming to claim one of my frogs, which my kids later played with. So that's an awesome, it's an awesome thing and serves multiple purposes. All right. So as we had talked about becoming more efficient and more productive, and thinking about how can we offload some of them, let's call it the doing work versus the relationship building work, the kind of the busy work. How can we leverage AI for some of that work today. And as you probably all know, or maybe some of you know, there is a tool that's called OpenAI or chatGPT. That chatGPT tool is available for everyone for free. And it can do things like perform writing tasks, be a mentor, be a coach, give you ideas for your upcoming appeal, help you create it, help you write it, it can do a lot of things. And obviously, as we talked about, the change is hard and getting into a habit of using it when you're thinking about maybe having a difficult conversation with a donor, or let's say you learn that a donor had someone pass away in their family, and you're having to write a letter expressing your condolences. Before modern technology that we have available to us today, the way it would look like is probably you'd be going to Google, you'd probably be looking for some samples, or maybe you would be going on to one of the forums and asking for folks to give you a sample, maybe you're lucky enough in the school already has a sample for this case, then you'll be thinking about how to customize it and personalize it. And then you probably you might be having a writer's block. So 40 to 50 minutes later, like, okay, now I have this letter written, instead of having conversations with donors, I've just spent almost an hour on this writing task. And then you send a response, you're like, okay, great, I just got it done. But imagine if you could get this work done instead of 40 to 50 minutes, in just a few minutes. And again, you could do a chat GPT. But let me show you one example where you could do it with, and I'm going to have to pause my screen sharing for a second, where you could do this with a tool that's, you know, built in right into your workflow. And, Amy, let me see, let me know if you're sharing the screen, or see the screen sharing. Not seeing it yet. All right, let me do this really quick. Okay, I think you'll see it now. Excellent. Alright, so let's just imagine a case where, you know, let's say, let's say we, you know, a donor had, you know, unfortunately, someone has passed away in a family of a donor. So we're going to ask this chat, chat AI to help us write this email. And expressing condolences. Yeah, condolences. For death in the family. And let's see, and this basically what will happen is the AI will give us a first draft, and will allow us to then take this draft and begin personalizing this communication for our needs. And this AI will know something about our school, and will include pertinent details about our school in the letter. And instead of all of this work, trying to figure out how to write this letter, this AI powered assistant allows us to write it in simply minutes. But also, if we want to send it to someone directly from, from that workflow, we empower the school to do that and be able to send this email out easily. And then we can either use the title that this AI has given us or write our own. Right. So that was a quick demo. Let me go back to sharing my screen. So give me just one second to get back to the presentation. But the point, again, the point that I want to make is a lot of a lot of change in our habits have to happen to allow us to adapt to this new way of doing things. And to be able to be comfortable with it. So I encourage everyone to think about every time they have a task, like a writing task to do is to go to open AI, and just play with it to get more comfortable, because it is like it's basically like searching Google, except now we're using AI to help us get to the next level of value. And the next thing I wanted to cover is stewardship. So as Amy had mentioned, one of the most, let's say painful things about, about just tasks and schools in general is having to manage the whole process of thanking donors, especially in crunch time, when a lot of donations are coming in, it's really challenging and time consuming to have to manage this process. And what we have today is basically spreadsheets, essentially, or a sauna or some combination of spreadsheets and task management tools. And what we basically have done is we realize this is an area where school teams, small school advancement teams are spending a lot of time in, and we have automated and enabled a workflow that allows the distribution of these tasks to be done automatically, saving time, basically, like it's going to be a job of someone to manage the spreadsheet, we've essentially removed that job, remove the need to do this. Now the team can spend time on more important communication tasks, like someone in Amy's team could be instead of managing the spreadsheet of people that need to be thanked. This person could be helping Amy schedule meetings with important donors. Or calling and thanking a donor personally themselves. That's even better. Yeah, stewardship is so important. So I want to give you an example of how we sort of rethought stewardship in our office, through the process of really thinking about like, what's the return on investment? What data do we need to make decisions? And so I'm going to talk a little bit about the annual report. So many of us still have been doing annual reports. We've been doing them forever in our offices. And for us, it was really challenging every year to do the annual report from the process of pulling everything, making sure everything was correct, everyone's name was correct, designing it, getting it to the printer. And then once we moved from just doing it online, sort of getting it into a design that looked good online, and then getting it out to people, and then we would wonder, have people have been read our annual report? And is this good stewardship? So we looked at our data from, in this case, FY 18, the open rate of our online, what we call the philanthropy report, but our annual report. So opening the email was 32%. And then only 10% of people clicked through to actually look at the report. So we decided, we did a little bit of research and certainly found that higher ed is doing less and less annual reporting in the same way that we've been doing it. And we decided that we would try something more personal. And so we've been doing personalized messages to every single donor from our head of school takes them about a half an hour each week. And this was our FY 22 stats. So personal video, meaning he would thank you by your name for your gift, and tell you how happy he was to have received it and what an impact it has. 87% of people opened that email, 64% clicked through to see his video, and 62% of donors watched the entire video all the way through. And these are some of the examples of feedback that we received from people. So really astounding how many people have emailed you to thank you for sending your annual report and to tell you how impactful that report was on them. These people are telling us that they really appreciate the video, and they wish that they could do more. And so the hope is certainly that those donors will come back again. They'll be in your retention numbers and that they might stretch themselves even more the following year. Awesome. Yeah, great use of technology. I mean, really impressive. And, you know, the one kind of last area we're going to cover today, which I'm sure many advancement leaders at independent schools think about, is sort of this interesting, let's call it a web of relationships that the advancement team is having to manage, and the complexity of those relationships. So as an example, trustees serve both a governing duty, but also they are in fact the highest, you know, typically on average, schools raise the most money from the trustees of the school. So they're both the biggest donors, but they also are, you know, they have kind of governing responsibilities as they sit on the board. And they have to be managed from the advancement perspective, it's important to know when they're coming up for term, as the advancement teams are planning their campaigns, and fundraising outreach. And it's important to have that data at the fingertips. But beyond that, engaging trustees has been a major challenge, because they are often like very busy people. And to get them to do things, it's quite hard and to, but to get them to do things so that they feel good about the work that they're doing is even harder, because they both have to be, you know, cultivated, but also they have to be managed as volunteers and trustees. So one of the ways we've been thinking about how can we make it easier for advancement teams to engage trustees, and that is how can we make it easy, as easy as possible for them to do their tasks. And so, you know, before the way it looked like is usually there's a person managing like a spreadsheet of when the trustees are going to be coming up for term, or if there's no spreadsheet, then it's possibly just written somewhere on paper. But it's usually like that process is managed fairly manually. And so we were thinking about how do we digitize that process and give proactive notifications when an important trustees coming up for term, this is before the campaign has begun. And once the campaign has begun, what we're seeing is again, trustees are being asked to do communication tasks. Sometimes that's not tracked, or maybe tracked in spreadsheets. Again, someone's job is to track that communication, make sure it gets updated in the CRM database. And again, taking time away from valuable outreach and relationship building work. So the way to change that is digitize the communication and task tracking, allow AI to pre write the communication that will be going to trustees and make it as easy as clicking one button for the trustees to go and send a communication request to someone that they know who is a major gift prospect to help the school move the mission of the school forward. All right, well, I can tell you my trustee stuff is definitely in a big spreadsheet, Simon. So good to know, you're on to something. So thank you so much. I hope that this session sort of helps you start to think about the different things that you're doing in your office and ways that you can think about doing them differently, to have the greatest impact. But please reach out to either of us. We're happy to chat. We love chatting about prioritization, and how to make all of our jobs more impactful over time. Yeah, same here. Reach out anytime happy to land a listening ear or just share the experiences that I'm seeing across, you know, hundreds of schools that I speak with, as well as my experience building communication products, please reach out anytime.

AI

technology

streamline

Advancement Office

engaging trustees

relationship-building