Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics

22:19

Nonprofit AI: AI for Humanity Report

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/10/06

Carolyn Woodard covers new state AI rules and Fast Forward's 2026 AI for Humanity Report this week: what the most AI-forward nonprofits worldwide are learning and what the rest of us can borrow. States are setting AI rules while federal policy stalls. California Governor Newsom signed workplace AI laws on September 30: employers cannot rely on AI alone to fire or discipline a worker, cannot use tools that predict a worker's emotional state, must tell workers when AI is behind a layoff, and c...

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33:07

Growing IT Management Capacity at Nonprofits with...

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/10/02

In Part 2 of the Growing IT Management Capacity at Nonprofits webinar, Carolyn Woodard and Johan Hammerstrom, CEO of Community IT, get practical about what well-managed IT looks like, and why the capacity to manage IT matters more than any tool, device, or license you can buy. Johan walks through a simple framework: five capacities every nonprofit's IT should have, and ten security essentials that non-technical leaders can use as a checklist. Carolyn then shares why she wrot...

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32:20

Nonprofit AI: Policy Creation Tips

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/09/29

Carolyn Woodard covers a question many nonprofits keep putting off: how do you create an AI policy when you are short on time? Whether your organization is embracing AI or has decided not to use it at all, you need a written policy, because AI is already arriving inside the tools you pay for. First, two news items with nonprofit connections. The Gates Foundation has committed $1 billion to AI for health workers, farmers, and teachers, including work to make AI tools function in languages that...

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25:57

Growing IT Management Capacity at Nonprofits with...

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/09/25

In the first part of this two-part conversation, Carolyn Woodard and Johan Hammerstrom, CEO of Community IT, take on a question behind a lot of nonprofit IT frustration: who at your organization actually owns IT? Not who fixes it, but who plans, budgets, and makes the case for it. Drawn from a Community IT webinar, this episode looks at what well-managed IT requires and why building management capacity does more for nonprofit resilience than buying more tools, devices, and licenses. Jo...

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29:39

Nonprofit AI: Carve Out Time To Experiment with AI

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/09/22

Carolyn Woodard digs into something that hits closer to home this week: a conversation with a friend who knows that parts of her job could be automated, but can't find the hour to actually build it. That tension of fixing the plane while flying it turns out to be a well-documented, structural problem across the nonprofit sector, not a personal failing, and Carolyn spends the episode working through what the research says and what to actually do about it if you need to find the time to l...

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31:54

Growing IT Management Capacity at Nonprofits with...

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/09/18

Carolyn Woodard talks with Jean Westrick, President and CEO of the Technology Association of Grantmakers (TAG), about why nonprofit technology management should be treated as organizational capacity. Jean argues that digital resilience is becoming as essential as financial resilience. The conversation moves through why nonprofit IT funding is so hard to secure, what it looks like when funders get this right, and how technology providers and MSPs can be stronger partners. Jean and Caroly...

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31:16

Nonprofit AI: Calls for Regulation

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/09/15

This week, host Carolyn Woodard tackles the AI story that made it onto TV and radio news this weekend: an essay from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for a deliberate slowdown in frontier AI development, followed within about 24 hours by agreement from OpenAI's Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind. If the headlines had you feeling like you should be very afraid, Carolyn walks through what's actually happening, why the timing is worth a second look, and why nonprofits have more a...

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28:03

Doing IT Assessments at Nonprofits Pt 2

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/09/11

In part 2 of this two-part episode, Carolyn continues her conversation with CEO Johan Hammerstrom and Senior IT Consultant Nuradeen Aboki: what you actually get at the end of an IT assessment, and what to do with it. This episode covers: Assessment deliverables — the comprehensive report, prioritized recommendations, strategic plan, and IT roadmap, and how they connect findings to what leadership actually cares aboutTwo key principles behind a successful assessmentWhat a healthy nonprofit IT ...

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41:57

Nonprofit AI: LLM 101 and Best Practices Roundup

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/09/08

Carolyn Woodard covers two things this week: a quick and basic explainer of how large language models actually work under the hood, and a roundup of the best practices for using AI at nonprofits that Community IT has built up over nine months of this podcast and 3 years of our monthly webinars. First, the basics. An LLM is not a database and it is not doing a Google search. It is predicting the next most likely word, or token, based on patterns learned from the huge amount of text it was trai...

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31:36

Doing an IT Assessment at Nonprofits Pt 1

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/09/04

Is it time for an IT assessment at your nonprofit? Maybe you need an assessment for a grant requirement, a change in leadership, or a switch to a new IT provider. In part 1 of this two-part episode, Carolyn talks with CEO Johan Hammerstrom and Senior IT Consultant Nuradeen Aboki about what a comprehensive, nonprofit-focused IT assessment actually involves, and how to tell a genuine, agnostic assessment from one that's really just a sales pitch. This episode covers: What Community IT mea...

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18:40

Nonprofit AI: Funding Questions and Back to School

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/09/01

Carolyn Woodard covers three threads in nonprofit AI news this week: new funding questions, a look at how AI is showing up for kids heading back to school, and a new advocacy group taking on AI regulation. Coefficient Giving, formerly Open Philanthropy, just announced it's raising its global health commitment from 175 million to 1 billion, betting that AI wealth will flow into philanthropy as OpenAI and Anthropic move toward going public. Their first grant is funding bed nets in the Dem...

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26:28

AI in Practice for Nonprofits with Carolyn Woodard...

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/08/28

In Part 2 of the AI in Practice for Nonprofits webinar, Carolyn Woodard and Erik Solce, IT Business Manager at Community IT, dig into the part of the project that matters most once an AI workflow is up and running: how do you know it is actually working, and how do you keep yourself in the loop instead of just trusting the output? Carolyn walks through her verify but trust framework using a real example from her own marketing data lake. An AI-generated report flagged that YouTube Shorts were ...

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30:21

Nonprofit AI: Impala MCP and Bridgespan NTEN Report

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/08/25

Carolyn Woodard covers two pieces of nonprofit AI news worth your time this week: a new AI connector from Impala, and a report from Bridgespan and NTEN that gives nonprofits a practical way to decide where AI actually fits their work. Impala just launched an MCP connector that links its philanthropic database to the AI assistant you already use, including Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot, so you are not locked into a single vendor. The database covers more than 2 million nonprofits, 250,0...

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33:42

AI in Practice for Nonprofits with Carolyn Woodard...

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/08/21

Carolyn Woodard explores how a nonprofit marketer with no IT background can run a real AI project with Erik Solce, IT Business Manager at Community IT. For years Carolyn had marketing data scattered across nine separate channel dashboards and no way to see any of it in context. Every attempt to build a unified report stalled out. In part one of this case study, she and Erik walk through the three part structure that finally made the project doable, and why it took weeks instead of the m...

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30:47

Nonprofit AI: Where do you get your information about...

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/08/18

Carolyn Woodard covers a question worth asking before your nonprofit makes any decision about AI: where is your information about AI coming from, and what does that source need from you? As a consumer you have had roughly a billion dollars of advertising aimed at getting you to adopt AI. That does not make what you are hearing wrong, but it does mean the messengers deserve a look. This episode maps the sources you are hearing from, including AI companies, funders and foundations, vendors and ...

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30:27

Nonprofit IT Migration from Google Workspace to...

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/08/14

Carolyn Woodard talks with Steve Longenecker, Director of IT Consulting at Community IT, about a client's decision to migrate from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365, and what a real nonprofit migration project looks like once years of technical debt have piled up. The client's story is a familiar one: a lean two-person IT team supporting 300 information workers, years of default settings, and undocumented shared folders that quietly became a governance risk. Steve walks through why this organ...

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31:52

Nonprofit AI: Jet Fuel Trade-offs, Agentic AI, Work...

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/08/11

Carolyn Woodard covers four AI stories with real implications for nonprofits this week, starting with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's sprawling new manifesto on open source AI and the release of Muse Glimmer, a lightweight model anyone can run locally. Carolyn touches on why this matters for budget conscious nonprofits weighing vendor values, and why open source still requires more technical capacity than most organizations currently have on hand. From there, Carolyn digs into a story about Alaska...

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28:15

AI Bias and Data Equity with Heather Krause

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/08/07

Carolyn Woodard explores why statistical analysis and evaluations are never neutral with Heather Krause, mathematical statistician and founder of We All Count. Heather built her career doing statistical consulting, evaluation, and causal analysis in the global south, work that eventually convinced her that the widespread belief in value neutral quantitative analysis is a myth. In this conversation, she and Carolyn dig into why every statistical task, even something as simple as calculating an...

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30:46

Nonprofit AI: Caution is Prescient

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/08/04

Carolyn Woodard covers why deliberate, thoughtful implementation is actually your nonprofit's competitive advantage, not a liability. The commercial AI sector is in a "move fast and break things" sprint. Tech companies are pouring billions into AI, racing to scale, pushing toward the edge of the market. Today's AI race feels similar. Nonprofits tend to think differently. You ask hard questions. You think about theory of change, root causes, impacts on your communities, unforeseen consequences...

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36:06

Nonprofit AI Case Study in Food Rescue with Joe Robbins

Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics ·

2026/07/31

Carolyn Woodard talks with Joe Robbins, Chief Product Officer at Food Rescue US, about a real-world AI project built from the ground up: a predictive model that flags volunteer pickups at high risk of a last-minute cancellation. Food Rescue US connects volunteers with food donors and receiving agencies through an app similar to a delivery service, coordinating about 150,000 pickups a year across 27 states. When a volunteer cancels within 24 hours of a pickup, site coordinators scramble to cov...

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