Nonprofits Talk A.I. and Workforce Woes at NTEN Conference

At one end of the conference hall, before a colorful backdrop of Portland’s famous donuts and roses, nonprofit leaders and activists excoriated the excesses of big tech. On the other end, a bevy of vendors, including Microsoft and Blackbaud, hawked their latest in A.I. and must-have software.

At last week’s annual Nonprofit Technology Conference, organized by NTEN, more than 1,600 nonprofit executives, fundraisers, digital strategists, and tech wranglers — and scores of consultants and tech companies — descended upon the Oregon Convention Center for three days of technology demonstrations, workshops, and panels. The mood there was playful, but tinged with politics and global discord. Passionate, but burnt out and understaffed. Abundantly curious, but also skeptical — and sometimes outright hostile — to A.I. and other powerful new tools.

Indeed, despite the sponsors in the room (like Microsoft, Blackbaud, Okta, and Care2), speakers did not mince words on the main stage.

“Big Tech has blood on its hands,” said Anasuya Sengupta, activist and co-director of Whose Knowledge?, a campaign to amplify non-Western and white voices on the internet. During her opening keynote, she pointed toward tech’s role in the Israel-Hamas War — which she called the “first A.I. war” — and the humanitarian catastrophe in eastern Congo, which is fueled largely by illegal mining for the minerals used to power smartphones.

Still, many also emphasized the role of technology in the right hands as a vital instrument for building a better world — or, at the very least, a better nonprofit.

“Incredible joy and incredible grief can coexist in you in this community,” said Amy Sample Ward, CEO of NTEN, a network of nonprofit professionals, during their opening remarks. If anxiety over Big Tech and a fear of being left behind by the A.I. revolution loomed large for many attendees, so too did a sense of wonder over how new technology could expand the capacity of their organizations and nourish missions.

“Solidarity is practicing possibilities upon imperfection,” said Sabrina Hersi Issa, a human rights technologist, investor, and CEO of Be Bold Media, a strategy and innovation agency. In the case of technology, she said during her keynote, that may mean convincing leaders to focus on values like equity when building new systems rather than on traditional metrics like growth or scale.

“They have the gas and the tank to burn,” she said.” “Burn it on what matters.”

A.I. for Good?

Artificial intelligence was the undisputed star — and boogeyman — of dozens of sessions, sales pitches, and happy hours. Just over a year since the launch of ChatGPT, nonprofits were flush with success stories and cautionary tales around A.I., whose best practices are still being written.

“It’s sort of the Wild West right now” when it comes to A.I. norms and regulations, said Omar Peña, Salesforce and systems manager at Resource Media, a nonprofit communications firm. He said that a chance to confer with other nonprofit tech leaders about how to proceed “is just what I needed right now.”

The NTC conference featured panels on A.I. for communications, fundraising, electoral organizing, social media, data analysis, knowledge management, human resources, and chatbots. There were also sessions on A.I. ethics and a demo by Microsoft on the use of its A.I. software for a new case-management system.

“This is basically the Nonprofit A.I. Conference,” said one attendee, an A.I. skeptic who saw the NTC as an opportunity to cautiously learn more after a year spent avoiding the technology: “That ends today,” she said, resolved to try her hand at experimentation.

Courtesy of NTEN

She has the right idea, according to several speakers, who emphasized that nonprofits ought to claim a seat at the table as A.I. norms are established.

There’s a sense that “technology is a wave crashing on us,” but that’s a fallacy, said Toshi Anders Hoo, director of the Emerging Media Lab at the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit focused on future tools. During a session on A.I. ethics, he pressed nonprofits to follow their instincts on A.I. gone awry, even if they feel intimidated by the technicalities.

After all, he said: “Even the people making generative A.I. don’t understand how it works.”

Workforce Woes

When not examining the benefits and pitfalls of cutting-edge technology, many attendees turned their attention to something more mundane: the nonprofit workforce, which has buckled under rampant understaffing, executive transitions, and burn-out in recent years.

A session on the four-day nonprofit workweek brought a rapt audience that burst into applause when Karim Bouris, principal at the consulting firm Mixte Communications, said his employees are required to unplug from Slack when they’re off the clock: “We make sure that everyone turns those notifications off.”

“It’s been 80 years since the workweek’s changed,” Bouris said, as audience members nodded their heads and snapped their fingers. Several attendees hoped to make the shift as a way to retain and attract new employees, though others questioned whether grant makers would push back against such experiments.

Later in the afternoon, attendees filed more quietly into another panel titled “The Essential Craft of Leaving Your Job.”

“Departing can feel really personal for you and the people you are leaving,” said Laura Guzmán, director of communications at DevGlobal, who recently left a position she’d held for six years and encouraged attendees to de-stigmatize succession planning and engage in careful documentation of their workflow.

It’s part of a shift in expectations that says, “I’m here for a particular time and a particular purpose,” said Karolle Rabarison, director of communications at the Online News Association, not necessarily forever.