Nonprofits and social sector organizations are adapting to a new era of digital transformation and AI. ​You're not stuck in the past and you're not allergic to change or transformation; you and your organization haven't been given--nor the ability to create--the tools, resources, environmental scans, the advocacy or backing, or the organizational or structural support or guidance. ​Or, of course, sufficient financial resources, to move at the pace of other sectors. ​

We always have a lot on the line. We always face scrutiny. We always grapple with insecure long term funding. We're used to fickle support from the public and media. The message? 'We can't afford to fail'. Because everything counts and mistakes are remembered. All the while corporate brands--whom we often need--eat more of our market share with 'socially good consumerism' branding.  

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In the face of all of this, my take is that this makes our sector stronger, not weaker. Nimble and fierce, not silenced. We don't have the luxuries, the bloating, the bailouts, though some days we wish we did. What do we have? The knowledge that our missions, our purposes, are more critical than ever before. The receipts that our work changes lives. And our skills, honed over decades of often-declining funding and public trust, such as flexibility, doing much more with way less, figuring out what works without massive budgets. ​

So. We're grappling with a paradigm shift. Digital transformation and AI are no longer optional; they’re essential. Why, then, does moving forward seem so hard? Why does it feel like moving forward is riskier than not moving at all? Nonprofits are caught in a constant reality of competing incentive structures. With many interested parties and key players, with so much on the line, we don't want to get it wrong. We pause. Analyze. Circulate documents. Hesitate to pilot projects. Stall on hiring. We freeze.​ Not because of fear alone, but because it always seems like not doing something will cost less than doing something and risking failure.

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What if we intentionally, radically, re-define 'failure'? What if we adopt a growth mindset, understand 'failure' to mean trying something, learning what didn't work, evaluating what we've learned, and applying it to the next project? What if we re-calculated risk and success, knowing that success always comes at a cost, just as 'failure' does?Here's why this is imperative: our missions and programs are as dynamic as they are important. As people, services and deliverability evolves, so too does our process have to evolve. We don't know, with 100% certainty, that providing a chatbot (for example) will help us achieve our goals, but we know that users and supporters expect us to communicate the ways they communicate. That they expect us to evolve services and deliverability. That's relevance.

'Failure' isn't testing a chatbot, discovering people don't use it, and determining the test was a net loss. Failure is not trying, not testing, and not evolving to meet the needs of constituents, users and supporters. Failure is allowing a growing gap between services and communications. Success, then, looks like trying, testing, assessing, taking learnings and applying to the next test, with the same goal in mind, until the goal is reached. Success is the understanding that there aren't absolutes and perfection is a myth. Do all donors or board members get this? No. But staying aligned to our missions demands that while our North Star mission remains the same, the means by which we get there will necessarily change and evolve, as society does.

Moving forward doesn't mean leaving your values behind. Nor does it mean a net loss. Moving forward means ensuring continued relevance. What's your mission worth if you lose relevance? Figuring out the what, how and when of digital and AI can be confusing and messy. But the why is clear. Relevance and needs served -- those are the why. I'm I’m here to help you navigate the messy middle with clarity, courage, and compassion.