Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics

In Part 2 of the Nonprofit Cybersecurity Playbook, Updated for AI webinar, Carolyn Woodard and Matthew Eshleman, CTO of Community IT, walk through the checklist at the heart of the new Start Here: Nonprofit Cybersecurity Basics download. 

Part 1 made the case that AI changes the risks but not the basics. Part 2 gets specific about what those basics are, starting with one that is not technical at all: someone at your organization has to own cybersecurity, because you cannot outsource your risk.

Matt also answers listener questions on choosing a password manager and keeping your emails out o...

Carolyn Woodard covers three questions running through this week’s AI news: who owns AI, who shapes its values, and who answers for it. 

Anthropic filed for its IPO the same day it expanded its nonprofit programs, and Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to about a quarter of its workforce. For nonprofits that depend on these tools, both raise practical questions about pricing, support, and lock-in.

On ownership, Carolyn looks at the new Claude for Nonprofits plugin, a planned Taproot Foundation partnership for shorter pro bono projects, and the critique that IPO-day nonprofit news doubles as goo...

In the first part of this two-part conversation, Carolyn Woodard and Matthew Eshleman, CTO of Community IT, take on a question many nonprofits are asking: does AI change what it takes to stay secure? 

This episode comes from the Community IT webinar celebrating the re-release of our Cybersecurity Readiness for Nonprofits Playbook, updated for AI. It looks at how the threat landscape has shifted and why the fundamentals still matter most. Whether or not your organization uses AI, the scammers are, and your staff need to be ready.

Matt walks through three ways AI is c...

Carolyn Woodard covers what the newest wave of AI money could mean for nonprofits, starting with Anthropic's new Public Benefit Fund. Pending stockholder approval, Anthropic will commit 5% of its shares to a fund that grows with the company's value. It is a wholly owned LLC rather than a 501(c)(3), which means flexibility for Anthropic but no 990s, no payout requirement, and no public grant process. With co-founder pledges and an employee giving match, roughly 20% of the company is committed to the public good.

Carolyn puts that money in context: foundation giving cannot replace lost federal funding, and...

Carolyn Woodard explores the operations essentials of nonprofit IT with Johan Hammerstrom, CEO of Community IT. 

If you are new to managing technology at your nonprofit, or you oversee an IT vendor without a technical background, it can be hard to know where to start. Before any conversation about transformation or AI, there are basic requirements your organization needs in place just to run, and none of them require technology expertise.

Johan walks through ten essentials that keep IT meeting the business needs of your organization, from making sure every staff member has a working d...

Carolyn Woodard covers a question on many nonprofit minds right now: is AI coming for our jobs? Headlines are full of tech layoffs, and recent graduates are finding entry-level work harder to land. 

For nonprofits the picture is more complicated, both for workforce development organizations training people for jobs that are changing and for the rest of the sector, where funding cuts seem more responsible for reshaping who gets hired than AI.

Carolyn starts with recent layoffs at HubSpot, Salesforce, and Microsoft. These are three companies telling three different stories about AI's role, and their r...

Carolyn Woodard explores the ethics of online fundraising platforms with Sarah Saadian, Senior Vice President of Public Policy and Campaigns at the National Council of Nonprofits. Hundreds of platforms now solicit and collect donations in the names of nonprofits, often without asking first, and with AI a new one can appear almost overnight. 

The issue came to a head in October 2025, when GoFundMe created fundraising pages for 1.4 million nonprofits without their consent, then removed them after an uproar from the sector. In response, the National Council of Nonprofits worked with state associations of nonprofits to publish four p...

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 cannot use AI surveillance in workplace bathrooms. 

If your nonprofit has staff in California, t...

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 wrote the upcoming white paper with the Technology Association of Grantmakers (TAG), reframing nonprofit IT around assets instead of def...

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 are poorly represented today. Carolyn looks at why some tribal and small...

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.

Johan walks through the hallmarks of well-managed IT, tied together by one theme: proactive rather t...

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 look into using AI.

What happens when funders a...

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 Carolyn also preview a white paper they co-authored for TAG and Community IT, Growing IT Management Capacity at Nonprofits, built on the i...

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 agency in this moment than the news cycle suggests.

She also digs into a p...

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.

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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 trained on. Image and video tools...

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.

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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 Democratic Republic of the Congo. Last week Carolyn mentioned the Bridgespan and NTEN report and one state  on he...

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 quietly pulling down watch time on the long-form webinar...

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, 250,000 foundations, 25 million grant transactions, board and leadership profiles, and full 990 data, and setup takes about two...

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 months she expected.

Erik shares what went sideways a...

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 IT providers like Community IT, environmentally engaged nonprofits, and your peers in...

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 organization is moving to Microsoft, from their existing use of Outlook and Windows devices to the stronger admin and device management tools...

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 Airlines using an AI tool called Flyways to suggest more efficient flight routes, saving fuel while keeping a human dispatcher...

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 average, is really a series of choices, and why those choices are never neutral.

Using a deceptively simple classroom size example, Heather...

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, and alignment with your values. You don't adopt trends just because everyone else is.

Concerned about climate impacts of your AI...

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 cover it or risk the relationship with the donor. 

Joe and his team partnered with a supply chain researcher a...

This week Carolyn Woodard covers how to get AI literate, moving from the big-picture policy questions she's been focused on lately back to a practical roundup: how do you and your staff build AI literacy, and do you need a certificate to prove it?

She starts with free and low-cost nonprofit-specific options: PoliSync's four-module Certificate in Applied AI for Social Good, and Tim Lockie's hands-on AI for Anyone course through The Human Stack ($99). She also points to more general platforms like LinkedIn Learning, plus certifications straight from the source: Anthropic's free AI Fluency for Nonprofits course and...

In Part 2 of the AI Maturity Model for Nonprofits webinar, Carolyn Woodard and Mimi Yeh, Engagement Director at PTKO, and George Danilovics, VP of Technology at AHIP, pick up where Part 1 left off, moving from the framework itself to the harder question of what it takes to make AI adoption become quiet, boring, and everywhere.

Mimi and George walk through what it looks like when AI stops being an initiative and becomes infrastructure, pointing to the moment when people stop announcing they used it, the way no one says "I used Outlook to send this email." The...

Carolyn Woodard covers a growing counter-movement to concentrated AI power  and what it means for nonprofits thinking about data sovereignty, open-source models, and their own agency in a moment that can feel overwhelming.

Mozilla's recent State of Open Source AI Report frames this shift as a "Rebel Alliance" against winner-take-all AI development. Mozilla is deploying $1.4 billion to seed an open, trustworthy AI ecosystem, joined by more than 55 organizations. The report makes the case that open-source models are closing the capability gap with closed commercial systems, and that communities, not just corporations, can own and control their AI.

In the first part of this two-part conversation, Carolyn Woodard and Mimi Yeh, Engagement Director at PTKO, and George Danilovics, Vice President of Information Technology at AHIP, walk through an AI maturity model designed to help nonprofits move from pilots and experiments to AI that is genuinely embedded in how the organization works: quiet, boring, and everywhere.

The conversation opens with a striking data point: 80% of nonprofits are already using AI in some form, yet 90% of nonprofit professionals still feel unprepared to fully leverage it. 

Mimi and George use a five-stage maturity model that moves f...

Carolyn Woodard covers a cultural moment that's been building quietly, resistance to AI among workers, young people, and nonprofits, and connects it to a research framework for thinking honestly about AI's real environmental costs and benefits. Both threads come back to the same core question: who benefits from AI, and on what terms?

This episode also introduces a three-lens approach to help nonprofits think through the environmental impact of their own AI use, and suggests why "I'm just against AI" may be a values signal worth listening to rather than a training problem to fix.

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Carolyn Woodard explores voice AI in the social services sector with Chip Kennedy, founder and CEO of CivicReach, a technology company building AI-powered communication tools for nonprofits and government agencies delivering human services. Chip brings a rare dual perspective: years as a technologist and startup founder alongside his role and experience running a nonprofit serving families experiencing homelessness.

When people we serve need information, how can we get it to them? When our nonprofits free up employee time by using technology - in this case Voice AI to answer simple questions in incoming calls - what else...

Carolyn Woodard covers the UN's first-ever independent scientific assessment of AI — and what its findings mean for nonprofits navigating questions of data rights, economic disruption, and who actually benefits from AI's rapid rise. This episode connects the global governance conversation to practical tools and timely opportunities your organization can act on right now.

From the Indigenous Data Sovereignty movement to a free geospatial tool built by a nonprofit, to two fellowship programs with deadlines this week, there's a lot here for organizations at every stage of AI engagement.

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Carolyn Woodard explores responsible data governance and AI realism with Jim Fruchterman, MacArthur Fellow and founder of Tech Matters, a tech-for-good nonprofit building open source software for the social sector. Jim's work sits at the intersection of two urgent questions every nonprofit is wrestling with right now: what do you owe the people whose data you collect, and how do you make smart decisions about AI without getting swept up in the hype?

Jim introduces the Better Deal for Data, a new data governance movement built around seven plain-language commitments nonprofits can make to the communities they...

If last week's episode left you wondering what you can actually do about data center development in your community, this week's episode is the flip side. Carolyn Woodard shares a new national workforce initiative just launched last week, then digs into the tools and resources available for nonprofits and community members who want to shape how AI infrastructure gets built - before it arrives, not after.

She also closes with a look at what's happening in Europe and Africa, tying it back to an earlier episode on how where you are in the world determines the environmental...

In Part 2 of the Securing Google Workspace for Nonprofits webinar podcast, Carolyn Woodard and Steve Longenecker, Director of IT Consulting at Community IT, move from foundational configurations into the question every nonprofit eventually asks: do we need to pay for a higher tier of Google Workspace to get real security?

The short answer is: probably not right away. Steve walks through the third-party tools that should come before a tier upgrade for most nonprofits: formal security awareness training, third-party backups, advanced email protection, and cloud monitoring. 

He explains when a paid Google Workspace tier does m...

Carolyn Woodard covers two developing stories this week that together raise a bigger question for nonprofits: as AI infrastructure money floods into communities and philanthropic channels, is your organization ready to navigate it?

First, Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would require large AI companies to transfer half their stock to a federally managed public fund, with annual payments going directly to every American. The idea draws on a broader argument gaining traction across the political spectrum: that AI was built on humanity's collective output, and the public deserves a...

In the first part of this two-part conversation taken from a webinar, Carolyn Woodard and Steve Longenecker, Director of IT Consulting at Community IT Innovators, walk through the security settings, risks, and first steps nonprofits need to know to get the most out of Google Workspace's free nonprofit tier.

Google provides a genuinely secure platform, but security is a partnership. Steve explains that the risks nonprofits face in Google Workspace rarely come from Google's infrastructure and almost always come from the configuration decisions made on the customer side. 

Whether your organization has been on Google f...

Carolyn Woodard covers Anthropic's announcement of Claude Corps, a $150 million national fellowship program placing trained AI fellows inside nonprofit organizations, and gives a quick regulatory update on AI liability and state-level regulation.

Claude Corps will train 1,000 early-career fellows on Claude and embed them full-time, in-person at host nonprofits for 12 months. Fellows are employed by CodePath, paid $85,000 plus benefits, and supported by Anthropic and Social Finance, which will handle measurement and evaluation. The first cohort of 100 fellows begins in October 2026, with applications closing July 17th. 

Host organization applications are also open, and at least 400 nonprofits will p...