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My story

I’ve worked with and within nonprofits for more than a decade, including as a full-time staff member and as a strategy consultant.

In 2023, I noticed that many of the most visible and decorated organizations seemed to consistently attract new attention and resources.

Meanwhile, many smaller and younger organizations seemed insulated from the accolades—despite doing incredible work.

Some light digging revealed to me that the difference between “thought leaders” and everyone else typically had nothing to do with wisdom or institutional expertise, and everything to do with the decision to carve out dedicated time for brand-building.

(Brand-building: reformatting ideas for mass consumption and actively pursuing relevant opportunities for writing, speaking, and recognition.)

At the same time, AI was having a cultural moment.

I led Compass Pro Bono’s monthslong AI integration effort, from internal interviews and platform scoping to large-scale integration into how we did our work. I posted weekly AI tips, hosted biweekly AI “office hours,” and held monthly hands-on AI workshops. Just four months after we launched a suite of enterprise AI tools, our team reported average individual time savings of 4-5 hours/week. One of my colleagues said, “Without it, it would take twice as long (at least) and the quality of the content would simply not be as high. I use ChatGPT for something almost every day and feel really educated about AI's possibilities for future uses!”

In early 2024, our clients and volunteers started asking what we were doing about AI at Compass Pro Bono. So I turned our integration process into a four-part framework and began sharing it with anyone in our network who expressed interest. When the scale of the demand became clear, we hosted our first AI workshop for nonprofit leaders. To my amazement, with minimal advertising, more than 300 people signed up—and based on survey results, they seemed to love it.

In the following months, we spoke about AI at events in DC, Maryland, and Illinois. I deepened my technical knowledge of AI tools and had dozens of conversations with business leaders that taught me a lot about the challenges organizations face with AI integration.

Now, I’ve made it my mission to help as many people and organizations as I can to learn how to use AI to scale their impact.

I knew that my early clients weren’t the only ones struggling with these challenges.

That’s why I decided to launch these services—to help dozens more social impact professionals take advantage of the benefits of AI and thought leadership.

Ready to work together?

So that’s what I did for my organization, Compass Pro Bono.

In just under two years, we went from minimal sector presence to a constant churn of visible community engagement:

• speaking at dozens of conferences and panels

• earning five new certifications to display on our website

• showing up in volunteer listings and regional media outlets

• …and even getting nods in two books!

I started working with busy changemakers on their individual brand-building efforts, too.

I co-created and ghostwrote educational email courses, presentations, LinkedIn posts, panel scripts, and more. Through a process of rigorous iteration, I learned how to create content that reliably attracts an audience while retaining a leader’s unique voice and expertise. I knew this process worked when my early clients started getting invitations to speak at events—being sought after instead of having to seek out opportunities for brand-building and sector connection. Visibility begets visibility. (And more than just that, too! I’ll never forget when the first donation came in that cited one of our workshops as the inspiration.)