Trista’s 2024 Philanthropy Predictions

Every year, the FutureGood team and I curate a list of trends that we believe will impact foundations and nonprofits in the coming year. Here are our 2024 predictions.

No more sitting on the policy sidelines

Nonprofits will increasingly engage in advocacy and policy work to address the root causes of social issues, advocating for systemic change. It is no longer enough to try to address the results of terrible public policy, we need to be critical partners that propose new policy solutions and help educate our elected officials on how public policy impacts our communities. If we don’t address root policy causes, we are just sticking our collective finger in the hole in the dam.

Where is the next big crisis? Assume it will be in your backyard

The world is becoming more unpredictable, with natural disasters, public health crises, civic disasters, and other emergencies becoming the norm. Nonprofits and foundations will enhance their crisis preparedness and response capabilities for themselves and the communities they work in. They will also shift to building long-term resilience and preparedness, especially in marginalized communities.

The rise of the machines - AI changes everything

Technology is advancing rapidly, and nonprofits will embrace this more than ever. Artificial Intelligence (AI), once considered a sci-fi storyline, is now an essential tool for nonprofits. It's making their operations more efficient, allowing for personalized donor interactions, and aiding in data analysis for better decision-making. Nonprofits and foundations will quickly learn how to utilize AI for most aspects of their operations, freeing up staff time for relationship building and innovation.

Traditional strategic planning is a thing of the past

Traditional strategic planning is based on a predictable future that looks a lot like the past. The events of 2020 taught us that just isn’t true anymore. Nonprofits and foundations will leave behind traditional, inflexible strategic planning in favor of forward-looking, adaptable ones.

The new strategic planning model will include setting ambitious 20 to 30-year goals to meet your mission. Additionally, these models will adapt to involve the implementation of monthly and quarterly accountability measures, which will help your organization stay nimble in the face of uncertainty and maintain alignment with your long-term transformative goals.

Taking the well-being of your team seriously

Nonprofits will increasingly recognize that their most valuable assets are the dedicated people on their teams. In an era of increasing demands and pressures, organizations are not only prioritizing the mental health and well-being of their staff but also viewing it as a strategic imperative to ensure staff members remain effective and committed to their missions. We will see an explosion of investments in employee wellness programs, sabbaticals and retreats. These are critical for staff to be effective in their roles and to stay with your organization.

Climate Change has arrived

Climate change is not some far-off boogeyman; it is affecting your community today. Nonprofits and foundations will intensify their efforts to address this as a central organizational issue, both in their operations and through advocacy for climate-conscious policies. Look for more organizations to recognize that climate change is within the parameters of their missions because the other issues they work on won’t matter if this one is not addressed now.

Future thinking skills are your biggest staff professional development need

Future thinking skills are critical in a world filled with uncertainty. These skills empower leaders to anticipate trends, adapt to changes, and develop strategies that lead to long-term success. They're not just about surviving; they're about thriving in uncertain times. (Shameless plug for FutureGood Studio where we train nonprofit and foundation leaders in three months to use futurism skills to supercharge their impact!)

I think there is another reason futurism and future thinking skills are critical in the social sector. Our field exists to change the trajectory of the future. Every time you launch a program or propose a piece of legislation you are working to change what the future looks like, especially for the most marginalized people in our communities.

You Get an Extra Day to Invest in the Future in 2024

This year is a Leap Year - Thursday, February 29, is a bonus day, and you should set it aside right now to focus on the future. The FutureGood team will share some amazing guidance on how to spend that time, but make sure you block off that time in your calendar RIGHT NOW.

About: Trista Harris is a philanthropic futurist and is nationally known as a passionate advocate for leaders in the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors. She is also the author of the books How to Become a Nonprofit Rockstar and FutureGood: How to Use Futurism to Save the World. She is the President of FutureGood, a consultancy focused on helping visionary leaders build a better future.

Is ChatGPT Going to Destroy my Nonprofit or Foundation Job? Probably, but it’s for the Best.

Unless you have been on a media fast, you have probably heard about ChatGPT, which is an AI language model developed by Open AI. It launched publicly at the end of November 2022. I’ve been watching AI and its impact on the social sector for the past 12 years and I have never been so impressed with the usability of an AI tool and have so clearly seen how it will change all aspects of our work in the field. I think this will have significant impacts on grant writing, program development, donor engagement, staff training, operations processes, communications, and almost everything else you do in your day-to-day work.

I’ve been talking to audiences of nonprofit and foundation leaders across the country and the responses to this tool have varied from “I have never heard of this thing, what are you talking about?” to “my communications team is using this as the basis for all of their work moving forward.” This singular tool is going to change almost all aspects of your day-to-day work and I would encourage you to jump in and start learning how to use it effectively as soon as possible.

So how can you use this?

Generate email templates. Instead of having to manually respond to each and every email or message from clients, supporters or potential donors, AI can be programmed to provide automated replies, freeing up staff time for more important tasks.

Increase the strength of your communications. ChatGPT can help your organization reach new audiences and grow your support base. By leveraging the AI model to generate engaging and relevant content for blog posts, your website, or emails, your organization can create a more dynamic online presence that appeals to a wider range of people, increasing your visibility and reach.

Completing drafts of grant applications. I envision a future where nonprofits give a foundation’s AI program the permission to scrape its website for the information needed to create a grant application, eliminating the millions of hours nonprofits spend on foundation grant applications but in the short-term future you can use AI tools to answer foundation grant application questions by pasting the question and relevant information from your website into the prompt and asking it to create a response that meets that word or character requirement of the funder.

Create new program plans. Create a query that includes details about the context of your request, the task you are asking it to complete, and then any additional details or clarity about the request. For example if you need a lesson plan created create a query like this:

You are an experienced afterschool program designer. You are an expert in cultural competence and how to make arts education exciting for 12-16 year olds in Oakland, California. Your writing style is accessible, informative, and fun. Create the outline for a 4-week program where youth learn about the history of local graffiti artists in Oakland and how the artform connects to hip hop culture.

Next refine the outline by adding 3 learning objectives for each session and one hands on classroom assignment. Here is the lesson plan that ChatGPT created for me using that prompt. (Note: each result is created individually so you will probably get a similar but not identical different result if you use this prompt.)

Week 1: Introduction to graffiti art and hip hop culture

Introduction to the program, its goals, and the students involved

Overview of graffiti art and its connection to hip hop culture

Introduction to local graffiti artists and their styles

Assignment: Students create a graffiti-style name tag using paper, markers, and spray paint

Week 2-3: Graffiti as a form of political expression

Overview of graffiti as a form of political and social expression

Discussion of the role of graffiti in political activism and its impact on the community

Examination of graffiti as a form of resistance against gentrification and urban renewal in Oakland

Hands-on workshop on spray paint techniques, stenciling, and handstyle

Assignment: Students create a graffiti-style protest poster addressing a social or political issue affecting their community, and present it to the class

Week 4: Reflection and conclusion

Reflection on what students have learned about the political context of graffiti art and hip hop culture

Final projects and presentations, showcasing the students' own graffiti pieces and the stories behind them

Conclusion and goodbye ceremony for the program and its participants

Assignment: Students create a group mural reflecting on their experience in the program and its impact on their understanding of the political context of graffiti art and hip hop culture.

 

There are a million more ways that you can use ChatGPT and I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments.

 

The Ethical Considerations

ChatGPT is a tool that still learning how to refine its outputs, so it is critical that people in the social sector interact with in and give it feedback if it is generating responses that are racist, sexist or if it needs more context on the issues that your organization is working on. You have the ability to make this tool more nuanced. Just click the down button next to the response it provided to give feedback.


There is also an important debate about the human cost of making these AI tools safe for people to use by filtering out toxic data from the chatbot’s training dataset. Real people in Kenya were paid $2 an hour to look through tons of graphic content like child sex abuse, murder, torture and self harm to make sure the tool was safe for you to use.  Our sector needs to be a part of the conversations about creating ethical AI and we need to be well versed in these tools to make an impact on these conversations.

I have also heard from many people in the sector that are concerned that this tool will create job losses. Let me be clear, it will. Just like how the supercomputer replaced the African American women who were the human computers at NASA or how many bank tellers were replaced by ATMs, all technological advances cause some jobs or job duties to disappear. But importantly, according to the World Economic Forum, technology creates 12 million more jobs that is destroys every year. We are not losing jobs, we are transforming them to something else and for our sector the something else could be more time for your staff to connect with real people in your community and more time to innovate and solve some of our society’s toughest problems. You can use this tool to decrease or eliminate repetitive tasks that don’t harness your employees creativity or ability to connect in the community.

Final Thoughts

There is a saying in futurism, don’t get Blockbustered. That is when an innovation is staring you in the face and you decide to stay on the tried-and-true road instead, to your own peril. This is a moment where we need to disrupt our organizations so that we don’t get disrupted.  We have the opportunity to free ourselves and our teams from repetitive work and instead spend more time understanding how to truly solve the issues our organizations are working on. Let’s not let this moment pass us by.

 

Trista Harris is a Philanthropic Futurist and President of FutureGood, a consultancy that helps foundations and nonprofits harness emerging trends to create a more beautiful and equitable future. She also is the creator behind FutureGood Studio, a 3-month learning program where nonprofit and foundation leaders learn how to use the tools of futurism to increase their impact.

Navigating Change: 5 Skills Nonprofit Leaders Need to Know Now

“Uncertainty is chronic; instability is permanent; disruption is common; and we can neither predict nor govern events. There will be no ‘new normal’; there will only be a continuous series of ‘not normal’ episodes, defying prediction and unforeseen by most of us until they happen.”

                                                                                              -Jim Collins

We are living in a time of rapid transformation. There are changes in how we work, how we connect, and how we make the world a better place. This change has been amplified by the pandemic, but it is not fully caused by it. We are living in a time of exponential change, where change gets faster and faster on a predictable scale. There isn’t going to be a time where things go “back to normal”.

The nonprofit sector is not immune to these challenges. When I talk to nonprofit leaders, I am hearing that you are facing staff and board members that are resistant to change. There are huge changes in your tried and true financial models (even the organizations that received a magical MacKenzie Scott gift are rethinking their financial path forward). In addition, you are facing some of the greatest staffing challenges that the sector has seen in recent history (hello Great Resignation). This is enough to send the most experienced nonprofit executive under their desks in the fetal position.

I know all of this can be completely overwhelming but in the Jim Collins quote at the beginning of this post he said these changes are “unforeseen by most of us until they happen.” Most…MOST…MOST! You aren’t most people. You have dedicated your career to making the world a better place. You have a vested interest in disruption because it is the only way to make things better. Ending inequality? Disruption! Making sure everyone has a home? Disruption! Rebuilding our education system? Disruption! You were made for this.

This is a critical time for nonprofit leaders to learn a new set of skills to harness this time of volatility to create the best results in your organization’s history. This is the time for us to build a new future.

A recent study from BetterUp Labs found that the most important skill for leaders today is future-thinking skills. These skills help you thrive and stay resilient in the face of uncertainty. BetterUp Labs launched a survey of over 1,500 US workers and found that people who harness future-mindedness can improve their personal and professional lives, even in spite of uncertainty and unpredictability. Those high in future-minded leadership reported 34% less anxiety and 35% less depression than their peers. They’re more optimistic about the future, more productive, and have greater life satisfaction. There has not been a more important time in your career to learn how to build these future-thinking skills to harness uncertainty into positive change.

5 Key Skills You Need to Navigate Change

1. Visualize your ideal future – If you’d like to create a better future, first you have to have a really clear, shared picture of what better looks like. What does the problem you are working on look like if it is actually fixed? For instance, what does your community look like if every child has equal access to education or if everyone has a home? Visualizing a problem that is fully fixed can give you insight into new solutions to get there.

2. Stop Loving the Problem- The easiest place for us to get stuck is when we are loving the problem. Loving the problem is when you use up your energy describing how terrible things are (in meetings, annual reports, and grant applications). When you spend all of your time describing how terrible everything is, you no mental space left to actually imagine ways to solve those problems or they may feel too big so you give up.

3. Get Future Focused – It is critical that you make time for the future in your present. Spending just 5% of your time thinking about the future exposes you to new ways of solving existing problems. Reading up on organizations that have an innovative way of solving the problems you are working on or new strategies in other sectors that might be applicable to your work can super charge your efforts.

4. Activate Your Network - Your network is one of the most critical pieces to making your ideal future a reality. No one can solve hard problems alone. It is only when we align our efforts does big change happen. Who is also working on the ideal future that you imagined? Reach out and find ways to learn from each other.

5. Make Your Ideal Future a Reality – We can’t just sit back and wait to see what the future will bring us, we have to do the hard work today to build a better future. You have to be willing to try new things and to build your skills as a future thinker to help your organization harness this volatility and create a more beautiful and equitable future.

Building these skills will help you begin to navigate this change and create a better future. You have an opportunity right in front of you to move your staff and board forward in the same direction, inspire funders and supporters with an exciting picture of what is possible, and be a leader that can help your organization and your community navigate change. It is a big task but you don’t have to do it alone.

We are creating a community of changemakers who are strengthening their future-thinking muscles. If you are really ready to commit to your own development as a future-focused leader, join our FutureGood Studio ‘s Beta cohort, which is a 12-week learning journey with a community of visionary leaders who are transforming their communities.

FutureGood has created a process for building future-thinking skills that has helped our clients garner huge legislative wins, secure their biggest grants ever, and identify partnering organizations that can help move your impact from incremental to exponential.

During our time together in FutureGood Studio you will learn how to create a clear roadmap and develop the set of skills necessary to become a future proof leader. We help you visualize your ideal future, know who in your network can help you create your ideal future and outline action steps to do just that.

This time is hard for all of us but you’ve got this!