Navigating the Maize

Year-End Without the Robot Voice: Using AI for GivingTuesday and December

December brings in more than a third of nonprofits' annual online revenue, and this year a lot of appeals will be drafted with the same AI tools. The risk: every inb

Career Plateaus, AI, and What I Built Because of Mine

Years ago, while working for a non profit organization, Sean realized he wasn't going to get the promotion. They were bringing in someone from the outside. He knew

The Day I Realized I Wasn’t the Choice: Career Plateaus, AI, and What I Built Because of Mine

Your Board Needs a Pipeline, Not a Vacancy Sign: Where AI Helps and Where It Can't

That one sentence says a lot about how many organizations think about governance. Sean explains why difficulty recruiting can't be the reason someone holds a seat in

My Honest AI App Recommendations for Nonprofits

No framework, no policy checklist, no statistics. Just the tools, organized by the problem they solve: fundraising intelligence, writing, design, grants, meetings, and au

Will AI Replace Nonprofit Jobs? What the Numbers Really Mean

A CNN graphic says AI could eliminate 10–15% of U.S. jobs and reshape 50–55%. What do those numbers mean for nonprofit teams already stretched thin? In this episode of N

What AI Can’t Replace: Why Personal Stories Still Win

A LinkedIn post about Sean's daughter's solo trip through Europe reached over 4,000 people and pulled in nearly 5,700 impressions, almost 80% from outside his e

The Algorithm Is Reading Your Pitch Deck: AI and the New Corporate Giving Gatekeepers

Somewhere right now, a corporate giving team is deciding whether your organization is even worth a meeting, and increasingly, an AI tool is making that first cut before a

The Candidate Who Wasn’t There: AI, Fake Qualifications, and the New Hiring Crisis

A nonprofit hired a grant writer who aced the interview, and couldn’t do the job. This episode digs into a hiring crisis moving faster than most nonprofit leaders realize

Untitled EpisodeThe Pitch Is Always Exciting: A Framework for Evaluating a New AI Tool

If you're a development director or ED, you've had this meeting: a consultant or vendor pitches an AI tool that "changed everything" for an organization just li

“Your Gala and Golf Tournament Isn’t the Problem: What Happens After the Last Guest Leaves”

Sean breaks down what actually happens in a room full of 150 donors, prospects, and corporate partners — and where AI can help make sure it doesn’t evaporate the Monday a

A $100 Million Bet on Nonprofits: What OpenAI's New Program Actually Means.

OpenAI's nonprofit arm just committed $100 million to the Common Health Coalition, going after a decade-old problem: a hepatitis C cure exists, yet roughly two-third

Your Newsletter Nobody Reads: Use AI to turn your donor communications to audio

How many of your own donors actually read your newsletter, start to finish? Open rates are declining, and meanwhile podcast and audio consumption keeps climbing. This epi

Why Your Nonprofit Needs an AI Governance Policy (Even a One-Pager)

Back in episode two, Sean cited a stat and moved past it fast: 47% of nonprofits have no AI governance policy at all. This episode unpacks why that’s riskier than it feel

AI Hiring - From Start to Finish

Every episode so far has been about donors. This one turns to your own team. Sean walks through a real search he ran for a client — filling a Development and Donor Relati

Episode 3 Navigating the mAIZe: Donor Segmentation

Building a Donor Segmentation Model, Step by Step. A few episodes back I mentioned a segmentation model I built for a crisis campaign — 1,100+ donors, five tiers, differ

Episode 2 — “The AI Adoption Paradox, Unpacked“

92% of nonprofits use AI. Only 7% say it’s moved the needle. This episode unpacks why — with three real case studies from my own client work: a donor segmentation model t

Episode 1: Why Nonprofits and AI, Why Me, Why Now

In this first episode of Navigating the mAIze, I introduce myself and lay out exactly what this weekly show is going to be. I’m Sean, founder and principal of Magnolia P