Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics

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 ma...

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 e...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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 c...

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 teacher...

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 ...

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 w...

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 provi...

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 ...

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.

This episode covers:

• Assessment deliverables — the comprehensive report, prioritized recommendations, strategic plan, and IT roadmap, and how they connect findings to what leadership actually cares about
• Two key...

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...

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 j...

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 g...

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 l...

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 vend...

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 ma...