AI can help with compassionate leadership in trying times
March 3, 2025
My blog posts and LinkedIn feed have described a tough time for nonprofits. Nonprofit leaders are going to have to make challenging decisions in times of profound uncertainty. In that light, this article in the Harvard Business Review entitled Using AI to Make You a More Compassionate Reader resonated strongly. While the article itself does not provide actual prompts, I have crafted a few prompts you can use to test the idea for your nonprofit. You will also see that I have also included a prompt [a version of the "playoff prompt" methodology] that may help the AI evaluate and improve its own outputs.
PROMPT -> Act in the role of a human resources coach with deep knowledge of nonprofit operations. In that role, assume that I am a [describe yourself demographically, e.g., 61-year-old white man] who runs a [describe the size (in terms of staff and revenues) [type, e.g., social services, etc.] nonprofit in [location]. [Describe the demographics of your staff in terms of age, gender, race, and other potentially important characteristics]. Assume that my nonprofit is going through challenging budgeting issues because of changes in federal funding. I want to ensure that my messaging about these challenges is both honest and empathetic. As me questions, one at a time, to help me craft a messaging strategy for my team.
[After you have worked with this prompt for a while, to develop messaging strategy.] Draft three emails that I could use to convey to my staff that we are experiencing challenges and solicit feedback.
PLAYOFF PROMPT ->Review the three emails, choose the best, and improve it. As part of this task, explain why the chosen email is best and how your improvements help.
The other ideas in the HBR article are useful, as well. You could use this AI chat to help you enhance your communication and staff engagement, or to coach you about emotional intelligence during challenging times. You could ask it to explain what cognitive issues teams and individuals experience in times of stress and low- or no-cost, research-backed countermeasures you could take to address those cognitive issues.
Please try these prompts to see how they can help you message. Think about how you could use the same general approach to craft messages for your board, your major donors, your beneficiary community, or other stakeholders.
As I have noted, AI is new for every human on earth. If you think this AI journey might be useful to anybody else, please forward this newsletter to them and suggest that they subscribe using this Link. By multiplying the readers of this newsletter, you again help build our common resilience and bring new minds to bear on these issues. Let’s grow this community together!