About our company and partnerships: In the nonprofit field, you have to be very responsible with all the money your supporters give you. It's always about how to reallocate resources so that you can create value while keeping costs at a similar level, or to determine whether the value you're creating is worth investing a little more in. Therefore, it is important to have a very reliable partner. And given what we do, there are some areas that are better brought in-house. In other words, anything that uses data and technology in a way that more directly impacts the community. That way, we can continue to work with some of our trusted partners for the more stripped-down parts, such as networking and major software. So what's happening on the publishing side is already integrated with what's happening in the back office, which makes it a little bit more difficult when you have to work with a lot of external parties. However, the way we use data has become much more efficient and all pipelines are now fully automated. As a fundraising organization, we have to do so many small things to gather resources to support young people. You need to work with different platforms, capture all your data in near real-time, and create value from it. I felt it was important to me to be able to create these features in-house.
About Generation AI: Seeing how things were emerging so quickly, we had to look at how we could start using it. I was upfront with my team about how to use generative AI to increase productivity. For example, people were using Copilot from very early on. And it's helping them be a little more productive. But we're not removing anything, and we're not saying we're replacing humans with regenerative devices. Instead, we're helping people find ways to be more efficient, which has given us confidence in some of the work we do. We have also been looking at ways to help people access services who may not be able to speak to us in person, as it may be out of hours. We did some research on people who care for cancer patients. They are very busy all day long, so when they were able to check online during off-hours, we were able to organize the information and create a model that showed that the data was being managed properly. Approved by us. However, we still need to go through a process of building confidence, as the biggest fear people have is that AI will provide inaccurate information.
About data security: Last year was a big year for cybersecurity, freeing up more resources to work in this area and ensure information is safe. One is that we're expanding the number of AI models we use to predict the best people to target for different campaigns. In the past, most nonprofits have had to send some or all of their databases to outside suppliers so they can run their own tools to determine who to target. So that helped us accelerate some of that. We currently do not send any data externally, except for very small datasets for specific purposes. The rest of the work can also be done in-house. We have also seen how technology can be used to mitigate many of the risks that have traditionally created opportunities for cyberattacks. Of course, there's also the human element to make people more aware of things to be careful of. So for us, especially since a significant percentage of our staff are clinicians, it's difficult to get them to think about what they have to do to stay safe, including moving to hybrid working. The goal was to update all of our tools to give you a more integrated way to protect your users. We felt we needed to improve some of the approaches we were using to detect how targeted we were. Previously, only about 3 out of 100 emails were filtered as spam, but now that number has increased to about 1 in 10, making it necessary to restrict access to some important resources. there is. With a little monitoring, you'll receive an alert whenever someone tries to download a particular field or a particularly large file. Also, we don't download a lot of information about someone, we just talk to people to understand the process they're going through and how we can help them with that in a different way. I feel like people are really engaged.
About leadership: It is important to accept yourself as a leader. There is more than one way to become a leader. I was recently talking with someone in the Mindful CIO community about leaders who go beyond their technical capabilities. His approach to looking at leadership more holistically really resonated with me. So identify your strengths and focus on them to slowly grow as a leader, overcome any gaps you perceive, and start becoming more confident and comfortable with the type of leader you want to be. I always think that thinking IT leaders tend to be introverted and less committed, but this allows technology leaders to do more to bring more and different types of people into leadership positions. I feel like I might start to be seen as a more inclusive person who is willing to embrace many styles of leadership. We see an opportunity to improve diversity in the technology industry leadership space.
