Grow Your AI Mindset

With an abundance of GenAI tools available, many for free, stop what you’re doing right now and think about how you could work faster, better, and smarter. These improvements add up to you being able to do more with less. For the Power Up! Convening we had a reduced budget and a truncated timeline; nonetheless, we still promised the same high-quality delivery (that’s just what we do). 

At every turn, we asked, “How can we do this better and more efficiently?” Once you have built some basic skills, brainstorming, editing, and organizing are all faster and more productive with GenAI. Check out Allie K. Miller’s Steps to AI-first productivity.

Choose Your Tools

First, Collaborative invests in Grammarly for Business for our whole team. Customize your account with style guides and brand tones for consistency. Then, invest in an advanced account with at least one GenAI chatbot. AI for Education offers a handy cheatsheet to help you pick the one best suited to your needs.  And remember that you can, and sometimes should, switch it up. A different chatbot will likely offer different ideas or abilities to explore. 

I’m using the paid desktop version of ChatGPT 4.0 now, and—importantly–I organize my projects in the context threads, which helps me collaborate with ChatGPT by picking up where we left off.

Dive In!

First, set up your prompts. Talk to your chatbot like a trusted consultant, explaining the project, audience, and what you want to achieve. Offer initial writing and what you liked and didn’t like about it. Specify the tone and level of language you want. For the Power Up! Convening, we produced a two-day learning event for youth development professionals to help them prepare for the school year. We wanted them to be excited, engaged, and able to apply their learning quickly; our GenAI prompts reflected these goals

Here are some other ways we used GenAI tools for this convening:

Theme Brainstorming: The theme focused on energizing people’s work and providing applicable tools. We picked a theme focused on electricity and asked the chatbot for words, phrases, and concepts that would electrify, energize, and amplify. We tweaked it until we got the message map we needed as a baseline for our project.

Session Refinement: We created rules for each session description. They needed to start with something catchy, be specific about what people would learn, and use words from our theme message map. We tried to put the whole draft agenda in ChatGPT for refinement but lost a lot of good content. When we used ChatGPT to refine each session individually and kept refining our direction, we found we could develop solid, consistent, and creative descriptions in a fraction of the usual editing time.

Speaker Bios: We needed all bios to have a specific word count and wanted to ensure the current jobs were first. This was an easy task for ChatGPT, but it still required careful review to ensure we weren’t misrepresenting anyone. 

Session Evaluations: Post-event electronic surveys often have terrible response rates and lose nuance for individual sessions. We wanted to use paper evaluations in each session but avoid the onerous data entry that goes along with that approach. We devised a simple form for participants to rate aspects of the session by writing a numeral and then open-ended comments. We scanned the forms as  PDFs and used Gemini Advanced to read the PDFs and provide data and language analysis to summarize the effectiveness of each session. 

Project Management and Productivity: GenAI has the potential to uplevel project management processes and tools. We use Asana and call notes/summaries using tools like Fathom, Otter.ai, and Zoom companion.

Responsible and Ethical Use of GenAI

Be sure to have internal discussions and policies on the responsible and ethical use of GenAI in your work. Establish guardrails for your team related to intellectual property, bias, and transparency. Be particularly careful about the data you put in GenAI tools. Understand how GenAI works, read everything carefully, and be sure that the outputs reflect the values and goals of the project. 

And be transparent! We like to share the original outputs from AI as well as how we refined it to suit the purposes of the event. (In that same  spirit of transparency, ChatGPT helped me rewrite my introduction here to have more thematic language!)