Abstract: 

Many of the 1.5M nonprofits in the US face increasing pressure to achieve their missions due to fundraising inefficiencies, lack of access to talent pools, and budget constraints. This limits the social good that can be cultivated to improve our world.

Through this lens, we’ll explore how artificial intelligence has played a crucial role in expanding the capabilities of nonprofit organizations, allowing them to build more and deeper relationships with supporters without having to hire more people (or fire anyone). As practitioners of vertical AI products, we’ll show how we’ve utilized open source technologies including TensorFlow, NLTK, CRFsuite, SKlearn, and others to determine who is most likely to give a donation to an organization and learn from communications to mimic the cognitive functions of fundraisers to expand their reach.

The discussion will center around case studies involving the College of Charleston, where AI was used to increase their workforce throughput by 160%, and University of Delaware, where AI uncovered a $50M donor. Similar examples will be pulled from cancer research, human rights, and Alzheimer’s funding.

The talk is intended for beginner-to-intermediate attendees. The main takeaways will be an exploration of AI in SaaS products, how behavioral psychology affects AI adoption, and insight into the nonprofit industry.

Bio: 

Rich is the co-founder and CTO of Gravyty, the first company focused on applying artificial intelligence to the social good industry. Rich believes that technology and companies are at their best when they augment people and allow them to do things that were previously impossible in simple, cost-effective and elegant ways.
As a brain aneurysm survivor, Rich has a deeply rooted belief that technology should be used for the positive benefit of people. He strives to scale Gravyty to help nonprofits of all shapes and sizes gain the resources they need to achieve their missions. Prior to Gravyty, Rich was senior product manager at RelSci, a $120M business connection intelligence platform. He was also the head of portfolio analytics for CapitalIQ and led product development for their quantitative solutions team. In between, Rich has founded four technology-based companies and was the winner of the 2015-2016 Entrepreneurship Award from Babson College.
He has a BS in Economics and Information Technology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MBA from Babson College.