Chief Innovation and Philanthropy Officer Brandolon Barnett recently shared his expertise on how philanthropy can prepare for a future that is being changed at an accelerated pace as part of the series, “The Future is Faster Than You Think,” on Authority Magazine. Below is a shortened version of the article.
The pace of change is accelerating, with innovations and disruptions reshaping industries faster than ever. Leaders must not only anticipate these changes but also develop strategies to thrive in this evolving landscape. How are forward-thinking leaders preparing for the technologies and challenges of tomorrow? What strategies are they putting in place today to ensure success in the future? As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Brandolon Barnett, Giving Compass.
Brandolon Barnett is head of innovation and philanthropy for Giving Compass, an AI-powered donor education platform where donors can learn about issues, get involved, and give to organizations. Giving Compass connects donors to resources and tools to help them give in ways more likely to make a difference. Barnett also is the founder and CEO of The Regular, which provides technology and other services for event organizers and venues. Barnett has promoted development and volunteerism on three continents, led the Gates-funded Growfund donor-advised fund effort, and led research and consulting engagements at the Council on Foundations and Global Impact. He is the author of Dreams Deferred: Recession, Struggle, And The Quest For A Better World and co-founder and lead faculty of the Tech for Good Bootcamp graduate certificate program at Loyola University Chicago.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Giving Compass stands out by being lean, agile, curious, and unafraid to rapidly test new innovations in a sector that often moves more slowly. We quickly jumped on the generative AI innovations and began to think carefully about how they will impact education overall, but particularly philanthropy. Within months, we built an AI layer for exploring nonprofits through natural search. All of this was supported by research into donor behavior. We wanted to use AI to solve actual problems, and the problem we uncovered was that a lot of the data out there to help donors make decisions is simply not compelling to them. But with gen AI, we can now surface multimodal content and begin to think about those engagements in a more dynamic way without the resources of, say, a Salesforce.org.
How do you balance the need for rapid innovation with the risk of potential disruptions in your organization?
Transparency and buy-in. Innovation is about making things better and easier. If you’re transparent about this, anyone can get excited about it.
Can you share an example of a strategy you’ve implemented to future-proof your business against upcoming technological changes?
This is difficult — almost impossible — when innovation is moving at the pace it is now. I think the best strategy, like I said earlier, is to listen. But that listening takes many forms. In building programs and products that are “future-proof,” we aim to do deep research and have every program, every feature, ideally be backed by qualitative or quantitative data. For example, we leverage the UserTesting platform and scholarship to do continuous testing. That listening means that while technology may enable new solutions, we’re going to have a chance to be the first to see how, because we understand the problem very deeply.
Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “Five Things You Need to Prepare For The Disruptive Future”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.
- Learn what Product Management is and how it operates. Product Managers are listeners. They listen to customers. The market. Research. They find problems. And they use that listening to power and rapidly test solutions to those problems. Innovation makes it easier to do things. Like with AI and vibe coding. But what makes the thing you do actually meaningful? It’s that listening and knowing where to start to see if you can solve a problem in a disruptive way. Example: at Giving Compass, we knew from listening to the sector that there was wide dissatisfaction with the available data. But it’s difficult to get data on organizations outside of human vetting teams, government filings, and other sources that are often old and outdated. As soon as agentic capabilities presented themselves in the APIs of LLMs, we were ready to test using them to gather data.
- Understand AI. This one is pretty straightforward. Just make sure you really understand what these technologies are.
- Engage politically. I don’t want to get political here. But with the rapid pace of innovation, we will be depending on our elected leaders in many democratic nations to create policies that are relevant in this entirely changed world. We can decide that AI shouldn’t replace all entry-level roles, for example, as a policy decision. We all need to be engaged and encouraging our leaders to actually lead on these conversations as a priority over a lot of the things they are arguing about now. AI is not going to stop.
- Do not fear failure. I cannot emphasize this enough. You have to try things. Period. And you may fail. That’s fine. If you can’t handle failure you won’t be able to handle a future that is truly radically different, where we’ll all be fumbling in the dark.
- Be human. As machines are more and more a part of our lives, we won’t survive if we aren’t human together. Our humanity is our “moat” against AI. How that manifests is yet to be seen, but I think this is fundamentally true in the face of whatever disruptions are in store.