Paul Pape is the barkeep and game master at Gamify Business, where he turns strategy and operational problems into role-playing game mechanics. It started when a stuck CEO's love of gaming turned into a four-hour session, and that session became a consulting method.

His framework splits people into linear thinkers and cloud thinkers, and his claim is that conventional planning documents fail roughly half of them. If you have ever watched a strategic plan die in a drawer while the people it described kept working, that will land.

• Linear thinkers versus cloud thinkers, and why one planning format cannot serve both
• The authority machine problem, building recognition is not the same as acquiring support
• Ride the dragon of passion, on why chasing recognition directly tends to starve it
• Working with neurodivergent clients rather than around them

Why we are running it here. Paul makes the point directly in the episode that this can be run as a nonprofit version or an outreach programme. For an organisation whose planning day has to hold staff, volunteers and a board in one room, a format that works for more than one kind of brain is worth a look.

Originally aired on Unscripted Small Business. Cross-posted here for the nonprofit audience.

David Wilson, executive vice president at Zozimus, has been doing this since AltaVista. His argument is that search engine optimisation has become search everywhere optimisation: being findable wherever a decision gets made, rather than ranking for its own sake.

The part worth a nonprofit's attention is his point about defensibility. His example is a tattoo shop working with veterans' groups, where the partnership creates something a competitor cannot copy by spending more money. For a cause organisation, that is the case for corporate partnership stated in the partner's own language.

• Findability over rankings, because only one of those places has a rank tracker pointed at it
• Turning Search Console into a gap list by comparing expected against actual click-through
• Internal linking, still one of the most reliable tactics and the least fashionable
• Digital PR and brand carrying the load as unbranded search erodes
• Your About page as the thing an AI model reads to decide whether to trust you

Why we are running it here. Nonprofits compete for attention against organisations with far bigger budgets. Findability and genuine community partnership are two of the few levers that are not purely a spending contest.

Originally aired on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast. Cross-posted here for the nonprofit audience.

Mike Montague of Avenue9 draws a line between two ways to point AI at a problem. The Terminator approach builds an agent and sends it out alone. The Iron Man approach wraps a person in the technology and sends the person. His whole practice is built on the second one.

He has also done the work in a nonprofit context that most agencies never touch: teaching questioning skills to border-crossing agents for an anti-trafficking charity in Africa. It is a short passage, and it is the clearest example in the episode of the method surviving outside a sales floor.

• AI reliably earns a C plus, useful, and not the part anyone was paying you for
• Bad strategy plus AI is just faster failure; it amplifies in both directions
• Keeping your online reputation matched to your real work rather than inflated past it
• Degenerative engineering, using AI to distil what you already are instead of generating more of what you are not

Why we are running it here. Nonprofits are being sold AI harder than almost anyone right now, usually as a staff replacement. This is the counter-argument, from someone who sells AI services for a living.

Originally aired on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast. Cross-posted here for the nonprofit audience.