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.

Benjamin Behrooz of Branding Los Angeles builds brands for blue-collar and home-service businesses, and one of his most consistent recommendations is the one most marketers treat as a nice-to-have: show up in your community, repeatedly, on the record.

His own firm runs an NYPD toy drive, donates to Shriners, and organises Santa Monica beach cleanups. He is candid that this is both genuine and good for the business, which is the honest version of a conversation nonprofits rarely get from a corporate partner.

• Empathy as a practical tool for finding what a customer, or a donor, actually cares about
• Holding authenticity while you scale, and where most organisations lose it
• Where AI helps marketing and where it flattens the voice you built
• Using community involvement to build visibility that advertising cannot buy

Why we are running it here. If you have ever built a corporate partnership and found the company wanted a logo placement and nothing else, this is a useful look from the other side of that table at what makes a partner stay.

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

Rebecca Prejean of EBGC advises nonprofit leaders on accessibility, and her argument reframes it: stop selling accommodation as compliance and start selling it as productivity and retention. For an organisation running on volunteers and a thin payroll, that is the version of the pitch that actually moves a board.

Her route in was personal. Her son has autism, and the advocacy she learned for him became the work she now does for organisations.

• Why structured meetings are the cheapest accommodation most organisations never make
• Self-advocacy after a late diagnosis, and why so much of the workforce is arriving there now
• Framing accessibility in terms leadership already budgets for, productivity and retention
• Where AI genuinely helps, and where it is being oversold

Why we are running it here. Rebecca works with nonprofit CEOs, and she is speaking at Cause Camp on the accessibility gap in nonprofit organisations specifically. The episode is about workplaces generally, but the volunteer-heavy, under-resourced org is where these ideas bite hardest.

Originally aired on Unscripted Small Business, hosted by Zaneta Chuniq Inpower. Cross-posted here for the nonprofit audience.

Only 24% of C-suite executives are women. 94% of them played sports. Melyssa Jaskiewicz built Leveling the Fields on the space between those two numbers.

She goes into Charleston elementary schools and hands third through fifth grade girls a sport they have never tried. The program is called EmpowerPlay, and the clever part is who coaches it: the school's own teachers, hired and paid. The kids already know the hierarchy, so classroom management transfers for free, and the money lands in a teacher's pocket.

In South Carolina, twice as many boys play high school sports as girls. Melyssa's read is that this is a pipeline problem, not an interest problem. There is no youth program feeding the middle school feeding the high school, so the team never forms. The barrier for families is options and logistics, not desire.

She is also honest about the skill that did not transfer. Twenty years in sales, and asking a friend for money is still awkward: "We have a school on a wait list and we need $14,000 to pull that school off the wait list. Can you give me $100?" If you want to end that particular conversation, bring the program to a school or donate.

Diagnosed dyslexic and ADD in the 1980s, she makes a blunt argument about cutting PE: you cannot take kids with fast brains and expect them to sit still for eight hours. She has the before-and-after story of one disruptive student to back it up.

On AI, she is not generating graphics. She runs paid Claude and ChatGPT as collaborators for grant writing, pasted a thousand Instagram followers in to find collaboration targets, and has Claude clearing bounced email into HubSpot. Response time is a nonprofit's version of speed to lead, the thing Ignitvio measures in home services: she met a volunteer who waited nearly a year to hear back from a shelter. Her team answers in hours and staffed a volunteer manager to make sure of it. If you want to be one, they are taking volunteers and coaches.

Connect with Melyssa on LinkedIn. Leveling the Fields is @levelingthefields everywhere.

Read the full recap: https://unscriptednonprofit.com/melyssa-jaskiewicz-leveling-the-fields-girls-sports-pipeline/

More from the network: Unscripted Non-Profit and Unscripted Small Business. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera.

You cannot teach a child to regulate if you are dysregulated yourself. Queen D. Michele spent 27 years in classrooms before founding the Fula History & Genealogy Society in America. She joins host Jeremy Rivera to explain why Generation Alpha is growing up emotionally dysregulated and what it would take to hand them the tools.

• Three nuggets structure the episode: the matrix, generational trauma carried in DNA, and the fact that unconscious adults cannot teach consciousness.
• 27 years of classroom evidence. This is not a theory arrived at from outside the school system.
• 52 Insights for Gen Alpha turns the five SEL competencies into a personal journey, adapted by AI rather than delivered as a fixed curriculum.
• The free online pilot starts 8 September. Which is the practical reason to listen now rather than later.
• Guided meditation is the big gun. Her words for the intervention that does the most work.
• The screens never turn off, and that is a different environment from the one any previous generation regulated inside.

• Why Gen Alpha is dysregulated
• The three nuggets
• 52 Insights and the five SEL competencies
• The big gun
• Guinea-Bissau and the decade of return
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Queen D. Michele taught for 27 years, which means she watched the change happen in real time rather than reading about it afterwards. The environment a child regulates inside now includes a screen that never turns off and an attention economy engineered against calm.

Her framing is not that children are worse. It is that the tools were never handed over, and the adults holding them are struggling too.

• The matrix. The systems and defaults a child inherits without ever agreeing to them.
• Generational trauma carried in our DNA. The idea that what was not processed gets passed down rather than resolved.
• Unconscious adults cannot teach consciousness. The one that does the most damage in practice, because it puts the work back on the grown-ups first.

That third one is the load-bearing claim of the whole conversation. Every regulation programme aimed only at children is building on a foundation nobody checked.

Her programme, 52 Insights for Gen Alpha, takes the five core SEL competencies and turns them into a personal, AI-adaptive journey rather than a fixed syllabus.

The design choice worth noting is the adaptation. Social and emotional learning delivered as one curriculum to thirty different children assumes they all arrive at the same place. They do not, and that assumption is why so much of it fails to stick.

A free online pilot starts on 8 September.

Guided meditation is what she calls the big gun. It is the intervention with the shortest distance between doing it and feeling the difference, which matters enormously when the audience is children who will abandon anything abstract.

Somebody wanted to hear the Brahms Double Concerto played live and could not find anywhere to look it up. That is the origin of the Live Music Project. Founder Shia Lyon went looking, and discovered that Seattle alone had around thirty community orchestras publishing their entire concert season as a JPEG. Megan Ihnen is now its executive director.

• An image is invisible to search. Around thirty Seattle orchestras had put their whole season into a picture file, so as far as Google was concerned the concerts were not happening.
• Listener agency is the product. Filter by piece, composer, instrument, price, house concert against concert hall, or sensory-friendly format.
• Spontaneous Free Tickets turns donated seats into audience development, with post-concert surveys fed back to organisations that almost never hear from first-time attendees.
• The software is built in-house by volunteers. Corporate matching hours from Seattle tech employers plus bootcamp graduates who need public-facing portfolio work.
• They ran the programmes manually for years before automating them. Which is why the automation fits what actually happens.
• Geographic expansion before new art forms. A deliberate order, and the opposite of what most non-profits do.

• The concert season nobody could search
• Listener agency
• Spontaneous Free Tickets
• Shipping software on a volunteer dev team
• Sponsorship that does not extract from the arts
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

She sees that their concert season is a JPEG on their website and realizes like, Google can’t scan this. Google has no idea that this concert is happening, right?

This is the whole problem in one sentence, and it is not unique to classical music. Any small organisation that publishes its schedule as a designed image has removed itself from search. The information is on the site. It is just not readable.

For a community orchestra the cost is direct. Someone in the same city is actively looking for the thing you are performing, and there is no path from their search to your hall.

The Live Music Project calls itself a classical music advocacy and tech-for-good organisation. Its answer to the discovery problem is a calendar built around how people actually decide to go to a concert.

• By piece, so the Brahms Double Concerto search that started all this now returns something.
• By composer and by instrument.
• By price, which quietly removes the biggest barrier for new attendees.
• By format: house concert against concert hall, and sensory-friendly performances.

But we’re using technology to make that easy. Just make it easy to be curious.

Organisations donate unsold seats. The project gets them to people who would not otherwise come. Then the part that makes it a programme rather than a giveaway: attendees answer a post-concert survey, and the responses go back to the organisation.

Small ensembles alm...