Dispatch: The biggest takeaways from PEAK2024

Episode Notes:

• Connect with Sam on LinkedIn

• Learn more about PEAK2024

• Join PEAK’s Connect, their community of grant managers

• Learn about Submittable’s AI Principles

• Check out Vu Le’s blog Nonprofit AF

• Read Edgar Villanueva’s book Decolonizing Wealth

• Read TAG’s Responsible AI Adoption in Philanthropy report

• Join TAG’s community 

• Join the Foundation Financial Officers Group

• Learn more about Submittable’s AI tools

• Read Submittable’s AI principles

• Join Sam at NASCIO 2024 Mid Year

• Join Sam at Engage for Good 2024

Transcript

Welcome to Impact Audio. I am Sam Caplan vice president of social impact at Submittable. Today's episode is a dispatch from PEAK 2024 where I'll share my biggest takeaways from the event. It's conference season which means I'm traveling a ton and getting to meet up with people that I look forward to seeing all year long and meeting some new folks along the way.

One of my biggest events every year is PEAK Grantmaking's Annual Conference because it brings together an incredibly thoughtful and passionate group of attendees. I always go home inspired. Last week I was in Seattle for PEAK 2024 which focused on reimagining philanthropy and transforming the grantmaking sector.

My colleague Sam Ellsworth wasn't able to attend, so we sat down together so I could fill her in on what I heard and saw while I was in Seattle. Here we are.

So can you please tell me about who PEAK Grantmaking is as well as a little bit about their annual conference?

I'm happy to Sam.

So PEAK Grantmaking is a philanthropy serving organization sometimes we call these types of orgs member organizations and this is one that is really intended for grants professionals who we sometimes call grants managers.

I know that PEAK has over 8,000 members and they mostly work at foundations and other grant making organizations. And one of the things that's really interesting about PEAK is that their mission is to advance equitable and effective grantmaking practices.

But to me I think the equitable part of that Sam is what is super interesting. So Satonya Fair is their CEO.

She took the helm of the organization back in 2020 and she really spearheaded this whole mission to approach grantmaking through a more equitable lens. And by the way fun fact, I think Satonya was our very first guest ever on Impact Audio.

True fact.

We'll put a link to that up in the show notes. Anyway, Satonya's leadership really helped to transition the role of grants management from one that was viewed as being very administrative to one that is becoming more strategic. And today a lot of grants managers see themselves as change agents, not just at their own organizations but really for like all of philanthropy and that is a super cool evolution of the grants management role.

So I've been attending the conference for like 10 years now and honestly I think that 2024 was one of the best conferences that I've ever been to. The theme of this year's conference was reimagining and many of the keynotes and sessions all focused on this idea of reimagining how philanthropy and our work in philanthropy can be more impactful and more effective and lead to greater equity. So this year there were like 1,200 attendees in person and there were several 100 more who joined online and there were just tons of really incredible sessions.

Other really cool events there, like the convening of PEAKs LGBTQ caucus and the Black men in philanthropy group got together. I'll end this very long winded preamble by just saying that for me PEAK isn't just an opportunity to go and learn new skills or even to discover emerging trends in philanthropy, but I love it because it's an opportunity where I get to go once a year and reconnect with tons of old friends in philanthropy and I get to make new connections and meet new people.

And the tone at PEAK is just always totally full of hope and excitement about the future and so much discussion about how we're all going to be trying to reshape the way that philanthropy works.

Awesome. So you touched on this a little bit, the theme this year was all about reimagining and transforming philanthropy. Why do you think PEAK chose to center their conference around those ideas this year?

So I've told this story a bunch so I know I sound like a broken record Sam, like a few years back during the pandemic that really shined a light on how inefficient philanthropy and grantmaking can really be. We discovered during that time that so many of our processes are like overly burdensome and really slow and very rarely were applicants and grantees centered. And I think since the pandemic we've been talking a lot about all of these problems.

And I think that this year PEAK really wanted to take this moment to focus on all the great ideas and practices that have emerged since that time and really to ensure that grants professionals have this chance to take a big step back and look at the big picture and really think about how to adopt all of these better practices. And I say that I also want to say with a word of caution, there's still a ton of work that's left to be done. I definitely credit PEAK for shaping the conversation around philanthropy and equity and beginning to position that grant manager role as something that's more strategic within foundations.

But I don't think that we are quite yet making like the super wide scale change and impact that we hope to see. But I think that PEAK just wanted to give us license to imagine and to reflect on what could be and to help lay the groundwork for what we might be able to do today and how to make progress and where we still need more ideas and support.

So you mentioned that this is one of the most successful or maybe the most fun of PEAK Grantmaking event that you've attended, were there certain sessions or speakers that stood out to you the most this year?

Oh, my gosh, get ready. I'm going to talk for a long time now Sam because there were tons. So I would start with the opening keynote which I thought was pretty amazing. So that one featured Satonya and she was interviewing Edgar Villanueva who wrote the book <i>Decolonizing</i> <i>Wealth,</i> and by the way he was also a guest of ours on Impact Audio so you can check that episode out.

And the other guest was Vu Le who I think everybody in philanthropy knows at this point. He writes this really amazing blog about the nonprofit sector and somehow he manages to be both hilarious and often scathing in terms of his criticism of the nonprofit sector and that happens to be mostly about funders. So the session itself focused a lot about just them talking about how philanthropy has to up its game in order to make the world a better place.

And I think that Sam one of the things that really stood out to me about this particular keynote was just that Edgar and Vu both showed a lot of just real authentic vulnerability on stage and they opened up and they talked about what's going well and what's not going well, both in their own work and their lives and within philanthropy. So that was one that I thought was just really heartfelt and impactful for me. I think that all of the keynotes were really good this year.

Another one that I really loved focused on reimagining persistence and there were several guests on stage for this. Jamie Allison who is the executive director of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, she spoke a lot about the strategic role of grants management within a foundation. And for me Sam just hearing an executive director talk about grants management at all was like pretty fantastic, it's usually not a role or a topic that you hear the executive director or CEO of a foundation talking about.

I would say like for most of the history of time, like that grants management role was relegated to back office administration and often didn't have a seat at the table with other foundation roles and leaders. And Jamie and the other guests on stage made this case that grant's managers are highly strategic and that it's time that foundations stop segmenting the folks who perform administrative work from the folks who are on the program side of the house.

So those were a couple of the big keynotes that really stood out in terms of individual sessions. There was one titled transforming the way social sector data flows, this feature Jamie Carroll from the Roots and Wings Foundation along with Allison Jannette from Candid, Davis Fisher who is one of our friends at PEAK, Sandi Boga from Impact Genome Project, and Hope Lyons from Charity Navigator.

So they focused a lot on the data and the services that their respective organizations provide but they also had a really rich discussion around how the social sector needs better data and why it needs better data in terms of improving our own research and analysis and simplifying the grants process for our applicants and nonprofit organizations.

And then my last call out about that session Sam actually didn't have anything to do with data. But Jamie from Roots and Wings made this offhanded comment that her organization grants around $65 million annually and they only have five people on staff.

Wow.

And that was just utterly mind blowing for me to discover like that there are organizations out there giving away tens of millions of dollars with like five people, I mean it's honestly just it's incredible. And she said that one of the ways that they do this is that their grant application only has five questions on it and it was just so refreshing and I think just an incredible testament to what's possible when we intentionally simplify our work processes and philanthropy.

Wow, man I would love to see that application.

I bet she would share it with us.

I'd love to see that. So Sam I know you also hosted a session at PEAK on artificial intelligence, how did that go?

I thought, me being humble, I think it was pretty good. So what I heard from our friends at PEAK, it was one of the better attended sessions and unfortunately. A lot of people didn't actually get into it, the room filled up really, really quickly and for a couple of minutes there was like standing room only and then I think they had to start turning people away.

And this was not because of me, I totally credit my colleagues and the topic. This session was titled leveraging AI opportunities and pitfalls for grants professionals and I want to give full credit here to Kyle Renninger who is a technical product manager at PEAK. He was the one that put together and led this session.

And then I was one of three panelists, the others were Jean Westrick who is the new executive director at TAG or the Technology Association of Grantmakers, and Rachelle Patella who is the senior manager of Grant Operations and Knowledge Management at the Conrad Hilton Foundation. So the four of us together covered a ton of ground in this session. So specifically I talked a lot about Submittable approach to artificial intelligence and specifically three amazing AI features that we have just released in our platform.

So everybody will be hearing much more about that I'm sure. I also talked about how AI in general can benefit applicants and foundation staff. Jean talked a lot about TAGs responsible AI adoption framework, Rachelle covered a bunch of use cases around how she and her colleagues at the Hilton Foundation are using tools like ChatGPT to do some real world data work like assigning codes to grants and formatting grant data, that was really cool.

And then lastly, Kyle did this super incredible demo where he took a whole bunch of grant data and he used that data to supplement ChatGPT and he built a chatbot that was capable of querying and using that grant data and finding unique insights in it. And what was really cool Sam is that he did this with like I would say probably pretty limited technical knowledge, I don't know that Kyle is a software developer I think he's just someone who identifies as a person who likes technology. So he used some open source tools that are available to everyone.

And I was just really impressed because he was able to use AI to do the same thing that we typically spend tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to do by creating a huge data warehouse and using these really complex data analytics tools. And I thought that his example was just this really great example of how our work is going to revolutionize the way that foundations and knowledge management teams are doing their work. And personally I think it's going to reshape a lot about how we do our work as grants professionals.

Amazing. So earlier you mentioned that PEAK isn't just an opportunity to learn practical skills or discover emerging trends, but also just a really awesome networking space. What's one thing for people who didn't attend this event? What should they know about it?

I would say and this maybe a little bit broader than just this particular event but I would say what you should know is that if you are a grants professional or if you have any role in philanthropy, there is a community out there for you. And even beyond community, I think it's a tight knit space and it often feels like a family affair when all grants managers get together to talk about their work and their challenges.

So there are a lot of people and organizations out there that I think are all experiencing the same challenges and they're thinking about these really innovative ideas and ways of working. And by attending events like PEAK, you can learn about those things and you can begin to adopt those best practices that you're learning about. So if you're a grants manager, there's PEAK but if you're a technologist there's TAG, which I mentioned earlier. If you're a finance professional, there's the foundation financial officers group.

So my takeaway here is that you don't have to go it alone, you should get out there, find the people who are your people, network with them, connect with them, make the time to attend an annual conference like this. It's just really energizing and fun and uplifting.

You use this word in the title of your session the pitfalls piece. I recall that when I attended PEAK last year, I loved like you commented earlier that it was such a warm networking environment. People are really open or seem to be really open about sharing their pitfalls or where they're having challenges and putting those vulnerable cards on the table but also being so open to sharing those best practices.

Totally right.

Here's what's worked for me, you should try it out as well.

So great to hear that that's continued on this year as well.

So obviously PEAK 2024, huge success. Any closing thoughts for the folks that were unable to attend?

Just a couple. So the first thing that comes to mind is that Submittable is a proud sponsor of this particular event. I was there with my colleagues Brady and Nico and we had this incredible time just like hanging out at the booth and introducing ourselves to tons of grants managers who stopped by because they wanted to learn more about who's Submittable is, what our platform does, what differentiates us from other grants management systems out there.

So that was a real highlight for me. I would also just reiterate I encourage everyone to just like find your people out there, make time to get away from the office, make real world connections with people who are like minded and like hearted. I feel Sam like I'm super lucky because in my role at Submittable I get to attend a bunch of these conferences and convenings and gatherings every year.

So in a couple of weeks I'll be going to my next one. It is the North American State Chief Information Officers which is a mouthful that abbreviation is NASCIO.

I'll be going to the NASCIO midyear event in Washington DC. A few weeks after that I'm off to the Engage for Good conference in Minneapolis, that one focuses on social impact for corporations.

So if you're listening and you're attending any of these, look for my colleagues and I. We sponsor a bunch of these and we love to go and engage and really just be part of the community. And then Sam the last thing I would add a little bit selfserving parting comment from me is that I'm super active on LinkedIn and I regularly post my thoughts and my learnings from these different conferences and I try to start a lot of conversations out there about philanthropy and technology and what's coming down the pipe.

So feel free to connect with me or follow me or whatever you prefer. We'll put my LinkedIn address in the show notes and would love to make new friends over LinkedIn and hear what everybody else is up to out there in the world of philanthropy and CSR.

Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing Sam. Great to hear about PEAK.

Thanks for asking me all the great questions.

Thanks for tuning in. PEAK recently announced that next year's conference will be in New Orleans in March 2025. Can't wait to see you there so we can catch up over a plate of beignets. Until next time. time.