Ai-Ai, Captain
Dear Erin,
Sorry I haven’t posted in a bit - I got stuck. I am wearing a few different hats right now as things settle for me in my “semi-retired / gig work / third act” professional life and, to be honest, I’ve had a hard time keeping my various pursuits separate and distinct.
As you are someone constantly juggling multiple gigs, choreo jobs, performances, classes, and your office work, you are my superhero!! I don’t know how you do it. Just watching you perform two weekends ago in three separate dances - all amazing, and all entirely different, was inspiring. It can be done!!
Or can it, for us mere mortals? I dunno. I needed some help.
Here’s the thing: I have three separate blogs, all with different audiences, purposes, points of view, styles… but all written by me. Whenever I sat down to write something, I couldn’t remember what voice I was supposed to be using or what topic I should address. I needed a map. A cheat sheet.
Turns out, at the same time I have been trying to figure out how to use AI for something more than just plopping some writing into the chat bar and asking the software to spit out a better version. After an inspiring podcast or two, I decided to give my little Large Language Model-based buddy something different. I typed in exactly what I wanted each of the blogs to do, what audiences, etc. and asked that the GPT to return to me a table with all the relevant aspects of a good blog and within each aspect specific characteristics for each of the three blogs.
Hit send.
In less time than it took to reheat my pasta in the microwave, I had a neat, three-column table listing 10 attributes for a good blog and recommendations for each attribute for each of my three well-defined blogs. And… it was pretty good! Voice, topics, cadence, length, style, pictures, tone…
Could I have done it myself? Yeah, probably. It wasn’t rocket science. But it literally took seconds and gave me as output exactly what I had expected to spend the night creating. That was the first time I used AI for anything that called for any amount of analysis and I was impressed.
Expect me to say more about this going forward as I experiment with how AI can be specifically relevant to nonprofit management.
In the meantime, know that my chatbot told me that I only should post once a month on this blog, otherwise I would come off as an overwhelming mother. Ha!! I pushed back and said ”how about twice a month?” The chatbot relented and said that would be okay as long as I wasn’t pushy. But no more than twice a month!! (I told it that the blog P.O.V. was a mom writing business advice to her daughter, so I guess it leaned into the wealth of information available on the internet of overbearing moms.)
It also said that the pictures I use for the blog should be hand drawn to demonstrate warmth and a personal touch. Hmmm. That’s not my forte.
Ok, well, here goes.
I hope you like the picture. I’ll be back atcha you in two weeks!!! (If that feels pushy, LMK and I’ll back off and go with monthly!)
Love,
Mom
