Cherian Koshy is the Vice President of Product Strategy at Kindsight. He started in the nonprofit sector working in IT for the National Speech and Debate Association before transitioning to fundraising. He later founded an AI platform that helps create fundraising content easier.
In this episode of the RKD Group: Thinkers podcast, Cherian discusses the importance of addressing systemic challenges in the nonprofit sector and how the community can work together to solve them.
He shares about:
- His career journey in the nonprofit fundraising space.
- How mentors in the nonprofit community helped him learn and grow.
- The founding of Nonprofit OS, now known as Engage through Kindsight.
- The importance of addressing systemic challenges in the nonprofit sector
Show chapters
- 00:00 A Career Journey in the Nonprofit Sector
- 07:47 The Role of Mentorship
- 16:12 Developing Nonprofit OS (Engage)
- 26:04 The Integration of Technologies in Fundraising
- 31:52 Addressing Systemic Challenges in the Nonprofit Sector
Meet our guest
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Transcript
Justin McCord
Welcome to the RKD Group: Thinkers podcast, the podcast for nonprofit marketers and fundraisers. This show in particular, this episode has some application a little more on the fundraising side. And you know, it's a show, Ronnie, that's about people and the people who influence nonprofit marketing fundraising. I'm your host Justin McCord, Ronnie Richard here with me and on this show today we do we get a little bit more into the story of someone who is extremely influential in the fundraising part of the sector. Ronnie tells us about our guest.
Ronnie Richard
Our guest is Cherian Koshy. He is the vice president of product strategy at KindSight. And like you mentioned, he's got 25 years or more background in fundraising. And in this episode, we'll hear how that all came about. And his career is fascinating because he's got all these different aspects and roles that he played, whether it was like, you know, a fundraising role specifically, or a role as like an IT helper or developing software. He was the founder of the nonprofit OS, which is an AI content creation platform that he built during the pandemic. And now under KindSight that's KindSight's engagement platform. And so, he's got all these different aspects that he touched on through his career and kind of all brought him to where he is today in his role.
Justin McCord
Yeah, man, Cherian is, and y'all are gonna hear this, he is so smart. He is so thoughtful, and he's so well-spoken. And that stems from a little bit of his background and formative experiences in speech and debate, which have been instrumental to not just his path, but who he is.
Now Ronnie and I just finished this conversation. We had a brief moment before we were putting this together and we were talking about the snowball effect in cheering career of one person in particular that cheering is going to mention that helped push Something downhill it sounds weird to say push him downhill but just help push some momentum behind him and then a community of people in particular that came around him and have continued to come around him and how that has helped pushed cheering to, to where he is today and the broad impact that he's having today. So, part doctor, part lawyer, part engineer, and just all around like, keen influencer in the sector. Here is Cherian on the Thinker’s podcast.
Justin McCord
What's the, when you think back to like childhood Cherian, what's the first thing that you remember that you wanted to do?
Cherian Koshy
Well, I come from Indian immigrants. So, there were only three choices of professions. I think there probably still are only three choices of professions and that's doctor, lawyer, engineer. So, of those three, I was like, I think probably in the doctor, maybe lawyer front. And it turns out that everyone that I knew became an attorney. Like all my friends became attorneys.
Every guy at my wedding party, with the exception of one, I think, was an attorney. So that's where I thought I was gonna go. I thought like eventually the path would lead me down that way. But having gone through that process with so many friends, I was like, I don't know, I'm not bright enough to do this and pass the LSAT and get into law school. There's still dreams maybe someday of like night school, law school, something like that. And I knew I couldn't cut it in any of those other things. So totally fell backwards into fundraising given some other pathways. But I think that was, as I look back, I remember a high school class where they were like, what do you want to be? And I think I said doctor early in high school and then by late high school, everybody was like, no, you're going to be an attorney. So failed pathways, I guess.
Justin McCord
I don't. Okay, that's fair. That's fair. I actually think as well as I know you, I think you are part doctor, part lawyer and part engineer. Like I think you're actually a weird combo of all three in some way. Yeah, actually, we've actually got her here. Bring her in Ronnie. Let's
Cherian Koshy
Can you tell my mom that Justin?
Ronnie Richard
Yeah, surprise guest.
Cherian Koshy
More than awkward. I swear she still has no clue what I do. Like, been a real long time and no clue.
Justin McCord
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fair. But just your path and your persona and the way that you show up, there are elements of all three of those. Okay, so you wanted to, so you had that kind of nuanced journey and then you said you fell backwards into fundraising. You fell through an interesting trap door because as your LinkedIn states, like your first nonprofit position, at least from your LinkedIn, is with the National Speech and Debate Association in IT. And you go from IT to development. And I have never seen
Cherian Koshy
Yeah, so actually my very, very first job, because nobody puts their like high school job on resume or on LinkedIn, was at the Minnesota Zoo. And so my first job was in a nonprofit, loved working there. I did food service for the Minnesota Zoo, had those little carts that sold ice cream and whatnot.
And then, like every job that I had since then, it was in a nonprofit with very, rare exceptions. So, the interesting piece was that IT job came about as sort of an evolution. had worked, I competed in speech and debate as a student. I then went on to coach and there was a need in the organization to kind of solve some IT problems. We didn't have in-house IT staff. They didn't know how to manage some of the tools that had evolved around them. And they said, hey, would you consider doing this and bringing that subject matter expertise into some technical knowledge? And I was like, I had a little bit of technical knowledge. So don't get me wrong, I didn't go to school for IT or anything like that, but I had learned a little bit of WordPress and built some, you know, little bitty websites and things like that. And had a curiosity to be able to answer questions around like how to install a printer and whatnot, which is really, really what they needed. So, I joined them to kind of do double duty in regard to doing some coaching with my former team and then also help them out with some tech pieces and then that quickly. So, because I was embedded, I was hearing all the things that were happening inside the organization and having backgrounds in that universe, in that ecosystem. The development director said, hey, we're writing this grant. Can you point me in the direction of who to talk to and what to say and whatever? And that quickly spun out into writing a big chunk of the grant. The development director then left, and they said, "Well, we won this grant, now what do we do with it?" You're the person in charge, you gotta solve this problem. But also, do you wanna do this job? And I had no clue, zero clue what the job was. But that was the trap door that caught me.
Ronnie Richard
So, you get put in this position not knowing what you're doing. What do you do from that point? How did you move forward and how did you learn the skills you needed to do the fundraising that was required there?
Cherian Koshy
Yeah, so I would love to say that I was super thoughtful and methodical and, you know, went through the process of, you know, doing all of the things that I now literally teach people to do, but it really was like fumbling in the dark trying to figure out what was the right thing to do and really a bunch of trial and error. So, prior to that moment of taking on that role, I had done fundraising in these other types of nonprofits that I had worked in because we had to raise money to take the teams to camps or to tournaments and whatnot and do in some other pieces that I had done in other roles. So fundraising was sort of a thing that you did, but it wasn't a role. wasn't a job. And so was like, you just let people know like, hey, we're raising money for this thing. We're going to ask for this amount of money or whatever it was. And I had no real good insight. And frankly, you know, when my boss hears this, will not be surprised, my former boss hears this, won't be surprised that I took the job because it was better pay and it was a more secure, from my vantage point, it felt like a more secure future for me. But it wasn't like this is what I want to do with my life, and I see myself doing this for forever. I was just having fun and it seemed like something I could do.
Fortunately, my boss being smarter than me at the time was like, we need to help this guy get to where we need him to be for the organization's sake. So, they brought in Linda Liskowski, who wrote the book on the development plan, and she helped the organization do a strategic plan. But then she just sort of took me under her wing and said, I'm going to teach you everything I think you need to know. You're going to come to AFP chapter meetings with me because she was doing speaking stuff and would be that phone call away to help mentor me and stuff. so, I mean, I not only fell through the trap door of fundraising, but fell into a situation that's like perfect, right? Like had the potentially best person to pick me up and say, all right, here's what you should do, here's where you should go, and here's how to think about some of these things.
So, I certainly have in the past credited Linda as being a really important mentor to me and someone who helped put me on the path to where I am today. I'd also credit just a bunch of other people in the community. There are folks that I got connected with quickly that just said, let me help you talk through some of these issues or what are you doing and whatnot. Even vendors, so other fundraisers were certainly part of as I got plugged into AFP, but consultants that helped say, you want to think about it this way, here's our process for thinking about it. So, it really was this huge community effort of saying things like, little Turing doesn't know what he's doing, let's put stuff around him and see what grows as a result of this.
Justin McCord
Okay, think things are making so much more sense now like just the one just your your presence in AFP now and how formative that was for you then and that it helped you grow up in the space and quickly like tying that together having seen the role that you play with AFP and the you know, your prominence in speaking many, many events and even as a part of, you know, ICON the last couple of years to just like it invested in you and so you're investing back in it. And so, I love seeing that. And to your point, the communal effort of collegiality that we have in the sector and how that can help take someone and grow them so that they can succeed and learn and grow.
How did that take you into the art space? You're at an association, an SDA, you had spent time at a zoo. But that still counts, you were working there, et cetera. How in the world did that lead you to the Des Moines Performing Arts organization?
Cherian Koshy
Yeah, great question. So, I had spent a really long time in the speech debate in general. So before working for the organization, I was a competitor and then I was a coach and then worked for the National Global Organization. And through all of that, I felt like I had gotten to a point where there's an element of like, you get so embedded in an organization that everyone knows you, everyone has grown up with you. And so, the people on the board are people who knew me in high school, and they had seen me kind of evolve and whatnot. And at the same time, there was a lot of comfortability with who I was, where I came from and what I was doing for the organization. And I wanted to see like, is this something that I'm good at in this very small pond or is there something that I can offer beyond this? Is there something that I could do that's different, that's bigger and sort of to test what I was doing? And interesting enough, a lot of the kids who do in particular do speech end up in some sort of acting role. So, a number of people end up on Broadway or in Hollywood and whatnot. So, like Josh Gad would come back and do come to Nationals and do things with us and some other folks that were really great people to give back to the organization and the cause that helped them. And so, I knew some of those people, I knew some of what they did, and part of what we did when we were coaching, when we were competing, you
know, immerse ourselves in some of those things. like we would go to my first Broadway experience was as part of the speech and debate team when I was 15. We went to New York. I saw Patrick Stewart in The Tempest and sort of, you know, every year from then would continue to go see Broadway shows. So, the advantage, like as I was thinking about where I could go, what I could do that would be different. I'd also been traveling a lot because it was a global organization. I once called my boss and said that I had spent an entire work week that month in a car driving from airport to airport. And it just wasn't like a good use of my time. and I was, my family was starting to grow, and I was like, I would love a job that had me more kind of centrally located, a little less travel, but allowed me to stretch those muscles. And the job at DMPA came up and this is one of those once in a lifetime jobs. It was one of those jobs that like, it doesn't come open very often.
And so was like, if I could get in that job, that would be a really cool opportunity. And so I applied sort of on a lark, didn't think that they would pick me. I even told my boss then several times after that, I was like, I really thought I was not getting the call back. And they called me back. And that was also another formative experience of just being able to not only build that team, but also deepen relationships with donors, really think about the philosophy that I had around fundraising and philanthropy, and then of course go through a pandemic with them. That was nerve wracking and overwhelming and frustrating and there are no good adjectives for all of that in the performing arts, right? Like we got hit first, we got hit longest, and the nuances around that were painful for the entire performing arts sector.
Ronnie Richard
Cherian, I'm glad you brought up the pandemic because one of the things I wanted to ask you about was while you're at the Des Moines Performing Arts, that was like 2016 to 2021, but while you were there during the pandemic, that's when you started to develop the product you created, which was nonprofit OS. And we know that now that's called Engage through KindSight, right? How did that process come about? So, you're dealing with the difficulties of the pandemic and its impact on the performing arts, like you said, like, so you're dealing with that. And then on the side, you were working on this, this product, how did you come about
Cherian Koshy
So actually, as Justin mentioned, my speaking, I've been speaking sort of throughout. Like think my first icon was when I was at National Speech and Debate Association back in 2014 or something like that. But the interesting piece was I had done a little bit of speaking, but not a ton. Like once in a while, an icon, maybe a webinar here or there with someone, but it was the pandemic that actually jump started the speaking part.
And that was because the speech event that I did in high school and one of the ones that I coached was you get 30 minutes of preparation time to answer a question in seven minutes. So you don't know what the topic is at all. You draw three out of a hat and then you have 30 minutes to prep a seven minute speech.
Justin McCord
It's kind of what we did with you today.
Cherian Koshy
When people were looking for content and just answers to questions and just community building during the pandemic, they were like, what are you, can you talk about this? And I was like, yeah, absolutely. So pretty much every week I was doing some sort of speaking thing with someone because they were like, nobody knows what to say or what to do here and you can at least put together two sentences. I'm not suggesting that it was great by any means, but it was a lot of volume of content. During that time, I'm now talking to hundreds if not thousands of nonprofits who are all going through very similar things, not exactly the same things, don't get me wrong, but very similar things around decrease in staff and trying to keep revenue up and trying to figure out how to navigate this space where they don't really even understand what's happening or when this will end or anything. And so, we're facing that as well, trying to keep the ship afloat while we've lost, you know, three fifths of our staff at this point. We've called all of our donors. We don't know what else to do. We don't have any vendor support because we don't have any budget. Like we just can't do anything. So, I joke that I had watched everything on Netflix and I had too many open bottles of wine, which isn't too far from the truth. Like we couldn't even go into the building, right? Like that was how, how bad it was.
The development staff went in a little bit and I, I got to bike to work, um, because it was a 40,000 square foot building and no one was in there. um, we, we were, I was trying to figure out like, how do we do stuff with limited staff? Open AI had just come out with their API well before ChatGPT. And I just started playing around with it, like watching YouTube, figuring stuff out, reaching out to people who were in the space, the same as I was.
So, like I have Y Combinator CEOs on speed dial because they are just like Linda Liskowski a decade or two before they were just like yeah, let's put some things around Tarrion baby Tarrion figure out what grows and they were super helpful. They saw the problem and they were like, yes, we want to help. We want to help you. We want to help the sector. And so frankly, internally, it was just solving our own problem. That was the point. It's like we needed to get stuff out. They're like, we can build segments, or we can build email appeals or direct mail, probably not direct mail appeals at that time. But whatever we were doing, we could build it and then see it and use it from that raw code. then some friends said, you should make this available online and like, okay, whatever. And I just put it up there and it just, it sort of took off a couple hundred customers around the globe later. And it was.
It was a fun little thing that was happening while I did my regular job. So really born out of curing what the community was feeling and needing at the time, knowing a little bit about what I was feeling and needing at the same time, putting those pieces together with some code and some expertise and saying, I think this can.
Justin McCord
The first time that I wave reached out to you, the first time, like that very first conversation went through your mind. Like you've got something now that you've born and that you've grown. Is it fear? Is it excitement? Is it both?
Cherian Koshy
The best adjective that I would use is disbelief. it was probably about six months, a year in the field where we're getting customers. Most of the time I knew where they were coming from. Sometimes I didn't and I was like, this is cool. This is actually a thing. was paying me enough that I was like, this is a lovely little thing that I don't spend a lot of time on, but I can actually help people that I couldn't with consulting.
It was a way to provide sort of my expertise and my help in a way that didn't cost so much that people were dissuaded from working with me for whatever reason. And I was still working at a nonprofit. So, like I didn't have time to take on a bunch of consulting clients, especially when people were recovering from the pandemic. So, I was really looking for partnership opportunities that first time out, I was like who wants to figure out with me how to integrate this into their platform, how to think bigger about making this more accessible. And so, I was an iWave customer at the time, of course I went up to iWave and talked about, here's how I'm using iWave as part of what I'm doing with this platform. So, the story that I told them was I was at AFP New Orleans and my CEO at the time was meeting with a donor and I said, what do we know about this donor? And I took the iWave profile and had it summarized it and create a set of talking points for our CEO. And I had to get on stage to do the keynote. I didn't have time to really do this. So, I sent it over to my major gift officer and said, can you take the profile and review this, make sure it works, and then send it over to our CEO? She's like, this is really good. I made a couple of edits and changes, but this is fantastic. And so...
When I showed it to them, they were like, this is interesting. We should talk more. A few months later, a couple more conversations happened, and they were like, we'd like to buy you. We'd like to buy the software. And I was like, OK. That's not what I anticipated. I'll say this. It took between April of that year and October of that year to get it all done and dusted.
And it wasn't until the paperwork was completely signed and everything was done that, I actually believed that this thing was going to work.
Justin McCord
How did you explain that to your mom?
Cherian Koshy
I don't think she still understands what happened. it was, yeah, so there were words around software and she's like, OK, as long as you're happy, whatever.
Justin McCord
Yeah, I'm looking for advice and counsel on how to explain, you know, what I do to my mom. So that's why I'm going to keep coming back to that, Cherian Koshy
Cherian Koshy
If you figure that out, you let me know.
Justin McCord
All right, we can workshop it.
Ronnie Richard
Please let me know too, because yes, it's a continuing problem.
Justin McCord
Maybe there's an Icon session that we can put together that's how to explain what a fundraiser or someone in the nonprofit sector does to their mom. That would be riveting.
Cherian Koshy
That would be brilliant.
Ronnie Richard
I think that's the next AI creation we need is an AI tool that translates your job to your mom and explains it in terms that your mom would understand.
Cherian Koshy
Yes. I'll get to work on that right away. That is, that absolutely is a need.
Ronnie Richard
So, Cherian, to fast forward to today a little bit, your VP of product strategy at KindSight, you've been through these roles in development, you've had some tech background, obviously your speaking background, how does that all come into play to where you are today?
Cherian Koshy
Yeah, so part of the acquisition of the product was also the acquisition of me. And so, you know, I think sometimes people think about that around like, I'm going to do my time and then I'm going to get out. I'm more of the opinion because I was an iWave customer and I knew these people, I felt like it was a much better fit than somewhere else. And I really want to stay connected not only to the product, but to these people and to the sector at large. And so, one of the things that is high on my list of things to do is to talk about what does this look like integrating with the entire product schema that we have, the fundraising intelligence platform. So, we're looking at how to make the job of fundraisers just a little bit easier and a little bit more seamless.
And that starts with good, the combination of big data and automation and AI. And that's what we think we've put together at this point with all of these acquisitions. So as you all know, the core original iWave product has been around for 40 years. And, um, you know, from my vantage point, why I was a customer best in class data. And I loved the fact that I could dial in to things that, you know, I knew were important. Like if I was working in the arts, I could oversample on the arts. I had, in my last job, for example, we had donors that were Silicon Valley or New York, we could dial down on real estate to be able to secure that piece. So, all of that is great. AI enables us to provide, you know, just in terms of that piece, summaries of information or understandings of segments and being able to build donor personas and those types of things in a really unique, meaningful way that helps
Fundraisers get to their end point a little bit faster. Now with the acquisition of UCI Innovation and their ascend product, we actually have that built into a CRM. So now you have the CRM, the donor data component, the third party donor data component, and then AI, which now enables you to do some really, really cool things. And it allows us to have this really amazing blue sky thinking around what we can do when we have first party data that's coming from the donor and the fundraising process combined with that third party data augmented with AI. And I think, you know, the use cases that we've now demoed that are now in pilots with a gigantic university and a huge hospital system and will debut this fall are amazing. we have the hospital system basically testing out a pathway where someone they're a patient at the hospital, we immediately like instantaneously screen that donor, we provide them with the score, and then based upon their score, we have a set of priorities for the fundraiser. Like this is a person your CEO or your board trustee should contact right away, here's a phone call script for them. This is a person that you should send, of course, like an email or a direct mail thank you or whatever, you put that the script for that is ready to go and you lightly edit it, but it's pulling together all those pieces in a seamless fashion. Same thing with alumni or with a college or university, right? Like pulling together, you know, if they're a parent of a student, if they're an alumnus, what does that look like? What are the action steps and having those action steps actually built out, ready for you to do. And I think we're just scratching the surface now of what else can be done when all of those are put together.
All of these pieces are modular. So even if you're not using iWave, for example, or you're not using Ascend, or you're not using our Engage AI tool, you could use and mix and match these different pieces. But we're really excited about how all of them work together to improve the system. And you're not looking at a big, long tech stack to be able to run multiple pieces. It's all just ready for you.
I'm just thrilled to be able to kind of work in that system where we're seeing opportunity and connecting the dots and saying we've never been able to do this before. Now what we can do that, but I think it's really cool.
Justin McCord
I agree with you, it's so here's how I'm going to connect it back to what I said earlier is I'm going to try and rewind it. And I've been thinking as you've been talking and, and I've got two thirds of it, right. The last third, we're going to have to continue to workshop. So to me, you're right now you're in your doctor phase and it's because of the way that you're taking and, and helping diagnose some systemic challenges that are present in the sector and you're bringing different solutions and you're helping pull together technology and strategy from different aspects of multiple different companies now that have come together. And so that to me is your doctor phase. Prior to that, I see your engineering phase in building nonprofit OS. And so that only leaves the lawyer phase early on, I guess, or maybe that's the future. It's one or the other, but you've checked off two of the three, least for me. So please, please tell the Koshy’s that I said that.
Cherian Koshy
I will share this recording with my mom. I'm sure she's the one that will be most intrigued by it, but still the least understand that. fact that you said it is probably good enough for her, but I appreciate that. think as I think about the work that I do, mean, part of what I do is go out and talk not necessarily about our products. I I'm happy to talk about our products, but I really do want to talk about some of the systemic challenges that we have, whether it's in
donor psychology and behavioral science, I talk a lot about that, or in leadership and management and diversity and inclusion and all of those pieces. The idea that I keep circling around with regard to the doctor phase that you've crystallized is that there's a triage functionality that we need to address. And I probably should have mentioned this very early on. Once, like somewhere in there, I thought about being an EMT. I actually went to school
I got my EMT license. So this triage mentality keeps coming back to me around like, you've got to solve the worst problem first in many cases. And you don't address some problems that could be addressed later if there's a gaping chest wound. And I do think that there are some gaping chest wounds in our sector that we have to address. And I'm sure we'll all disagree on what those big gaping chest wounds are.
Nonetheless, we need to have lots of smart, thoughtful, committed people who are willing to say, this is a big problem and we have to focus and address this, as opposed to people saying, let's just solve and band -aid every problem that's out there. And by the way, how do I make money selling the band -aids? Right. And they don't really care about the homeostasis of the patient, right? Like the security of the patient, they're just selling the bandaid. So, if there is one big gaping chest wound that I see, it's that there are, I don't ever consider myself an expert. I am far from it in many, many ways. I also think, you know, an expert built the Titanic, and an amateur built the Ark. So, I really want to be careful about any, you know, I'm not going to speak for anybody else, but at least from my perspective, I'm never going to call myself an expert. But I do have time and I do have the ability to think things through with other people. And so, coming back to things like the community that was around me and AFP, I love like pouring into people and giving back and just spending the time because I do think I have a vantage point around what does the sector look like? And I try to keep this in mind in everything that I do. What does the sector look like 20 years from now or 40 years from now and how do we design a sector today that promotes a healthy sector, not just four months from now, but 40 years from now?
Ronnie Richard
Cherian Koshy, you may not consider yourself an expert, but as we've talked about here, your background as a fundraiser, as a tech consultant, as a developer of software, and call it the triaging doctor for the nonprofit sector, you've certainly offered a lot to our industry. to all our listeners, find Cherian Koshy on LinkedIn and connect with him and pay attention to AFP where he's heavily involved and just follow him along if you want to learn some cool stuff. So, cheering and thanks for joining us.
Cherian Koshy
Thanks for having me. I always appreciate talking with you guys.
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