Infoxchange crafts tailored educational resources in hours instead of days with NotebookLM

“Doing this work manually may have taken a week or more of in-depth collation, review, and analysis, but with NotebookLM, we had a starting point for building our training modules in half a day — saving us a week’s worth of valuable time.” 

Snapshot:

To help nonprofits overcome a common challenge — delivering social impact services with lean budgets and resources — Infoxchange designs training programs to help nonprofit organisations leverage technology. The team relies on NotebookLM to accelerate industry research, improve training development processes, and focus on providing program strategy and educating clients. Learn how NotebookLM helps Infoxchange:

• Speed up resource review time by a week

• Simplify access to new AI-powered tools for non-technical users

• Free time to focus on strategic initiatives rather than manual work

Origin story

Infoxchange is a nonprofit social enterprise that has been delivering technology for social justice since 1989. Today, Infoxchange works alongside more than 35,000 community, government, and corporate services and partner organisations on social programs. Together, we solve issues around homelessness, family violence, mental health, and disability, as well as offer support to First Nations communities, women, youth, and families. 

We are committed to delivering solutions that address the unique challenges of organisations across the nonprofit sector. This typically involves offering a combination of technology, strategic guidance, and educational support. The technology areas we advise on most frequently include technology foundations, data and cybersecurity, and AI. 

When designing our programs, we focus a great deal on understanding their challenges of the communities we serve, collating existing resources, and making informed and targeted recommendations for solutions.  

When considering new AI tools within Infoxchange, we want to be certain they’re practical and serve a clear purpose. For our new AI education programs, we found that NotebookLM would help us fill an immediate gap and potentially save hours on manual research. Since we’d already worked closely with Google as part of the Google for Nonprofits and Google Workspace for Nonprofits programs, we trusted that NotebookLM, as part of the Workspace offering, would be familiar, secure, and easy to use.

The adoption of NotebookLM

As we assembled our AI training, we realised we had four distinct audience personas that would each require unique training approaches. Our first persona is the “AI Sceptic” who may need some AI 101 educational resources. The next is the “AI Experimenter” who needs more hands-on resources to help them identify where AI can fit into their work. “AI Implementers” are specialists in their fields who are excited to maximize their sector-specific AI use cases, so we can offer them the means to do that. And lastly, we have “AI Influencers” who are passionate AI evangelists who are leading the AI adoption for their nonprofit.

To meet each persona’s needs, we used NotebookLM to easily create a notebook, then uploaded our data and background research and asked the tool to review the sources related to a specific persona. We then asked what additional training each persona may require based on missing information, and NotebookLM provided a list of training topics. Then, with the topics in mind, we probed further and asked NotebookLM to elaborate on the learning objectives related to each topic. Doing this work manually for new training programs used to take a week or more of in-depth collation, review, and analysis. NotebookLM gave us a starting point for building training modules in half a day — a full week faster than before.

By using NotebookLM in combination with our other AI tools to lay the groundwork, we can be more strategic about further developing our training content. We can then deliver higher quality service by freeing up our team members to spend time on developing strategy and management rather than time-consuming operational tasks. 

Looking ahead

As early adopters of integrating AI tools into our workflows, we’re excited to share the progress we’ve made with our broader teams and our clients. When we have these conversations with colleagues and others in the industry, it’s easier than ever to show them exactly how valuable these tools have been to serve our mission. Our overall AI education programming will include NotebookLM training and webinars to showcase its applications for the nonprofit sector. We can put our consulting hats on, ask people about their challenges, and demonstrate how they can really customize it to meet their needs because we’ve seen it firsthand. If you are a nonprofit interested in learning more, try our AI learning persona quiz and join our community to stay up to date on the latest resources.