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This episode is presented by Bloomerang, the trusted, all-in-one giving platform that connects your data, streamlines your systems, and helps your mission go further. Learn more here.

From Certification to Skills: Preparing Nonprofits for the AI Economy with Naria Santa Lucia

There’s something about being in a room with 1,400 nonprofit leaders from 40 countries that strips away the noise. Everyone there is working on something real. The conversations in the hallways matter. The energy is hard to manufacture anywhere else.

That’s the setting for this episode of Missions to Movements. Recorded live at the Microsoft Global Nonprofit Leaders Summit in Seattle, I sat down with Naria Santa Lucia, Microsoft Elevate’s GM and the MC of the entire week, to talk about something that’s been on every nonprofit professional’s mind: AI skilling, what it actually means for the people doing this work, and how we build a future where opportunity doesn’t just go to those who already have it.

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Who Is Naria Santa Lucia?

Naria’s career doesn’t follow a straight line, and she’ll be the first to admit it.

She’s led workforce transformation programs, run a legal aid fundraising campaign in Washington State, served as an executive director, and directed a STEM scholarship initiative where 96% of students were employed within six months of graduating. Her board chair for that scholarship program? Brad Smith. That relationship opened the door to Microsoft.

That path, immigrant roots, a father who stayed in the country because of a high-demand science degree, years of work at the intersection of education, workforce access, and economic opportunity, is exactly why her role at Microsoft Elevate fits. Her personal mission and Microsoft’s mission happen to be the same thing: make sure talent and opportunity meet, for everyone.

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What Microsoft Elevate Actually Does

Microsoft Elevate sits inside one of the world’s largest technology companies with a specific mandate: widen the circle of opportunity for people who might otherwise be left out of AI’s benefits.

The theory is grounded. Three systems largely determine whether people thrive: education, the workforce system, and nonprofits (which function as the safety net holding everything else up). Elevate works to make sure the people inside those systems, teachers, fundraisers, volunteer coordinators, job coaches, have the AI skills they need to do their work better.

That means not just teaching people to use a tool, but building pathways that are designed for specific roles and real daily tasks. A fundraiser and a classroom teacher need different entry points. The goal is adoption that actually sticks, not a training that gets forgotten the week after.

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The Shift from Certification to Skills and Why It Matters

During the Summit’s keynote, the distinction between certification and skills came up in a way that’s worth unpacking. When a genuinely new general-purpose technology arrives, the way the internet did, the way personal computing did, the people who benefit most early on tend to be those who already have access to skill development and credentials.

Naria’s point is that this time, we have a chance to do it differently. Stackable, verifiable credentials, the kind you can add to a LinkedIn profile and signal to the world “I know how to do this,” can open doors for people who don’t have a traditional degree or pedigree. That philosophy is at the heart of what Elevate is building with LinkedIn.

The parallel for fundraisers is tighter than it might seem. You’re already trying to build personalized pathways for your donors. Microsoft Elevate is doing the same thing for nonprofit professionals. The underlying logic is identical: if a learning journey feels like it was built for you and your actual work, you’re far more likely to follow it.

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The Real State of AI and Workforce Change

Naria is refreshingly direct on this: anyone claiming to know exactly which jobs will disappear because of AI is overstating what we know.

What is happening is a shift in the skills mix within existing roles. A software developer today spends far less time on hard coding and far more time thinking about systems, team dynamics, and front-end architecture. By 2030, LinkedIn data suggests that roughly 75% of the skills required in most roles will look different from what they are today, even if the job title stays the same.

For nonprofit teams, this is practical information. The question isn’t whether AI will affect your organization’s work. It’s whether your team is building the familiarity now to use it well when you need it.

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What AI Can Actually Do for Fundraisers

Naria’s fundraising experience gave her a grounded answer to this. She didn’t say AI would replace relationship-building or make asks for you. She said it would let you do what you’re already doing faster and with more precision.

Think about the scholarship program she ran. Building the program, identifying the right donors, developing the narrative, telling the story back to funders, AI can support every step of that. The strategy stays human. The judgment stays human. The relationships stay human. But the time it takes to research, draft, and communicate shrinks considerably.

The real-world proof came up in a panel I led at the Summit with Team Rubicon. When the Texas floods hit, Team Rubicon had implemented Microsoft Copilot just months before. Within hours, they had media bullet points, press releases, social posts, and donor emails ready. Larissa described it as transformative, and for a $40 million organization, that campaign raised $2 million. Speed, in emergency fundraising, is directly tied to lives helped and dollars raised.

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Don’t Chase the Funding. Stay the Course.

Melinda French Gates spoke at the Summit, and she said something that landed hard in the room: take big swings. Naria came back to that idea when we wrapped the conversation, and her advice to nonprofits is worth repeating plainly.

Don’t pivot your mission to chase a funder. Don’t reshape your programs because a new funding priority emerged.

If you are genuinely solving a real problem for a real community, the donors will come, especially if you’re telling the story clearly and using the tools available to find the people who care about exactly what you do.

That’s where AI becomes an asset for mission-driven organizations. Identifying aligned donors, communicating your work more precisely, reaching more people with less overhead, these are the places where AI earns its place. The mission itself stays yours.

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Two Things Naria Tells Every Young Professional

Before we wrapped, Naria circled back to something she shares with every person early in their career, and it applies just as well to nonprofit professionals thinking about AI adoption:

You never know who’s in the room. Someone in that space may become a champion for you, not just a mentor, but someone with the ability to open a door you didn’t even know existed. Show up, do excellent work, and stay open to who’s standing next to you.

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What This Means for Your Organization Right Now

AI skilling for nonprofits doesn’t require a massive budget or a dedicated IT department.

It starts with identifying the specific roles on your team, the tasks those people do every day, and then finding the entry points where AI can remove friction. A volunteer coordinator doesn’t need to know how large language models work. They need to know how to draft a communications sequence in a fraction of the time.

The organizations building that muscle now, even incrementally, will be in a stronger position in 2027 than the ones waiting for a perfect implementation plan.

Resources & Links

This episode is presented by Bloomerang, the trusted, all-in-one giving platform that connects your data, streamlines your systems, and helps your mission go further. Learn more here.

See how one team surpassed a $1M match and raised $2.25M for their mission with Penny, Bloomerang’s AI-powered fundraising strategist. Learn more at bloomerang.com.

Connect with Naria on LinkedIn and learn more about Microsoft Elevate on their website.

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My book, The Monthly Giving Mastermind, is here! Grab a copy here and learn my framework to build, grow, and sustain subscriptions for good.

Not sure where to start in building your program? Start with this $5 audit to know where your gap is. Takes 5-10 minutes max, and you’ll know where to start –> Monthly Giving Interactive Audit 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dana Snyder
Dana Snyder is the founder of Positive Equation, creator of the Monthly Giving Builder, a sought-after keynote speaker and workshop facilitator, and the author of The Monthly Giving Mastermind: A Framework to Build, Grow & Sustain Subscriptions for Good. She is also the host of the global nonprofit podcast Missions to Movements, and host of the Monthly Giving Summit, a worldwide event for nonprofit professionals focused on building stronger recurring revenue programs.