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From Months to DAYS: How AI Is Helping Children International Scale to 275,000 Kids with Tim Bachta

A child in Guatemala once tried to give Tim Bachta one of his pet chickens. It was a thank-you gift, offered during a visit to see the families Children International serves firsthand. Tim couldn’t bring it home (customs would have had a few questions), but the moment stuck with him. It’s the kind of detail that reminds you why the technology work matters in the first place.

In this episode of Missions to Movements, recorded live at the Microsoft Global Nonprofit Leaders Summit in Seattle, I sat down with Tim Bachta, VP of Global Technology at Children International, to talk about how his team built one of the most field-driven AI adoption stories in the nonprofit sector. Tim came into this work from the for-profit world five and a half years ago, and what he’s built since centers on one consistent idea: start with the friction, not the technology.

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From Connecting Revenue to Investors, to Connecting Revenue to Mission

Tim’s background is in the for-profit sector, and the mindset he brought with him is simple: it’s still business. The difference is what the revenue connects to. In the for-profit world, that’s investors. At Children International, it’s the families and children the organization serves.

Children International currently works with about 220,000 kids. The goal over the next three years is to grow that number to 275,000 or more, and Tim’s team is using technology to get there without inflating the budget along the way.

What’s changed for Tim personally is just as telling. He talked about waking up knowing the day’s work adds value, and going to bed knowing it helped a specific child or family somewhere in the world. That’s the lens for everything else in this conversation.

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The Letter That Used to Take Eight Hours

Children International runs a sponsor letter program: donors write to the children they sponsor, and those children write back. Before Copilot, translating a single letter could take up to eight hours. The physical process added even more time. Letters traveled from a community center to home office, got sorted, shipped out, and made their way back through the same chain in reverse. The full loop could stretch a month or two before a sponsor ever heard back.

Today, that turnaround is a matter of days. Translation that used to consume most of a workday now takes a few minutes.

Tim sponsors a child named Christopher in Mexico himself. He sends photos. Christopher sends drawings back. The relationship stays active because the loop closes quickly, instead of going quiet for six months at a time. That’s the real outcome here. Faster translation was the mechanism. A sustained relationship between a child and a sponsor was the point.

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Why 80% of Copilot Users Are in the Field, Not the Home Office

This is the detail that sets Children International’s rollout apart from a typical technology implementation.

The initiative started, as most do, with IT leading the charge. But Tim’s team made an early call: the tool needed to live with the people delivering services, not just the people managing systems from headquarters. Today, roughly 80% of Copilot users at Children International are field staff.

Getting there meant building a champions network instead of issuing a directive. Tim’s team asked managers across different agencies a simple question: who’s already experimenting with this on their own? Those early, organic adopters became the first champions. The group started with a handful of people and has grown to nearly 50, with most agencies having at least one or two.

“More information flows up than it does down,” Tim said. Champions in the field often tell him about a new tool or use case before his own team has heard of it. That kind of signal doesn’t come from a mandate. It shows up when people feel ownership over a tool instead of being handed one.

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Don’t Start With AI. Start With the Friction.

Tim’s advice for smaller nonprofits without large tech budgets or dedicated IT teams is direct, and it’s the same advice he gives his own staff: don’t start with the solution. Start with the part of the process that causes friction, the place where work piles up or pulls attention away from the mission.

Children International’s registration process is a live example of this in action. Onboarding a child and family into a program currently takes more than 50 steps. The team is actively looking at where AI can compress that timeline, so families get registered and supported faster, without losing the qualification and commitment conversations that matter most.

Once a team finds that friction point, the next move is small and deliberate. A small group tests the idea. They share what worked and what didn’t. The pattern grows from there. “Those little successes turn into bigger successes,” Tim said, “and it balloons.”

A recent internal survey backs this up. More than 90% of staff said they feel more empowered using Copilot and AI tools day to day. The areas that scored a bit lower, still a respectable 70 to 80%, were about wanting more access to learning resources and certification paths. People aren’t avoiding the tools. They want more room to grow with them.

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A Story That Sums Up Why This Matters

One story Tim shared captures the human side of this work better than any metric could. A staff member told him about a difficult meeting with her manager that she’d been dreading for days. Before walking in, she used Copilot to think through the conversation and prepare talking points. Her smartwatch, which tracks stress through heart rate, had been flagging elevated readings all morning. Within 30 seconds of working through the prep with Copilot, the alert cleared. She walked into the meeting calm, and it went well.

That’s the measure Tim cares about most: a tool that shows up for someone in a hard moment, not just a tool that moves faster on a spreadsheet.

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Where Tim Sees His Role Going

Asked how he sees his own role evolving over the next few years, Tim used the phrase “grand teacher.” Leadership, in his view, is increasingly about multiplying knowledge across the organization rather than directing every step personally. That means explaining the reasoning behind a decision, not just the decision itself, so people feel ownership instead of compliance.

Children International’s retention rate has stayed strong throughout this transformation, and Tim connects that directly to giving teams tools that make their work and their lives genuinely easier.

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What This Means for Smaller Organizations

You don’t need 1,100 employees to apply any of this. Tim was clear that smaller nonprofits may actually be better positioned to move quickly, since there’s less bureaucracy standing between an idea and a test run.

The path looks the same regardless of size. Find the specific task that drains time without serving the mission. Apply AI there. Test it with a small group. Let the results speak before scaling further. And don’t go it alone. Tim pointed to ongoing peer conversations with organizations like Catholic Relief Services as proof that shared learning across the sector moves everyone forward faster.

The technology is accessible to organizations of any size. The harder, more important work is building a culture where people feel safe testing it, making mistakes, and sharing what they learn along the way.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How did Children International roll out Copilot to field staff? Children International built a champions network by identifying staff who were already experimenting with AI tools on their own, then giving them dedicated time and support to learn and teach others. The network grew from a handful of people to nearly 50 champions across the organization, with information flowing both from leadership down and from the field up.

What problem did AI solve in the sponsor letter process? Translating a single sponsor letter used to take up to eight hours, with the full mail and sorting process sometimes stretching a month or two. Using Copilot for translation, Children International reduced that turnaround to a matter of days.

What’s Tim Bachta’s advice for nonprofits with limited tech resources? Identify a specific point of friction in an existing process before introducing any AI tool. Test the solution with a small group, learn from what works, and expand gradually rather than attempting an organization-wide rollout all at once.

Resources & Links

This episode is presented by the Monthly Giving Builder, Dana’s step-by-step tool that helps nonprofits build and manage their monthly giving program from start to finish. Sign up here.

Ready to walk into EOY with your monthly giving program finally built? Join Dana for a free live webinar and learn the 5-step framework that makes it happen. Register here.

Connect with Tim on LinkedIn and learn more about Children International on their website.

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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.