NotebookLM - Why It’s An Invaluable Tool For Your Club Or Association

I have a bone to pick with the universe. In the final year of my university degree, a few AI tools became available, but they were not very effective. As a result, I didn’t use them much because they were more trouble than they were worth. However, the moment I submitted my final assignment, the AI revolution took off, and those tools transformed into some of the most powerful and useful resources available.

I mention this profound personal injustice because I tried out NotebookLM, and dear god, do I wish I had this during university. 

So today, through a mask of tears, I’m going to: 

• Explain what NotebookLM is
• What it’s uses are 
• Why you should consider using it

For full discourse, this is not sponsored content; Google isn’t slipping me a manilla envelope full of singles to discuss it. That said, Google, if you want to pay me to talk about your products, I’m open to it. I even promise not to call you a soulless mega-corporation more than three times an article. 

 

What Is NoteBookLM?

NotebookLM is a free AI-powered research assistant. Google describes it as “the ultimate tool for understanding the information that matters most to you.” It lets you upload a variety of sources, such as text documents, videos, web pages, slideshows, or even copied and pasted text, and then provides a concise, easy-to-understand breakdown of what's being discussed. This can be a game-changer for research, but its potential for clubs and associations is also quite exciting. 

As NotebookLM is powered by Google’s Gemini AI, you can ask it questions about your source texts, and it will find and pull out that information for you. It can also write up study guides, FAQs, briefings and even some pretty realistic-sounding AI-generated podcasts that feature people discussing whatever topic you gave it.  

 

 

Basically, you feed it any and all sources you have on a particular topic, and it will summarise them for you in whatever format you like, making you an explainer podcast about it, and answer any questions you have, making it really easy to get your head around the subject. 

It’s worth noting that, like all AI tools, NotebookLM can get confused, hallucinate, and make things up, so do not take anything it says as gospel, and always double-check the information it has given you before acting on it. 

What Uses Does NotebookLM Have For Clubs & Associations?

By now, you’re probably saying, “Well, Piper that sounds fascinating, but alas, I’m not a researcher or a uni student, I work full time and manage a membership organisation. Why are you yapping at me about this program?”. 

Well, despite the fact that NotebookLM is designed to be a virtual research assistant, it has a whole lot of uses in the context of clubs and associations. So, let’s take a look at some of the relevant uses of NotebookLM for your organisation.  

Organise Meeting Minutes With NotebookLM

NotebookLM is excellent for breaking down complicated information into more straightforward bits, which makes it super helpful for taking meeting notes. You can also upload Word docs and videos, so just record your meetings and toss them into Notebook. Then, you can ask it to whip up some meeting minutes for you.

As an example, I took a transcript of a team meeting here at Member Jungle and copied and pasted it into NotebookLM. It first gave me the following written summary of the meeting. 

 

 

As you can see, it gave me a nice little summary of the meeting from the transcript. I then asked it to give me meeting minutes from the transcript, and it did a really good job. It gave me a summary of what happened, who said what listed action items and gave me quick links back to the source text so I could double-check that it had gotten everything right. 

Before Notebook came out, I reviewed The 3 Best AI Tools To Take Meeting Minutes For Your Club, and I can confidently say that NoteBookLM’s minutes were on par with the ones in that article. 

Helping Simplify Complicated Subjects

Unsurprisingly, one thing that NotebookLM is great at is breaking down complicated subjects in order to make them easier to understand. For example, the ATO’s changes to tax laws for non-profits or what an industry report has to say about the state of membership organisations. 

These are admittedly two subjects I have already researched without NotebookLM and written explainers on. However, I won’t be able to cover every possible subject out there, so having a tool to help cover the spots I don’t have time for is a really good idea. 

Speaking of, I gave NotebookLM the 2024 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report, which I wrote an article on to see how it went, breaking it down on its own. It did a pretty good job; it gave me a nice summary, showed me the key points, and I was able to ask further questions about the data. Generally speaking, I think it did a good job; it was able to give me five actionable strategies to grow a membership organisation based on the report, and having read the whole report myself, they are all things I agree with and mentioned in my article. 

In case you were curious, those strategies were: 

• Adding value to your organisation 
• Innovating your organisation 
• Targeting younger generations 
• Increasing member engagement via in-person events and CPD/courses

Its fifth recommendation for how you can grow your membership was less helpful. It was “adding new members”, going so far as to say, “Associations that report increases in new members are significantly more likely to report increases in total membership”. So, there you go; according to the all-powerful AI, one of the best ways to increase your members is to increase your members. 

 

 

Its AI-generated podcast is also pretty good at helping understand complicated topics. Having two “people” sit there and discuss the subject definitely makes it easier to get your head around it, but they can get a little carried away, so do double-check the information they give you. 

Make Web Page Content With The Help Of NotebookLM

Another great use of NotebookLM is to help come up with content for your club’s website. Since it’s great at summarising information, it makes creating summaries, FAQs, and straightforward web content a breeze. It’s a super helpful tool to help you get your message across more clearly on your site.

I tried using NotebookLM to create some new FAQs for the Member Jungle website, and it did a really good job. It got a lot of the important information and presented it in a pretty easy-to-understand way. It did need some editing as it was written in a way I wouldn’t want to put on my website, but if you are looking for a quick way to get started on creating better website content, it’s a good call.

How To Get NotebookLM & What Does It Cost?

Like most AI tools, NotebookLM offers a free version and a paid version. The paid version allows you to add more sources, create additional AI podcasts, customise the tone of the notes further, and collaborate with others on your notebooks.

As of this writing, it seems that to access the paid version, NotebookLM Plus, you must sign up for the Google One AI Premium plan, which costs $32.99 AUD per month. This subscription also provides access to Gemini Advanced, Gemini in Gmail, Google Docs, and several other benefits.

I recommend starting with the free version of NotebookLM to see if you find the paid version necessary. Considering the applicable uses of 

NotebookLM for clubs and associations, the paid version is probably not necessary, but that’s your call to make. 

How Else Can You Use AI To Help Your Club Or Association? 

NotebookLM, like all AI products, is best used to help you do what you were already doing, not replace it. You should use it to help speed up meeting minutes and help make writing content for your website faster; you should not use it to replace you in that process. If I used AI to generate all of my articles, I would finish 20 in a week rather than three or four, but all 20 would suck to actually read. 

For more information on how to use AI to help you, check out How To Use AI To Generate Content For Your Club’s Website. 

For some other AI tools that are well worth having a peep at, read The 3 Best AI Tools To Use For Your Club - That We Actually Use.