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Hazardous Fuel Reduction in Pescadero Canyon, Carmel-by-the-Sea

Carmel Fire Goats Tech Stack

Reaching potential Petition signers without wasting organizational funds requires creativity and discipline.

Carmel Fire Goats meets that challenge by leveraging leading-edge AI tools, including Claude, ChatGPT, Kling AI, and ElevenLabs, combined with hands-on expertise with web-based Photopea (free equivalent to Adobe Photoshop), Adobe Premiere Pro for iPhone (free), and Hostinger’s AI web hosting platform to rapidly produce and distribute high-impact public service announcements (PSAs) videos, engaging web content, and click-intensive social media posts.

These PSA videos feature text-to-voice with a lip-synced animated goat that spotlights the dangers of hazardous fuel buildup in Pescadero Canyon. The PSAs are shared across Nextdoor, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to maximize community awareness and engagement.

If anyone plans to edit videos on a Mac platform, Premiere Pro—at about $263 per year—is a powerful but often overly complicated option. You can easily spend an hour hunting through descending dropdown menus just to find the button you need for a simple task.

By contrast, the free Premiere Pro app on iPhone (with an Android version still in development) is remarkably easy to use with just your finger. All of Carmel Fire Goats’ videos were edited on a cellphone—importing AI-generated video clips, free MP3 sound bites, and Photoshop-created title and logo overlays.

The iMac Photos app was then used to crop the video to the required aspect ratio before final export.

Behind the scenes, HubSpot ($9/mth) has transformed our operations from a growing, haphazard stack of printed inquiries into a streamlined, opportunity-driven, automated web form-to-lead system. What was once paper-based is now an organized digital pipeline, tracking petitioners, goat graziers, and supporters.

Salesforce quickly fell off the list. Their Starter Suite ($25/month) does not include web-to-lead ingestion from a website into their CRM. To enable that feature, you have to upgrade to the Pro Suite at $300/month, which makes it a total non-starter.

One note before you decide on HubSpot: a new AI competitor, Monday CRM, may be easier to use and configure to your specific needs.

Slack is also under consideration for addition to our digital headquarters. In theory, it could help team members reduce email clutter and collaborate more efficiently—whether coordinating petition outreach locations and times, or refining video PSA messaging and production.

However, Slack may ultimately prove to be the elephant in the room—another promising tool that could end up a non-starter, much like Salesforce.

As an update, Slack has been kicked to the curb—at roughly $60 per month per user, it simply isn’t within the Carmel Fire Goats budget with a team of three to five volunteers.

Alternatives such as ZenZap, RocketChat, Chanty, and Pumble all supposedly offer free tiers for small teams of up to seven volunteers, which makes them more realistic options for Carmel Fire Goats. The remaining question is whether their free plans will provide the features needed to support our collaboration and coordination...