Guest post by DonorSearch

It’s no secret that tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) have increasingly become part of daily life, from online chatbots to social media algorithms and even facial recognition. Similarly, AI use has become a trend in the nonprofit sector as organizations are discovering that machine learning and intelligent content generation can enhance many aspects of their management and fundraising efficiency.

While many of the available AI tools for nonprofits can benefit your organization, there are also real risks associated with using them improperly. If you’ve experienced pushback from leadership about implementing AI at your nonprofit, you aren’t alone!

However, if your team uses AI responsibly, its benefits significantly outweigh the risks. In this guide, we’ll discuss some of the advantages of AI for nonprofits before diving into some common challenges with these tools and ways to overcome them. 

Benefits of Leveraging AI at Your Nonprofit

Although AI tools can be used in many aspects of your nonprofit’s work, they tend to provide the most advantages when it comes to fundraising. DonorSearch’s AI fundraising guide lists seven general roles that AI plays in engaging donors and generating revenue for nonprofits’ missions, including that it: 

1. Saves time and money by allowing you to work smarter, not harder, on more targeted efforts.

2. Automates mundane tasks so you can focus on decision-making, relationship-building, and other activities that require human oversight.

3. Personalizes the supporter experience through segmented outreach, consistent follow-ups, and tailored fundraising appeals.

4. Provides accurate and actionable insights via detailed analytics and recommendations to maximize fundraising effectiveness, especially when it comes to identifying and cultivating major donors.

5. Levels up your marketing efforts by generating higher-quality content that resonates with your target audiences.

6. Taps into exciting new donation methods while also optimizing your existing campaigns to maximize donor engagement.

7. Measures your organization’s impact so you can identify strengths and areas for improvement in your fundraising strategy.

Of course, you can also leverage AI in other areas of your nonprofit’s work outside of fundraising—for example, generating content to promote your programs to beneficiaries or modeling financial data to inform the creation of your annual budget. Think of your AI tools as collaborators in your organization’s mission-driven success since using the best solutions in the most effective ways will provide you with new capabilities that increase your capacity to make a positive impact on your community.

Common Nonprofit AI Challenges (& How to Overcome Them)

As mentioned above, the risks of improper AI use are very real—they include data breaches, biased decision-making, noncompliance with legal regulations, and more. However, your nonprofit can prevent these risks while maximizing the benefits in the previous section by making a commitment to leverage AI responsibly.

Let’s dive deeper into a few of the challenges that many nonprofits face when implementing AI and how your organization can overcome each one.

Ensuring Data Privacy & Security

AI tools process and analyze copious amounts of data—some of which includes sensitive information about your nonprofit’s existing supporters, prospective donors, and beneficiaries. It isn’t surprising, then, that concerns about data protection with these solutions may arise both inside and outside your organization.

Fortunately, your nonprofit can keep community members’ personal information safe by taking similar precautions with your AI tools that you would with other software. As a start, Double the Donation’s donor data guide recommends taking the following security steps:

• Implement access controls. Ensure only team members who need to use AI-processed data for their jobs can work directly with it. Each of them should have their own login credentials with strong passwords that are updated regularly.

• Use reliable solutions. Look for AI tools with security features built in, such as encryption and multi-factor authentication. Some providers have also committed to promoting responsible AI use in the nonprofit sector (such as members of the Fundraising.AI Collaborative), so do your research before choosing solutions for your organization.

• Regularly update and patch systems. AI is constantly evolving and learning from new data, and new security measures are often rolled out as this happens, too. Ensure you’re always using the most up-to-date version of your solutions to maximize data protection.

Once you’ve implemented these measures, focus on being transparent with your nonprofit’s supporters about how you’re using their data for AI fundraising and allowing them to opt out if they wish to do so.

Preventing Unintentional Bias & Discrimination

Before they can produce useful outputs, AI tools must be “trained” to recognize patterns and draw conclusions from existing data. However, sometimes solutions are trained on biased data, or the algorithms they’re based on were designed (intentionally or unintentionally) in a way that perpetuates harmful biases and leads to discrimination.

To mitigate this problem, ensure your nonprofit’s responsible AI commitment includes the principle of inclusiveness. Monitor and evaluate your systems’ outputs to verify that the information is representative of your organization’s community, promotes equality, and allows you to make objective, fair decisions based on it.

Additionally, there are steps you can take to promote inclusiveness through your use of AI tools. For instance, if you use AI image generation tools, prompt them to create outputs that feature diversity. Or, if you create audio and video content with AI, ensure the solution generates a transcript and closed captions to make the finished product accessible to all audience members. Maintaining diverse and accurate data in your organization’s databases also gives your AI tools a more inclusive source of information to pull from in analysis and modeling.

Maintaining a Human Touch

AI is meant to assist your nonprofit’s team with content creation and data-driven decision-making. Organizations often run into problems when they let AI do the work for them.

Your fundraising efforts will be most effective when they’re human-centered, even if AI also supports them. Use your content generation tools’ outputs as a starting point for donor communications, but edit the outputs to tailor them to your organization and audience before sending them off. Before you make any decisions based on machine learning models, discuss the results with your team and ensure they align with your nonprofit’s overall strategy.

Additionally, remember that as advanced as AI technology is, building genuine relationships with supporters is still a human activity. While AI can save time on data-gathering and preparation for donor interactions, it’s still up to your staff members to get to know each donor personally and use your understanding of their needs and preferences to inform their journey with your nonprofit.

AI is the future of nonprofit work, especially fundraising. By committing to responsible AI use and investing in the right tools now, your organization will be well on its way to more effective decision-making, outreach, cultivation, and retention for the long term.