How Leaders in Nonprofit are leveraging AI
openai web forum recap from june 24, 2024
Last week, OpenAI brought together several of AI’s leading influencers in the Nonprofit sector to discuss the impact that AI is currently having on social impact organizations. The forum was so insighful that we decided to recap the discussion for you here and summarize our top takeaways from the event. There were a variety of topics covered including:
— The use of AI in time saving initiatives
— The use of AI in programs and operations
— The use of AI in fundraising efforts
— The use of AI in communicating efforts
The major theme of the night, however, was the need for nonprofit leaders to start getting more involved in conversations around AI or risk getting left out of the conversation entirely. Nathan Chappell, the moderator of the event and co-founder of fundraising.ai, kicked off the discussion by highlighting the importance of trust when it comes to nonprofits leveraging artificial intelligence within their organization.
“We have a higher role and responsibility to use AI in a way that is going to increase trust between individuals and organizations. This is a great opportunity for our sector to lead the world in what that means.”
The panel ranged from Chat-GPT power users to AI-implementers to fundraisers who’ve leveraged AI in $75M capital campaigns. If you’re too busy to watch the full hour and half discussion, we’ve compiled a list of our top takeaways from the event:
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The philanthropy sector has grown to over 1.7M organizations in the U.S. and 10M organizations worldwide. It is the second largest source of U.S. employment and makes up 5.6% of the overall GDP. In 2022, it added $1.2T to the economy with fundraising contributing over half a trillion dollars.
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The donor base for nonprofits is facing heightened financial stress due to high inflation, significantly reducing the number of American households who are giving to a 501c3 organization. There is a huge push towards digital as donor behavior shifts to a younger demographic. And nonprofit staff are facing an unprecedented level of burnout and leaders are concerned about employee turnover.
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Adoption of AI in the nonprofit sector is at ~12%, significantly lower than the rate of adoption in the for-profit sector. We need to the change the narrative around nonprofit's use of innovative technology such as AI as it could be one of the few scalable solutions to address many of the administrative and donation challenges that the industry has been facing.
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Maintaining donor confidence is more important than ever and nonprofits need to be careful about leveraging AI in a way that could reduce trust with donors. Language models have the ability to hallucinate answers so it is always wise to double-check your results! Always be transparent with donors and board members if they ask how you're using AI tools.
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The more collaborative we can be in sharing the frameworks and assets that we're finding to be most useful in the nonprofit sector will only help expedite the adoption of the technology and innovation within our own sector. The more we can invest in the AI literacy and training for nonprofit leaders and staff the more quickly and effectively we can utilize these new tools.
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AI gives nonprofits the ability to enhance their personalized marketing and fundraising efforts by personalizing the stories they're able to share with their donors. AI-driven platforms such as Cadenza allow nonprofits to create Personalized Impact Reports for their donors and corporate sponsors within minutes.
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AI can help reduce the administrative workload of your staff by automating many of the tasks that previously had to be manually performed. The panel mentioned a variety of tools they are using today from ChatGPT to Grammarly to Otter.
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AI is uniquely capable of making sense of large volumes of data. It is like having your own research assistant at your fingertips to help you capture the impact that your organization is making within your community.
For a full breakdown of the questions that were asked during the forum as well as the panelists responses, we’ve compiled a list of our favorites below:
"What do You think the nonprofit sector needs to realize the opportunities and potential of ai?"
Response by Woodrow Rosenbaum, Chief Data Officer @ GivingTuesday
“First, I think that there is the obvious and continuing challenge that we have in the nonprofit sector of keeping up with technology. And we've seen time and time again, this sector get left behind. And that's, that's the sort of expected situation, I think that a lot of people are, are facing this, "oh, are we just going to be behind the capacity curve yet again?"
The flip side is I think there is more of an embracing of the opportunity of this new technology now than we have seen in the past. There is a lot less kind of inertia in the system. And I think that that's an opportunity for us to, as you said, to lead the development of these tools. And that's the big, big difference here.
It’s less about missing the opportunity of adopting the tech and more about the potential opportunity of being able to drive the development of this. The needs of the social sector are quite challenging and the potential outcome of serving those needs is one of dramatic positive social impact on many, many domains.
And if we embrace the technologists that are developing these tools to solve these problems first, not as an off-label solution, but as the primary purpose of these tools, then the tech itself will be robust. And I think we need three things in order for that to happen.
First, we need a place for some transparent experimentation. We need to be able to test how these things are working and see, really interrogate how these solutions are solving validated issues for the social sector around the world. Yes, including in fundraising, but also in just how organizations meet their missions.
Second, we need assets to support that development that are specific to the nonprofit sector. We need to make sure that we have the basic building blocks of these that on which AI solutions are built that are sourced, ethically sourced by and for nonprofits, specifically for those use cases. And that those solutions that we are then interrogating in that experimentation environment are built with those assets at the core.
And then the third thing we need is a new framework for capacity building. Implementation of these tools against those validated use cases. Again, where we have an enormous opportunity here because if we build something that serves one purpose, it becomes very extensible if we're doing that collaboratively. And in doing that, we really need to be very clear that we avoid the risk of just amplifying existing bad practice. And I think if we can keep our eye on that, if we can work collaboratively, and if we build on top of assets and a tech stack that is purpose built for the social sector, then we can meet that opportunity of guiding the development of these products rather than keeping up with them.”
“You see AI as being a ‘force for equalization’, what does that mean and how can nonprofits use AI to support their mission in a really powerful way?”
Response by Jody Britten, Head of Research and Innovation @ Team4Tech
“I think in our work with nonprofits, we've really observed that AI kind of holds that potential to either be a pretty significant source of inequity or a powerful equalizer. So our aim as an impact accelerator is to really ensure that this achieves the latter. Like we wanna make sure that even the smallest organization can overcome resource limitations and enhance their mission delivery. All of this is about mission for us.
I think traditionally small nonprofits have struggled with things just from lack of resources. It can be anything from copy editing to accounting to grant writing. We're experiencing for ourselves and with our partners how AI tools can really give us more time to focus on mission critical work through our AI for education initiative.
Like I said before, we're developing solutions but we're not just developing solutions to develop them. We're building with and for the communities that we serve. So we're looking at very specific use cases, very specific solutions and trying to figure out how not only we can build those things as one-off deployments, but also build those things for sustainability across organizations.
I think just in terms of local implementation and sustainability as an accelerator program where you really wanna see overall impact with educational outcomes, because that's our focus area. But we also wanna see growth and sustainability in scale of those organizations. So one of the things that we've kind of seen happen before.
We're trying to think about things like just staff turnover, right? So how can we create closed libraries of training materials and chat bots so that we can free up that one-to-one human interaction time to be really meaningful and really focused on the pedagogical work and free up those kind of small struggles in ways that we couldn't do two years ago. Now we can. We're also really thinking very carefully about things like personalization of program materials. 90 countries in our community of practice, we have to figure out what's gonna be the silver bullet through kind of the core mission to hit a lot of different organizations. So just thinking about how we can use AI, where they used to pay consultants or staff exorbitant amount and wait years to be able to just adapt programs. Now they're able to really make some cool things happen just with AI, whether it's brainstorming, whether it's reimagining, whether it's refining, all those things are happening…
So, we're really focused on recognizing the challenges that are faced by nonprofits. And they're not new, but what can we do as an impact accelerator to really push things forward. And we're seeing firsthand right now how crucial it is for the nonprofit community, not only to develop that AI literacy, but also to share their tools, quality assurance measures, data sets, all of those things.”
“How can AI be leveraged to help nonprofits have a voice not just broadly but within under-represented communities?”
Response by Dupé Ajayi, Social Impact Marketing Lead @ The Ajayi Effect
“I love this question. I could talk about this all day long, but we will get it done in a few minutes. When I think about the possibilities, when it comes to say, for example, disaster response, and thinking about AI, assisting in the decision-making process that has to happen very quickly when people are in an emergency, right, this is a very real-world application. It's a very pure example of how you can use these tools to find out, where is there a safe space? And where, for example, can people be housed, it's a very obvious solution. But I'm thinking about the collection of stories and storytelling.
Behind all of the infrastructure of AI, and the work that our incredible organizations do, there are the stories, and that is what pulls people in, that is what drives our fundraising, that is what gets people to support, that's what gets people interested.
So imagine if you have, for example, hundreds of stories for an international nonprofit organization and you have been collecting them over time. This is a pure example of how you can use AI to sort through, look through those stories that are going to resonate most for a campaign. So say, for example, we're talking about a campaign connected to cheddar cheese, it's late in New York, and I'm hungry. Here's an example of where you can look through very quickly, all everything that's in your story library, and surface those stories that are related to cheddar cheese, and knowing that they are going to relate to people who enjoy cheddar cheese, funders, etc, and the like. So for me, that's a very pure example. It's a very easy example that any organization can employ today.
And then we look at voice, and I cannot over-stress this, I cannot over-emphasize this:
“There’s a special type of delight in hearing a voice that sounds like you, seeing someone that looks like you, when it comes to something that you’re engaging in.”
And that goes, it's the same case for our constituents that participate, that we serve through our nonprofit organizations. Here's an opportunity for us to really lean into the texture of individuality when it comes to engaging through marketing. I, earlier this week, saw an article in Tech Crunch that was mentioning some Black founders, just nuancing chat GPTs for tone, specific to African American voice. And that's exciting, right? Because here we are, where we can drill down, drill in, and pull through intersectionality in a very pure way, right?”
“What are the differences between generative ai and predictive ai? and What is precision philanthropy and why should we be optimistic about it?”
Response by Scott Rosenkrans, Chief Data Scientist & Associate VP @ DonorSearch AI
“So predictive and generative are two different sides of the coin, but they work incredibly well together, right? The reason that AI is so big in the space, thanks to open AI in November, 2022, is because it works differently than predictive. Predictive is generally indirect. It's what Amazon uses to recommend the things that you should purchase, what Netflix uses to recommend the shows you should watch, what Google recommends, uses to recommend what route you should take to get through the city. You don't have direct control over it. It's really good at objective, at logical, at quantifiable information, a yes or a no, do this or do that. This person will respond this way versus this way.
Whereas generative is more open-ended. It's more creative. It's more subjective. And also, again, as a result of Chats with the T, it's more direct. I have direct control over getting the output that I wanna get by just changing my prompts. I don't have direct control over Amazon's algorithm and predictions of me unless I'm very specific in what I purchase to control that model, right? So there's two different ways to interact with them, but when you put the two of them together, it's like one plus one equals five, right?
A lot of people focus on the capability of generative AI to, especially in the nonprofit fundraising space, to reach out to more people quicker, right? But predictive AI allows you to reach out to better people better... You wanna make sure that you're talking to the right people and you're meeting them where they're at and where they're interested, especially nonprofits do not have resources, unlimited resources to reach out to everyone. So that precision philanthropy, we pulled it from precision medicine, right? Treating each individual and their disease as an N of one, knowing that cancer is not just global cancer and affects everyone the same way.
Philanthropy is not the same for everyone. Engagement is not the same for everyone. And so we wanna make sure that we're seeing what the motivation is for each person to continue to engage in a certain way. How can we intercede and receive them where they are and strengthen that relationship while at the same time?
There's no shortage of information delivery. We're getting way too many emails, way too many messages, way too much content online. So it's not like we just need to push out more of that to cast a wider net. We just need to cast a better net. And so that's where we've really prioritized that predictive component, but then using the generative to help and assist with that outreach. So that way you can offload that and utilize that resource as well.”
“How do individual staff get started with generative ai in a responsiBle and beneficial way?”
Response by Anne Murphy, CEO @ AI Empowered Fundraiser Group
“I love this subject so much because there are so many folks sitting on the sideline because they're afraid and because it's new and because they don't want to make a mistake and they don't want to technology themselves out of a job. And I know lots of those people and I have been one of those people. So I'm gonna share like our three steps that we do with people as they're coming into our programs to get familiar with AI and then eventually move toward adoption and leadership in their organization.
A commitment to an abundance mindset. That's really, really important. Mindset is critical. So that's one.
To learn through use cases you actually care about. The people who bring use cases to the table that are on topics that are important to them or very, very important to the world tend to adopt things faster.
Develop your own personal code of ethics before you move into doing that for your enterprise.
So within the mindset piece, there are three things that I always talk about that are essential. One is having a curious mind. So not a technical background, not necessary in some ways, not helpful. This is the revenge of the liberal arts majors. So a curious mind, having a willingness to be vulnerable. So we high achieving people, we love to do things we're good at. We're asking you to do something you are not good at and nobody's good at it at first. Nobody knows. These things don't come with like rock solid operational manuals on how to do this. And then the third piece is community. This stuff is so like face meltingly confrontational to our self identities that having friends, work besties, other nerds who can sit around talking to you about, ‘oh my God, I can't believe this thing that I discovered that ChatGPT can do. What have I been doing with my whole life up until this very point?’
So those three things, curious mind, willingness to be vulnerable and community are really important… And I'm willing to go to my grave on the whole, you learn better through use cases. Use cases is how we get dopamine.
We adult learners need our little pellets of dopamine to power through annoying technology gaffes. So I believe use cases are the way in. That's how people get their light bulb moments.”
“you’ve described One of the benefits of AI as providing ‘a dividend in time’… what does that mean? How important is it and how do you enable it?
Response by Allison Fine, President @ Every.org
“Thanks, Nathan. And I want to give a shout out to my co author Beth Cantor, as well, as we worked on that idea together. So this is the return on investment. And so many people as this entire session is about are tiptoeing into the AI waters right now. And the question is, why are you doing this? Because everyone else is doing it because the nonprofit down the street is doing it. And what do you expect to get back from that? Right?
So imagine you're the ED, you're in front of the board, you're starting to talk about we're going to use AI. And my fear is that you'll do it to supersize existing activities, right to do more of the same. And that's not a great ROI because we know the systems aren't working well right now and people are drowning in administrative tasks. And all of the bad data around current fundraising, Woodrow brought up you brought up at the beginning as well. So there's another way to think about this.
AI has the capacity as the most powerful technology regular people have ever had at their fingertips, to greatly reduce the administrative overload of people within organizations, the workflow, the finances, the communications, every task that's taking up 30% of people's time… AI is great at doing those tasks.
And then you have this dividend, you have this return, which is time.
Now imagine what you could do it differently. If you could get up from your desk and look at the world and say, ‘I want to be in relation to people who care about our cause.’ I want to pick up the phone every day or go out to lunch every day with a $25 donor and say, ‘what does our cause mean to you? Why did you come here? What's your story?’
Right? Well, how can we make this about you, instead of about our busyness, about our to do list, which is what so many fundraising appeals are really about- all the things we have to do.
And imagine how joyful that would be for staff. And imagine how different the experience would be for all of our stakeholders outside of our walls to now actually know the people who are doing this work. To be able to reach somebody if they have a question or want to share a story, to connect them to one another in your communities, to pray by zip code, set up some coffees for people just to get to know one another. That dividend is about how can we be more human in this next chapter of our development? Not how can we suck the humanity from all of our work even more.”
“You already shared ‘Just Do It’. how else can the nonprofit sector work to ensure that the future of AI reflects and benefits the needs of all of humanity as well as the needs of marginalized communities?”
Response by Gayle Roberts, Chief Development Office @ Larkin Street Youth
“I could write a book on that, right. But I think Nathan, you already have, in some ways, you know, just to kind of quickly summarize some of the things that we've been hearing:
Nathan, you did talk about how the nonprofit and geo-sectors are in this country at least 10% of the economy and globally, a significant part as well, with almost 2 million people in the US working in this sector.
Woodrow talked about the importance of investments and pilot projects and new frameworks for how we do this work.
Judy talked about how AI can really enhance our missions and effectiveness and reach.
Dupé talked really about what I got about the personalization of marketing so that everybody can see themselves and have their voices be heard.
Scott, bringing together both the predictive and the generative so that we have more precision in our work, particularly around fundraising and development.
Anne, I also heard you say, really, how do we help people take those first steps to get more comfortable with this technology?
And Allison, this promise that we'll all have more time on our hands. And I'm like, God, I hope that happens. I really hope that happens. I think in the short term, maybe that's not true.
“So the main message I have summarizing all of that is the AI sector needs the nonprofit space at the table.”
I have heard in the last year and a half very little conversations that include nonprofit leaders in what the future of artificial intelligence, whether it's predictive or generative or AGI or ASI or whatever, where we're going. We have not only huge communities that we represent, but also extreme expertise and a big back bench that can be leveraged in a variety of different ways. And as we think about the future and some of the challenges that we're going to face, we need to make sure that communities are involved.
And the more that we can engage our communities in advance to get everybody facing the right direction, I am concerned about some of the possibilities of the future, including just the social disagreements around what this technology should or should not even be used for, let alone some of the more potential risks that are down there.
So I think the AI sector could really benefit from the nonprofit sector to create community partnerships so that these tools can not only be leveraged effectively, but will actually be embraced and used to make the greatest good in the world.
And yeah, I'm a fundraiser. And so yes, there needs to be resource development. There needs to be pilot projects. There needs to be technical assistance. And we're under-resourced, under-capitalized, and fragmented as a marketplace.
But there is the opportunity to make dramatic shifts over the next couple of years in our own lifetime. And I'm excited about what the future might hold.”
The forum concluded with a Q&A session that can be found on the full webinar HERE.
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