As AI becomes more integral within the workplace, new and novel use-cases are developing. For nonprofits, organizations, and associations that depend on fundraising, a few practical, efficient, and effective applications can help refine operations and achieve more ambitious targets.
Why AI?
For nonprofit organizations, fundraising professionals are typically among the most critical team members. Their talents and efforts help deliver crucial resources that serve as the launchpad for the initiatives that serve their communities.
To be clear, AI can’t now, and won’t ever, replace the interpersonal skills that fundraising professionals leverage to make meaningful connections, communicate the importance of missions, and encourage ongoing partnerships. What AI can do exceptionally well is focus the work of these professionals, bring them more actionable information, and guide their efforts toward additional opportunities.
Three Ways AI Can Support Fundraising Efforts
AI is like a savant. For all the ways it falls short compared to its human counterparts, it excels in one key – and extremely useful – area: large scale data processing and analysis. In combination with well-considered prompting, AI can quickly assess huge data sets and identify patterns that may prove useful. If you’ve ever collected or analyzed donor data, you likely intuitively understand the incredible potential of AI applied to fundraising information. Here are three practical ways it can be used to good effect.
Turn Donor Spreadsheets into Data-Driven Strategies
Leverage your extensive records by uploading them into a secure AI platform and prompting the AI to search for identifiable patterns that may be useful directing future efforts. For example, you might ask your AI to identify similarities in certain types of donors – like those that are most generous or those that typically only support for a year or two. Do these types of donors share certain patterns of engagement? For example, do certain patterns of activity suggest a donor that increases their donation amount from year to year?
Get creative by taking it further and moving beyond your organization’s data. For example, ask the AI to compare the same annual donation data against the same year’s stock market index. Inventive prompts could help you uncover patterns that may prove useful in expanding your base of support or tailoring your messaging to encourage additional support.
Define Parameters
When prompting AI, try to always explain your criteria. Doing so can help the AI sort information in a way that is useful to you. For example, asking simply for your top donors may not be a great use of AI – sorting an Excel sheet can yield similar results. Instead, ask your AI to analyze your donation history and identify donors who have increased their support by the highest percentage over the course of their relationship with you. Similarly, you might upload your organization’s calendar of events and solicitations alongside donation data to assess and correlate the initiatives, events, and seasons that correlates with specific donor activity. That may help you develop bespoke outreach strategies that better serve your donors’ interests and communication preferences. Getting more specific criteria in the prompting process will generally result in more insightful AI analysis.
Use Publicly Available Information
Regulations require that nonprofits disclose a good deal of information that might be considered sensitive in other industries. That can help donors understand how their contributions are used to further a particular mission. And, with AI’s help, it can help you benchmark various aspects of your operations. Uploading and analyzing public disclosures can offer insight into anything from dollars raised, to compensation, and much more. Conducting analysis like this might help you offer more competitive salaries to attract talent, reallocate investments, or increase efforts to match the metrics of top-performing organizations.
Conclusion
AI is a tool like any other. Putting it to good use is a matter of finding tasks fit for purpose and data analysis is one application that allows the technology to shine. Hopefully, you’ll leverage these tips to uncover useful patterns and apply AI to realize more effective fundraising.
If you have any questions about your organization’s AI readiness, strategy, or optimization, contact a member of the CBIZ technology team today.
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