Using AI in fundraising – where it helps, where it doesn’t, & key challenges
AI in fundraising – how it’s helping
In practical terms for fundraisers, this means the likes of:
- Enabling donations via conversational interfaces like Alexa and Siri, such as the NSPCC’s Alexa skill.
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA): low-cost AI tools that can automate basic tasks (or parts of them) like diary management and data entry, giving fundraisers more time for their main jobs.
- Generating content. There are AI tools that can automate tasks such as producing written content for marketing, and creating natural sounding language.
- Analysis. AI and Natural Language Processing are also being used in social listening tools and to analyse the performance of campaign and marketing collateral to help spot patterns, and make predictions.
- Recommendation algorithms. These use data to generate tailored recommendations to an individual – something we’re all used to in the consumer world, and are starting to be used by charities, for example on websites and with chatbots to promote the content most relevant for that person.
- Predictive analytics. Machine learning can be applied to donor or prospect lists to spot patterns and make predictions to improve prospect research, or gain a better understanding of existing supporter preferences and behaviour.
“As charities start racing more and more towards using machine learning applications, they’re going to start realising the importance of having integrated data around an individual, and being able to make sure it’s good, appropriate, relevant data and it’s permission based. And that’s going to be an interesting challenge for a lot of organisations, because many don’t necessarily have their data organised in a useful way.”
And, clever though AI and its subsets are, in many ways they still can’t replace human intelligence and all activity needs to be overseen, so it’s also important to keep people involved in the process.
See the full story here: https://fundraising.co.uk/2021/06/16/using-ai-in-fundraising-where-it-helps-where-it-doesnt-key-challenges/
