Image courtesy of Givzey
“Our sector has to really wrestle with the tougher questions… Are we building a society that is human-centric/” Nathan Chappell, Co-Founder – Fundraising.AI
Meet Alex. Alex was designed as an autonomous fundraiser, independently managing a portfolio of donors. Alex and bots like her are billed as a conduit to help organizations build relationships with their donors. Is this technology exciting? Absolutely. But these new and quickly developing technologies bring to the forefront many questions about the impact of AI on fundraising and the human relationships at the foundation of philanthropy.
The genie is out of the bottle. It would be naïve to think we can reverse the course. So, it is more important to consider how — not if already deployed — nonprofits should be using artificial intelligence to support fundraising and engagement in a responsible and beneficial way.
AI: Beyond ChatGPT
Many professionals are familiar with ChatGPT and similar tools that are top of mind due to their accessibility. But for the purpose of this article, discussion focuses on AI broadly, beyond generative AI, which represents only a fraction of artificial intelligence’s capabilities. AI capabilities are expansive, especially around data analysis, automations, predictive modeling, which can help identify donor trends and personalize engagement strategies. These capabilities become the building blocks that open up many new and unexplored possibilities.
Is AI Technology Good For Fundraising?
Is the use of artificial intelligence going to enhance or detract from fundraising and philanthropy? This is the key question that the nonprofit sector leaders are just beginning to consider against the backdrop of rapidly evolving technologies and new opportunities. The answer entirely depends on us, nonprofit leaders, and how we use — and philosophically think about– artificial intelligence and its use in our craft.
When technology is used as a tool and a helper to augment the work, there are enormous efficiencies to be gained, as long as we take care not to lose the heart. However, overreliance on technology to manage donor interactions and relationships can lead to the corrosion of human relationships and a more tenuous and disembodied connection with our donors. Following are some factors to consider, both the opportunities and the pitfalls.
Helping Fundraisers Build Continuity
The most successful fundraisers are relationship builders. They get to know donors and their families, listen, and understand the nuances and motivations that drive donors’ behaviors. These real and very human connections go deep, beyond what can be easily captured in a data field.
Now imagine what it must be like for a philanthropist who has generously supported your cause for a long time and has to start this relationship-building cycle from scratch every 16-24 months — the range cited as an average tenure of a frontline fundraiser. You have talked about your connection to the mission, shared your preferences and areas of interests, but now you have to do it all over again with a new person assigned to be your relationship manager after the previous development professional left the organization. Wouldn’t you be frustrated about spending your valuable time sharing the same information many times over? How long would it be before you disengage and move on?
If the organizational managers put in place processes and expectations to meticulously document interactions, AI can help retain valuable information about donors and pave the way for continuity. These insights can help prepare the new fundraiser to take over the relationship before making that first introductory phone call. The data and technology make this possible, but it is incumbent on the human using these tools to gather insights, document them in a meaningful way, and study up on what’s available and most relevant to help smooth their introduction to a valued supporter.
Gaining New Insights
Imagine standing inches away from Monet’s waterlilies. All you can see are globs of blue, green and white paint. Now step back a few feet and watch lilies floating in the pond and the Giverny bridge come into focus. They were there all along, but when you stood too close, the pattern of brushstrokes was not visible to your naked eye. AI-generated data insights allow fundraisers to step back and uncover new trends, arming them with insights to make informed decisions and optimize efforts.
Provided you have collected information and maintained data hygiene, powerful analytics tools can assess interactions and uncover patterns in donor behavior to help you identify opportunities and guide your engagement. Within seconds, a clever AI helper can analyze giving and participation patterns to help prioritize donor relationships, focusing on those who are most likely to have long-term impact and value to the organization. AI-powered analytics can track the effectiveness of fundraising and marketing campaigns in real-time to adjust and optimize your strategies and maximize success.
Beyond analysis, algorithms can even predict future behavior and donor preferences and help you identify “diamonds in the rough,” valuable prospects. This information allows fundraisers to anticipate donor needs, optimize their outreach strategies, prioritize how they spend time, and tailor communications more effectively. This is a true partnership with AI serving up incredibly valuable insights and the human making decisions about what parameters matter most and how to calibrate their efforts.
Mass Communications with One-to-One Feel
Much of what’s been discussed above primarily informs high touch and one on one interactions. It would be impossible to build individual relationships with every constituent that has ever participated in your walk or wrote a check for $25. However, communications with rank and file supporters can also benefit and be improved through powerful AI. You have experienced it yourself. Think about Netflix anticipating your needs and serving up period dramas based on your Bridgerton binge, rather than animated family cartoons. This is artificial intelligence at work.
AI can help you segment donors with ease into meaningful groups, while demoting characteristics or segmentations that may seem important but are not actually going to impact your success rates. This improved segmentation enables nonprofits to tailor mass communications and target specific donor segments with personalized appeals and campaigns.
AI: Your Handy Administrative Assistant
AI excels at automating repetitive administrative tasks such as data entry, scheduling, and report generation. Leveraging these tools can free up valuable time for high-value engagement with donors and constituents, allowing fundraisers to make phone calls, plan visits, prospect for new supporters, and show up at events prepared to engage appropriately.
This shift to free up employees for important interactions may also inadvertently impact your management approach. Introducing AI into your fundraising operations will quickly reveal how staff prioritizes their responsibilities.
Fundraisers who are uncomfortable with direct donor interactions may gravitate to managing administrative tasks, such as data entry and reporting, as a way to avoid personal engagement. Because relationship building and high touch engagement are so valuable, it may be necessary to course correct through coaching and even reassessing how responsibilities are assigned.
But Can AI Build Relationships?
There are things that, at least at this juncture, machines simply cannot learn. AI is intelligent, capable of processing vast amounts of data and performing complex tasks with precision, but it lacks EI (Emotional Intelligence). EI is essential for understanding and responding to human emotions, motivations, and social dynamics.
As humans, with ease and intuitively, we empathize, interpret non-verbal cues, pay attention to the body language, sense mood, course correct our own behavior, and build authentic relationships based on emotional connections. People build trust based on give and take in interactions, two-way sharing and reciprocity.
AI operates based on algorithms and data patterns and cannot understand and replicate the nuances of these human interactions. AI can analyze information and serve up the right message, but it cannot reciprocate through sharing and authentic engagement because it does not have memories, experiences, or emotions to relate. It boils down to the simple fact that in spite of its intelligence and interactivity, it is not human,
If we become too seduced by efficiencies and cost-cutting measures of employing fundraisers like Alex who do not take PTO or ask for a raise, human-to-human connection is at risk of being lost. AI can help us craft the right messages, but our communications might become more robotic, lacking genuine connection. AI-powered customer service and communication tools may also lack empathy and emotional understanding, resulting in less satisfying or meaningful interactions compared to human-to-human contact. In essence, trust and connection between two people cannot be fully replicated by AI.
AI: Holding Up A Mirror To Biases
While lacking in human emotion, AI reflects human biases that become embedded in its systems through data and algorithms, which can perpetuate and amplify negative effects. This happens in several ways. Training data bias happens when artificial intelligence learns from data sets that do not represent everyone equally or even misrepresent groups of people. Algorithms can be biased when these datasets or programming cause the AI to make unfair decisions. Cognitive bias occurs when users relying on our human experiences and preferences unintentionally influence AI. These preferences can be very subtle and challenging to detect yet adding to the complexity.
These biases in AI systems can affect nonprofit fundraising and constituent relationships. AI relies on historical data, which can contain societal biases potentially leading to unfair outcomes and impacting interactions, segmentations, strategies, and resource allocation. Nonprofits must take care to put accountability practices in place to use AI in ways that help reduce bias and uphold ethical considerations.
For The Greater Good
Ethics, data privacy, and transparency are baseline requirements for using AI responsibly. It is not about what is possible to do or efficiencies that can be gained by using intelligent technologies. It is also incumbent on us to consider whether these advancements serve the greater good. Are our actions in alignment with creating a better, more generous, just society?
As a sector dedicated to social good it is our responsibility to lead ethically and look beyond short-term gains or bottom-line profits to ensure that AI advancements do not negate what we are working towards. That is a high bar, and it means that while chasing efficiencies and competitive advantages, it is also imperative to take the time and consider the impact of how AI is used from all angles.
To AI Or Not To AI: Balancing Human Values and Technology
AI is our reality, so the question is not an if we ought to use it but rather how to in a way that aligns with our values and supports positive change. AI brings the most value when it complements and supports rather than replaces human-to-human interactions. It can be fantastically helpful to maintain and enhance relationships and support staff in their roles. It is vital that use caution to use powerful technologies in a way that does not reduce acts of generosity to mere transactions.
As a sector, nonprofit organizations cannot afford to prioritize short term gains over long term trajectory of generosity. This means educating ourselves, using restraint, and putting guardrails in place to protect ourselves from short-sighted or ethically ambiguous decisions. As allies and advocates for social good, it is on us to help lead the way as we grapple with these new and complex considerations.
*****
Olga Moshinsky Woltman founded LemonSkies, a boutique agency specializing in messaging and storytelling, and contributing editor to The NonProfit Times. Her email is owoltman@lemon-skies.com
The post AI & Donor Relationships — The Good And The Bad appeared first on The NonProfit Times.
Source From Non Profit Times
AI & Donor Relationships — The Good And The Bad
Image courtesy of Givzey
“Our sector has to really wrestle with the tougher questions… Are we building a society that is human-centric/” Nathan Chappell, Co-Founder – Fundraising.AI
Meet Alex. Alex was designed as an autonomous fundraiser, independently managing a portfolio of donors. Alex and bots like her are billed as a conduit to help organizations build relationships with their donors. Is this technology exciting? Absolutely. But these new and quickly developing technologies bring to the forefront many questions about the impact of AI on fundraising and the human relationships at the foundation of philanthropy.
The genie is out of the bottle. It would be naïve to think we can reverse the course. So, it is more important to consider how — not if already deployed — nonprofits should be using artificial intelligence to support fundraising and engagement in a responsible and beneficial way.
AI: Beyond ChatGPT
Many professionals are familiar with ChatGPT and similar tools that are top of mind due to their accessibility. But for the purpose of this article, discussion focuses on AI broadly, beyond generative AI, which represents only a fraction of artificial intelligence’s capabilities. AI capabilities are expansive, especially around data analysis, automations, predictive modeling, which can help identify donor trends and personalize engagement strategies. These capabilities become the building blocks that open up many new and unexplored possibilities.
Is AI Technology Good For Fundraising?
Is the use of artificial intelligence going to enhance or detract from fundraising and philanthropy? This is the key question that the nonprofit sector leaders are just beginning to consider against the backdrop of rapidly evolving technologies and new opportunities. The answer entirely depends on us, nonprofit leaders, and how we use — and philosophically think about– artificial intelligence and its use in our craft.
When technology is used as a tool and a helper to augment the work, there are enormous efficiencies to be gained, as long as we take care not to lose the heart. However, overreliance on technology to manage donor interactions and relationships can lead to the corrosion of human relationships and a more tenuous and disembodied connection with our donors. Following are some factors to consider, both the opportunities and the pitfalls.
Helping Fundraisers Build Continuity
The most successful fundraisers are relationship builders. They get to know donors and their families, listen, and understand the nuances and motivations that drive donors’ behaviors. These real and very human connections go deep, beyond what can be easily captured in a data field.
Now imagine what it must be like for a philanthropist who has generously supported your cause for a long time and has to start this relationship-building cycle from scratch every 16-24 months — the range cited as an average tenure of a frontline fundraiser. You have talked about your connection to the mission, shared your preferences and areas of interests, but now you have to do it all over again with a new person assigned to be your relationship manager after the previous development professional left the organization. Wouldn’t you be frustrated about spending your valuable time sharing the same information many times over? How long would it be before you disengage and move on?
If the organizational managers put in place processes and expectations to meticulously document interactions, AI can help retain valuable information about donors and pave the way for continuity. These insights can help prepare the new fundraiser to take over the relationship before making that first introductory phone call. The data and technology make this possible, but it is incumbent on the human using these tools to gather insights, document them in a meaningful way, and study up on what’s available and most relevant to help smooth their introduction to a valued supporter.
Gaining New Insights
Imagine standing inches away from Monet’s waterlilies. All you can see are globs of blue, green and white paint. Now step back a few feet and watch lilies floating in the pond and the Giverny bridge come into focus. They were there all along, but when you stood too close, the pattern of brushstrokes was not visible to your naked eye. AI-generated data insights allow fundraisers to step back and uncover new trends, arming them with insights to make informed decisions and optimize efforts.
Provided you have collected information and maintained data hygiene, powerful analytics tools can assess interactions and uncover patterns in donor behavior to help you identify opportunities and guide your engagement. Within seconds, a clever AI helper can analyze giving and participation patterns to help prioritize donor relationships, focusing on those who are most likely to have long-term impact and value to the organization. AI-powered analytics can track the effectiveness of fundraising and marketing campaigns in real-time to adjust and optimize your strategies and maximize success.
Beyond analysis, algorithms can even predict future behavior and donor preferences and help you identify “diamonds in the rough,” valuable prospects. This information allows fundraisers to anticipate donor needs, optimize their outreach strategies, prioritize how they spend time, and tailor communications more effectively. This is a true partnership with AI serving up incredibly valuable insights and the human making decisions about what parameters matter most and how to calibrate their efforts.
Mass Communications with One-to-One Feel
Much of what’s been discussed above primarily informs high touch and one on one interactions. It would be impossible to build individual relationships with every constituent that has ever participated in your walk or wrote a check for $25. However, communications with rank and file supporters can also benefit and be improved through powerful AI. You have experienced it yourself. Think about Netflix anticipating your needs and serving up period dramas based on your Bridgerton binge, rather than animated family cartoons. This is artificial intelligence at work.
AI can help you segment donors with ease into meaningful groups, while demoting characteristics or segmentations that may seem important but are not actually going to impact your success rates. This improved segmentation enables nonprofits to tailor mass communications and target specific donor segments with personalized appeals and campaigns.
AI: Your Handy Administrative Assistant
AI excels at automating repetitive administrative tasks such as data entry, scheduling, and report generation. Leveraging these tools can free up valuable time for high-value engagement with donors and constituents, allowing fundraisers to make phone calls, plan visits, prospect for new supporters, and show up at events prepared to engage appropriately.
This shift to free up employees for important interactions may also inadvertently impact your management approach. Introducing AI into your fundraising operations will quickly reveal how staff prioritizes their responsibilities.
Fundraisers who are uncomfortable with direct donor interactions may gravitate to managing administrative tasks, such as data entry and reporting, as a way to avoid personal engagement. Because relationship building and high touch engagement are so valuable, it may be necessary to course correct through coaching and even reassessing how responsibilities are assigned.
But Can AI Build Relationships?
There are things that, at least at this juncture, machines simply cannot learn. AI is intelligent, capable of processing vast amounts of data and performing complex tasks with precision, but it lacks EI (Emotional Intelligence). EI is essential for understanding and responding to human emotions, motivations, and social dynamics.
As humans, with ease and intuitively, we empathize, interpret non-verbal cues, pay attention to the body language, sense mood, course correct our own behavior, and build authentic relationships based on emotional connections. People build trust based on give and take in interactions, two-way sharing and reciprocity.
AI operates based on algorithms and data patterns and cannot understand and replicate the nuances of these human interactions. AI can analyze information and serve up the right message, but it cannot reciprocate through sharing and authentic engagement because it does not have memories, experiences, or emotions to relate. It boils down to the simple fact that in spite of its intelligence and interactivity, it is not human,
If we become too seduced by efficiencies and cost-cutting measures of employing fundraisers like Alex who do not take PTO or ask for a raise, human-to-human connection is at risk of being lost. AI can help us craft the right messages, but our communications might become more robotic, lacking genuine connection. AI-powered customer service and communication tools may also lack empathy and emotional understanding, resulting in less satisfying or meaningful interactions compared to human-to-human contact. In essence, trust and connection between two people cannot be fully replicated by AI.
AI: Holding Up A Mirror To Biases
While lacking in human emotion, AI reflects human biases that become embedded in its systems through data and algorithms, which can perpetuate and amplify negative effects. This happens in several ways. Training data bias happens when artificial intelligence learns from data sets that do not represent everyone equally or even misrepresent groups of people. Algorithms can be biased when these datasets or programming cause the AI to make unfair decisions. Cognitive bias occurs when users relying on our human experiences and preferences unintentionally influence AI. These preferences can be very subtle and challenging to detect yet adding to the complexity.
These biases in AI systems can affect nonprofit fundraising and constituent relationships. AI relies on historical data, which can contain societal biases potentially leading to unfair outcomes and impacting interactions, segmentations, strategies, and resource allocation. Nonprofits must take care to put accountability practices in place to use AI in ways that help reduce bias and uphold ethical considerations.
For The Greater Good
Ethics, data privacy, and transparency are baseline requirements for using AI responsibly. It is not about what is possible to do or efficiencies that can be gained by using intelligent technologies. It is also incumbent on us to consider whether these advancements serve the greater good. Are our actions in alignment with creating a better, more generous, just society?
As a sector dedicated to social good it is our responsibility to lead ethically and look beyond short-term gains or bottom-line profits to ensure that AI advancements do not negate what we are working towards. That is a high bar, and it means that while chasing efficiencies and competitive advantages, it is also imperative to take the time and consider the impact of how AI is used from all angles.
To AI Or Not To AI: Balancing Human Values and Technology
AI is our reality, so the question is not an if we ought to use it but rather how to in a way that aligns with our values and supports positive change. AI brings the most value when it complements and supports rather than replaces human-to-human interactions. It can be fantastically helpful to maintain and enhance relationships and support staff in their roles. It is vital that use caution to use powerful technologies in a way that does not reduce acts of generosity to mere transactions.
As a sector, nonprofit organizations cannot afford to prioritize short term gains over long term trajectory of generosity. This means educating ourselves, using restraint, and putting guardrails in place to protect ourselves from short-sighted or ethically ambiguous decisions. As allies and advocates for social good, it is on us to help lead the way as we grapple with these new and complex considerations.
*****
Olga Moshinsky Woltman founded LemonSkies, a boutique agency specializing in messaging and storytelling, and contributing editor to The NonProfit Times. Her email is owoltman@lemon-skies.com
The post AI & Donor Relationships — The Good And The Bad appeared first on The NonProfit Times.
Source From Non Profit Times