How to Strategically Integrate Artificial Intelligence Into Your Nonprofit

You’ve probably heard a lot about artificial intelligence (AI) recently. Remember the Google engineer leaking a chat with a bot that seemed sentient? The public beta of Open AI’s ChatGPT launched. And pretty much every marketing newsletter has an ad for artificial intelligence.

While chatbots are getting most of the attention right now, there are lots of ways you can use artificial intelligence to be more effective and efficient at your nonprofit — even with scarce resources. Artificial intelligence can add a “mod” to your skills and empower you and your team to amplify your mission.

Websites are complex. Writer’s block is real. Budgets are not growing exponentially. Competition for donations is increasing. And how donors decide which organizations to support is evolving. AI can help solve some of these challenges and have an immediate impact on several key areas of your digital operations without requiring huge financial investments.

Generative AI Helps Nonprofits to Write Compelling Content

People act emotionally and then justify logically. In other words, we must ensure that we’re creating emotional content that connects with potential donors. And we must create lots of it since the digital world is constantly expanding and potential donors are constantly seeing a variety of messages asking for their support.

AI can help with that.

Two of the most popular tools to decrease the amount of time it takes to write content and remove writer’s block are Jasper and Copy.ai. Each has pros and cons, but is anything perfect? Copy.ai provides more in the world of social — specifically with hashtags — and Jasper has created ebooks through the use of “recipes” that make using the tool easy.

Yoast and RankMath are two of the most popular SEO plugins that recognize the benefit of AI and have included AI aspects in their offerings. Yoast uses Bertha to help generate SEO-optimized paragraphs and RankMath uses AI to create SEO-optimized headlines to help increase organic rankings.

AI sounds great, but what’s the real impact? Using AI as a base with human oversight has reduced the amount of time it takes to produce a blog post by more than 60% for a lot of teams.

Generative AI Helps Nonprofits to Create Stunning Visuals

People process images they see for a mere 13 milliseconds and a much larger percentage of people retain what they see as opposed to what they read, so video generally is more memorable. Visual content is a necessary part of every content strategy. It can be expensive and time-consuming, but guess what? 

AI can help with that.

AI can create images. Dall-E-2 is one system that does this though it’s not open to everyone yet.  There are some tools out there that you can use. Craiyon, for example, allows you to write a description of the image needed, and it will then generate several for you. (Just don’t ask it to render faces or you may get a character that could be in the next installment of “The Hills Have Eyes.”)

There are also several AI platforms that turn blog posts and written content into videos. Lumen5 and Synthesys.ai are two examples that can help you get your content in more places in more ways with minimal investment.

This all sounds interesting, but how does it drive donations? If you are a YouTube Nonprofit Program partner, you can place a “donate” button beside your YouTube-published videos. AI can help with video production. This means you can have more videos on popular video platforms with a direct call to action next to the content.

Not only do people retain video content more than the written word, but they also consume it more. Cisco predicted that video would account for an estimated 82% of internet traffic by 2022. Imagine sending your usual annual PDF report to your board and major donors with a custom, AI-created video.

AI Helps Nonprofits to Write Better Code

Websites are made up of millions of lines of code. That’s a lot of room for error. 

AI can help with that.

GitHub Copilot makes writing code more effective by suggesting functions and code in real time. And it’s not the only tool that’s transforming how developers write code. Tabnine uses AI for whole-line and full-functions code completions. Think of it as the developer version of an autocomplete search query that you’d see when you start typing something into Google.

AI doesn’t just write code, it can analyze it, too. Tools like CodeT5 provide natural language code generation and summary functions that make it easy to not only learn to code, but also to understand what the code on your website actually does.

This can save time and increase the efficiency of website development. For nonprofits, there usually is no extra budget to hire outside help when a technical issue pops up, but by using AI, organizations can get a better grasp on its website and what may be causing the issue in the first place. This not only empowers your team, but allows you to be more efficient with your budget. A PwC study found that using even the most basic AI tools can reduce time spent by up to 40%.

AI Helps Nonprofits to Keep Their Websites Secure

Website threats are everywhere so having systems to protect your website is incredibly important.

AI can help with that.

A couple of popular tools used at the retail level are Cloudflare and Imunify360. Cloudflare is a content delivery network and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation tool that uses AI and machine learning to detect bot traffic and mitigate DDoS attacks. Imunify360 uses its AI and machine learning to scan for and block malware on Linux web servers.

Do you really have to worry about website security? Ramil Khantimirov, the CEO of StormWall, shared that attacks increased by 90% in the third quarter of 2022 compared to the same period the previous year. Nonprofit organizations are not exempt from this threat. In fact, it’s the opposite. Since nonprofits do not have the reputation of being highly technical organizations, they are the target of cyberattacks more than any other industry according to recent data.

AI can help.

Using AI as a “mod” allows you and your team to be more efficient and effective. Could AI power the four-day work week without losing any productivity? Maybe. The perception of AI went from the cute Jetson’s robot to a scary job killer. In reality it’s somewhere in between. The power of AI to make routine decisions can’t be ignored as it empowers people to spend more time amplifying missions instead of being bogged down with more routine, behind-the-scenes tasks. 

The preceding blog was provided by an individual unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of NonProfit PRO.