How Artificial Intelligence Can Improve Fundraising (and More)
Artificial intelligence (AI) used to sound like science fiction. Now it seems like it’s making headlines every day.
Some folks seem intimidated by AI-based technology, like ChatGPT. Some are experimenting with what tools like ChatGPT can do. Others are impressed by the possibilities of AI.
With all of the hubbub about AI, I wanted to look deeper into what AI can do for the nonprofit sector. That’s why I recently sat down with Jon Thompson from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and Nathan Chappell from DonorSearch AI to talk about how artificial intelligence can improve fundraising.
Using AI to streamline donor prospect research
When Jon joined CHOP, he was tasked with determining how technology can advance philanthropy. In the process of answering this question, he and his team recognized that wealth alone was not enough of an indicator to determine willingness to give. Eventually, they found that wealth, combined with donor attachment to the organization and psychological factors, were more powerful indicators of willingness to give.
Using DonorSearch AI to build segmentation lists from these data points, CHOP saw direct response rates soar by 85%, and gift size grow by 25%. Those are pretty impressive numbers.
Learn more about how Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia uses AI for donor prospecting to drives big results. Listen to the NonProfit PRO Voice podcast: How Artificial Intelligence Can Streamline Your Prospect Research.
Using AI to make you a better fundraiser
Results like this show that AI has the potential to make you an even more efficient and effective fundraiser. For example, in our discussion, Jon said that CHOP had a goal to double philanthropy results. That could be daunting without tools to help them crunch more data, faster, and gain better insights so they could scale up their results. But that’s just what they were able to do with the help of DonorSearch AI.
As AI becomes more advanced and AI tools become more available, fundraisers will be well-served by using this class of tools to deliver even better results. And not just fundraisers, either.
AI has the potential to help nonprofit professionals across the organization to do their jobs more efficiently. But I think you must be willing to learn more about it and experiment with AI tools and approaches to understand how they work and how they can be best put to use for your organization.
For example, here at Cathexis Partners, we asked ChatGPT to create a basic HTML page. We then watched it write the code in less than a minute. And the coding was well-done. Of course, the output of AI still needs to be checked for accuracy, but this is just one example of how an AI tool could help a nonprofit professional with limited HTML skills to quickly build a basic HTML page – or even help someone with more advanced HTML skills to generate a web page faster.
Learn more about the possibilities of AI for nonprofits
You can discover more about the potential of AI for nonprofits at the BridgeTECH conference on Wednesday, August 2, 2023 in National Harbor, MD. This tech-focused day kicks off the full Bridge Conference and includes multiple sessions about AI and nonprofits. See the BridgeTECH lineup, and register today.
