AI for Nonprofits (7 of 10): How to Find the Right AI Use Cases for Your Nonprofit

November 12, 2026/ Mark Becker / ThursdAI

Start with a problem your team can describe and a result it can measure. If it takes two hours to prepare a donor briefing or staff keep rewriting the same event reminder for different audiences, you have something concrete to test.

Start with problems and outcomes

Ask departments where work is repetitive, delayed, difficult to scale, dependent on one person, or spread across too many systems. Then define the desired outcome.

For example, aim to reduce the time it takes to prepare a first draft of a major donor briefing. Ask staff to verify every fact against the source before using it.

Explore opportunities across the organization

Ask what each team would change about its day-to-day work. These examples show where nonprofits have put AI to work or developed a pilot.

• Try prospect research, appeal drafts, acknowledgments, or donor briefings. Save the Children used Windfall’s wealth screening and predictive AI to help its team identify major-gift prospects among existing donors. Windfall case study
• Try repurposing content, preparing accessible formats, or translating drafts. UNICEF piloted AI translation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to make humanitarian information and training materials available to local partners. UNICEF Venture Fund annual report, p. 40
• Try resource navigation, knowledge search, or intake support, with additional safeguards for sensitive information. In a South Carolina pilot, mRelief used AI to flag blurry or cropped images of documents submitted with SNAP applications so applicants could fix them sooner. OpenAI Academy case study
• Operations and finance. Try policy search, invoice coding, or reconciliation support. Lantern Community Services used Tipalti’s AI-assisted invoice capture and reconciliation tools to reduce manual accounts payable work. Tipalti case study
• Executive and administrative work. Try meeting prep, action-item drafts, or document comparison. The co-founders of mRelief use ChatGPT to tailor meeting presentations to a prospective partner’s geography and priorities. OpenAI Academy case study
• Technology and data. Try drafting queries, classifying records, or triaging support requests. The Dutch Red Cross’s data and digital team and Xomnia built an AI service that classifies and summarizes feedback records for human review. Xomnia describes it as ready for testing with the Ukrainian Red Cross. Xomnia case study

Score four dimensions

Score each dimension from 1 (low) to 5 (high). High value and readiness favor a pilot. High effort and risk call for closer review.

Discuss the scores separately. For a high-value idea with significant risk, identify the safeguards you would need before testing. Give low-value ideas a lower priority even when they are easy to implement.

Choose a balanced pilot portfolio

Select two or three opportunities:

• One visible quick win with low risk
• One workflow with measurable operational value
• If appropriate, one more ambitious use case that tests a strategic capability

Define the user, workflow, baseline, expected benefit, prohibited behavior, human-review point, test period, owner, and stop conditions for each pilot.

Apply a mission and trust test

Fundraising.AI’s framework asks nonprofits to consider how their use of AI affects people and advances the mission. Use these questions to decide whether to proceed. Fundraising.AI

• Does it strengthen or weaken human relationships?
• Could it create unequal treatment or exclude people?
• Would the organization be comfortable explaining the use to a donor or beneficiary?
• Is the claimed benefit meaningful enough to justify the data and risk involved?
• Is a human accountable for the result?

Create the opportunity matrix

The output should be a prioritized matrix that identifies what to start now, pilot with safeguards, investigate later, or decline. Include dependencies and a short explanation of each decision.

For example, you might start with drafts based on public materials, pilot donor briefings with staff verification, and defer automated eligibility recommendations until the organization can evaluate the data and potential harm.

A shared workspace for event communications

Suncoast Humane Society used a custom GPT with organizational materials such as past impact reports and blog posts to help draft its Paws of Hope campaign. The campaign included email, social media, direct mail, and blog posts. The campaign team revised AI-generated blog drafts before publication. Chronicle of Philanthropy case study

For a peer-to-peer precedent, Cure Alzheimer’s Fund’s Hero Fundraising Guide gives volunteer fundraisers sample event emails and social promotion guidance. An event team could combine that toolkit approach with Suncoast’s use of approved materials to guide AI drafting. Hero Fundraising Guide

For your next walk or ride, create an invite-only shared project in your organization’s ChatGPT Business workspace. Add your brand guide, approved mission language, schedule, accessibility checklist, and examples from last year. Shared projects let staff work from common files, chats, and instructions. Ask the project to identify gaps in your communications calendar and draft a captain recruitment email, a participant reminder, and sample social posts. Have staff verify dates, links, claims, and calls to action before publishing. Save the approved versions for next season. ChatGPT Projects

As of November 2026, five ChatGPT Business Standard seats cost eligible nonprofits $480 per year on annual billing or $50 per month ($600 over 12 months) on monthly billing. The workspace provides centralized administration and billing, and OpenAI excludes business data from model training by default. Start with materials approved for sharing with everyone in the project. Keep donor records and sensitive participant data outside the pilot. OpenAI nonprofit pricing OpenAI Business plans

Combining AI drafting with workflow automation

Use AI to prepare draft copy. Use workflow rules to decide when an approved message goes out, who receives it, and when staff should follow up. Here’s how to pilot a welcome sequence for first-time donors.

1. Start with a first gift. If you later adapt the sequence for event registration or a fundraising milestone, check which triggers your platform supports.
2. Define who enters the sequence using campaign, gift amount, and constituent status. Check consent and channel preferences before sending.
3. Use an approved AI tool to draft a welcome and a follow-up. Have staff approve the copy before adding it to the workflow.
4. Build the sequence. Send the approved welcome, wait a set interval, then send a follow-up or create a staff task. Keep the standard gift receipt in place.
5. Use verified personalization fields and preview the fallback for missing information.
6. Use rules to route high-value, sensitive, or unusual gifts to staff.
7. Test with sample records. Verify timing, suppression rules, links, opt-outs, and any record updates.
8. Track staff time, replies, opt-outs, and mistakes. Review the results before expanding the sequence.

Givebutter Plus has a first-time donor workflow template. Its separate AI connector lets approved assistants query live campaign and donor data. It is read-only, so you configure the sequence in Workflows. Virtuous CRM+ supports donor engagement sequences based on donor activity. Confirm available actions and channels in your account before building the pilot. Givebutter Workflows Givebutter AI Connector Virtuous CRM+

What you can do today

1. Ask each department for two problems involving repetitive drafting, research, classification, summarization, or searching.
2. Score the strongest ideas for value, effort, risk, and readiness.
3. Choose one low-risk use case with an outcome you can measure.
4. Write down why one attractive use case should wait or not be pursued.

Next ThursdAI, we’ll turn the prioritized list into a roadmap with owners, dependencies, budgets, and ways to measure when a pilot should expand or stop.

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Cathexis Partners helps nonprofits assess their technology environment, improve business processes and select platforms based on documented organizational needs. Contact us to discuss your next step.