AI @ EOY: Tools for Saving Time and Raising More at Year-End

I’m welcome. We’re so excited. You all are joining us. We’re just watching the numbers grow this very clearly a topic that people are excited to discuss. So very glad that you’re here today. We’re just giving it a minute for some people to join us. And Read More

I’m welcome. We’re so excited. You all are joining us. We’re just watching the numbers grow this very clearly a topic that people are excited to discuss. So very glad that you’re here today. We’re just giving it a minute for some people to join us. And we’ll dive right in. It’s a very sunny beautiful day here in South Florida where I live. I don’t Emily is in Pennsylvania. I think it’s maybe a little colder up there where you are
wanting so no.
Terrible. Yeah, maybe I’ll go sit by the pool after work today. Who knows?
All right, well, let’s get started. My name is Julia. This is Emily, we are excited to present to you AI at EO why this is all about using artificial intelligence at your end of year. And ways that you can help yourself to do more, we know you have very full plates and such a we’re going to try and give you some tips and tricks for using artificial intelligence to make your job a little bit easier.
So my name is Julia cockin Bock I am the Communications Manager at DonorPerfect and thrilled to work with DonorPerfect, which is a company that does a CRM software. And actually, prior to working with DonorPerfect, I was a client of DonorPerfect. I served as a development director for five years and I was in nonprofits for five years prior to that I really, really, really loved the nonprofit sector and have such a heart. For those of you who are on this call who are making a difference in your communities, we know that your passion is so clear and that your plates are so full. So there is all the empathy between myself and Emily, as we think of all the things that are on your, on your radar for end of year, and we’re here to help. And so it’s AI, which is great news, I love to use AI especially when I’ve writer’s block. Or if I have a really, really quick a deadline, like maybe a donor is waiting for some kind of information on our programs. And I need to put something together in five minutes. Sometimes I can think for way too long about what I need to write. But AI can help me really spread something out faster. So excited to share some of those tips with you today.
I’m Emily Sonic, I’m a copyright copywriter at DonorPerfect. I joined the team about two years ago. And before that I was a fundraiser for about 10 years. And I worked for a wide variety of nonprofits, and a wide variety of sizes of nonprofits. So I was in higher education, I worked in adult literacy, advocacy, the arts, am I missing anything, I think I’ve done hunger in there. Just a lot of beautiful organizations and teams that range in size from I’m actually doing a I’m a one person volunteer fundraiser for my choir right now. And I’ve been on teams of 60s. So I know what I’m sorry, I know what you’re going through. Because I’ve probably been in your shoes before. I really love the profession of fundraising. And I’m so so so happy to help fellow fundraisers with their jobs and to make their jobs easier, raise more money and take some time off and have a break and really achieve a good and sustainable work life balance. I really like to use AI oh gosh, for a variety of things. And we’ll go through them in the presentation today. But particularly if I’m stuck on a subject line or like something that requires a small number of words. Or if I want to see the same message in a variety of voices. This is especially good for things like your annual appeal.
And I’m so excited to introduce you to our little buddy Donnie, he is my favorite. This is Donnie perfect and he helps navigate AI tools, you will see him in our AI for nonprofits Guide, which you’ll get a link to in the next slide and in our follow up materials. If you’d like to help fundraisers use AI to save time and money and raise more money, and he’ll call out helpful tips throughout that guide.
So I would like to see I’m going to pop up a poll. I just want to know why you’re here and see what your comfort level is with using AI right now. Because if I’m being honest, number one here is absolutely where I was before starting using AI as a writer, of course, I’m terrified of robots taking my job, you know, and I saw initial chat GPT content coming out. It was like oh, oh, that’s actually pretty good. I got to step up my game. So I was really scared at first and pretty resistant, but the more that I use it, I am so much more comfortable. And I use it all the time. It’s it doesn’t make me less creative. It doesn’t take away my creative like the creative parts of my job that I love but it really enhances it. So I’m hopeful that’s what you all will feel when you leave here today. But it looks like right now we’ve got the majority of us have have dabbled a little bit we’ve used chat GPT and are excited to learn more which is really great. Got about 10% in the same camp that I was in earlier, looking at about 36% rolling in who
are open to it a little nervous, which I think is a perfectly healthy approach to take to, to AI and you’ll be less nervous when when you start practicing these skills bit more. We’ve got that lucky 1%. Who does who has their job done for them? They I want to know who you are, what meat you’re on.
Yeah, this is great. I agree. I’m I went through all these phases. I haven’t gotten to I’m on the beach right now. But I went through, oh, my goodness, is my job going to be taken and then I went through. Okay, I guess I’ll try this out. And now I’m like, Oh, let me just turn to charge GPT for this. So it’s a it’s a growth and knowledge for sure.
So today, I wanted to share with you our year end fundraising bundle of guides, we know that GivingTuesday has already passed. But this QR code here will take you to all three, our year end fundraising cheat sheet, or GivingTuesday cheat sheet and the AI for nonprofits, which I really like for all of you to download. It’s just fantastic. And it helps you figure out some ways to use AI that are really creative for your nonprofit, it’s not just about writing
emails or writing proposals, there’s so much more to it. So these guides will help you communicate with the latest AI tools and save time and reduce your holiday season stress. Julie and I worked on these we’ve got you know, teams of writers and designers and people who know what you’re doing and have your back created these resources for you. And we’re just so excited to hear them.
Now, we want to talk about the elephant in the room and kind of why should you care about end of year, I know that there are different arrays of experience on this call. And so I just want to take a second to talk to you two groups that maybe have
come up against and have you’re at some point. So one, maybe you’re brand new to fundraising, maybe you just got out of college, and this is your first nonprofit role. Or maybe you just retired from a lifelong journey of corporate America. And you decided that during your retirement, you want to help give back. And now you’re just brand new to this whole conversation and why does end of year matter so much. So I’m gonna give you a couple of just base level understandings of end of year one, a lot of people give at end of year because of just generosity in the air in general, people it’s giving season, whether you’re giving gifts or giving food or whatever people are in a generous spirit. Secondly, there are a lot of tax benefits to your and giving some people
in certain tax brackets need to give away a certain amount of money by the end of the year in order to receive tax benefits for that philanthropy. So they’re looking for places to give. And then lastly, you see in this quote, among DonorPerfect users over 30% of the years, gifts are often given in the last three months of the year, whether that’s the tax benefits, or just procrastination on the part of the giver, or I don’t know, the the giving spirit, whatever it is, it’s a high volume gift season. And so you as someone who’s new to fundraising, just want to be part of the conversation, you don’t want to miss the boat of all these really important gifts coming in because of this time of year, you want to be part of that narrative. Now the other group are maybe some veterans who have done a whole lot of urine giving. And this is not new to you. And maybe you feel like you have this in the bag. And you could do it with one arm tied behind your back, which, as I mentioned, I was a development director. And there were some times where I felt like that, especially with end of year giving because we did the same campaign every year, which worked, we always ended up making our goal, things were great. But I needed a little bit of creativity when it came to my year end giving. And so I just want to take a moment to encourage you for being on this call. Because that’s what we’re going to talk about us how to breathe some new life into your urine giving those those fundraising veterans you all know why this is important. You’ve seen the gifts come in and you know that you want to be part of your end. But maybe this will help you get a little more creative on what kind of campaigns you’re doing.
So now we’re going to dig into the main roles that are tapped into during your end. So the first is the strategist. The strategist is the person who kind of oversees the whole caboodle. They oversee everything that’s going on with the campaigns. Maybe they know exactly what the goal is and where the funds will go once they come in. Maybe they have seen the annual budget and so they know what needs to be made and
100 Make your annual budget be in the black as opposed to in the red. This person sees the whole picture and lays out the whole strategy. A lot of times this is a development director or an executive director. And this is someone who can see beyond, you know, January 1, and is able to see where that money will go and why you need it. The next role is the administrator, this person really prepares the data and maintains your database, this person is incredibly important for any of the other development directors on this call, I’m sure that you lean a lot on your administrative person to really put everything they need into DonorPerfect or whatever your CRM is. Next is the communicator. This is the person who really works on the messaging and maybe figures out what time of day to send things or what kind of differentiation they can take in messaging to make sure that the message hits different for different people, this person is very creative, and a has to write a lot. And then lastly, is the networker. This person is making sure that the information is in front of the right people. So maybe they are a board member, and they’re advocating for you to their network. But I do want to take a pause here, because some of you are all of these things. Some of you are the strategist, the administrator, the communicator and The Networker. I was that for a couple of years on my organization. I know Emily, as she mentioned, she’s been a team of one before, it is a little intimidating to see all four of those roles and think, Oh, my goodness, I have to do all of those things. But that is something again, we are here to help with, we think that AI will be able to serve a lot of those kind of menial tasks so that you can serve the 30,000 foot view. Now, as Emily mentioned, when we took the poll, and I cannot replace you, you know, your organization, you know, the goal is that you’re trying to get to, you know the effect of your words. But AI can help. And that’s what we’re going to try and talk about today.
Absolutely. And what’s really exciting, and I have found this with my own use of AI is that studies show that communicators who use generative AI and generative AI refers to artificial intelligence tools that create content by combining things that it finds on the Internet into something that appears to do. So general, generative AI saves three hours on each content piece, at least I would say certainly more for me, I write a little slower, and implementing AI techniques in communications increases in organizations ROI by up to 30%. And I know you all can read but I just wanted to say that out loud, because it’s huge. You’re not only saving time, but you’re raising more money. And it’s just this wonderful lifting effect that you’ll see. When you start using these tools. It’s it’s very exciting. Again, this is coming from Emily, who is a copywriter and me who I’m a Communications Manager. We use this every day in our work and we don’t feel replaced by this tool. It’s a helping mechanism. And we we see the benefits.
So at first I’d like to dive in a little bit deeper into the role of the strategist and some ways that they can use AI to help their job around calendar year and then throughout the the fundraising year. So some ideas include using AI to to analyze previous year’s data, you can use this there are some data visualization AI tools like Akio and we’ll we’ll dive more into that.
The strategist was responsible for setting the years fundraising goals or reviewing budget requirements. And they can use AI to sort of assess things like what communications performed well, for previous years, what donor segments performed well, and you can look at this in your data yourself. But having a smart computer sort of analyze it all for you, takes a lot of the head scratching out it takes a lot of the time just spent with spreadsheets out visualizes everything into just really nice graphs and very easy to digest. Ways to see and think about it. You can look at you know, retention rates and all that good stuff.
So really quick before we jump into the first AI example, Julia is a development director, who was a strategist. Is there anything that you wanted to add or kind of touch on? Or should we should we jump into our first prompt here? I’m excited to show people how this works. I think this is going to be good.
Oh, before Sorry, I forgot to mention that you can even ask AI to help you write the best probes for AI which is crazy. But it’s learning by you know, scrolling through the internet and so AI like people when people ask AI Hey, help me write a good punch for you.
It will. And you can use that as a template. And it’s just sort of constantly improving. It’s a very, very cool process. So here we have our first prompt, and it’s really not a bad one. It’s very simple. So if this is your first calendar year in fundraising campaign, this is a good place to start. So just hey, I use Cloud AI for this. Hey, Claude built me a timeline for a calendar year end nonprofit fundraising campaign starting on December 1, super, super simple. And here’s what it put out for me in about 15 seconds. So it’s, it’s reasonably good. It’s basic, but you know, it tells us when to launch the campaign, what emails to send it when I like the earlybird outreach, especially to like major donors and corporate sponsors to make them feel a bit more like insiders. I like that it includes events printed appeals, like this is a pretty comprehensive timeline, and is such a good starting point.
However, they are tools are built to learn. If you communicate with them more clearly, they will give you more detail in their answers. So this reminds me so much of when I was in elementary school, and I had a teacher who did an exercise with us in writing directions, I think was meant to be kind of a very, like baby’s first engineering class, where she asked us all to tell her to teach her how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And so you know, she had all the ingredients on the table, everything she needed. And so of course, you know, being second graders, we were like, well put, put the peanut butter on the bread. And she said, okay, and put the loaf, took a loaf of bread still in the bag, put it on the table, took the jar peanut butter, stuck it on top of the loaf of bread and was like, Here you go. And we all thought, you know, oh, we have to take the bread out of the bag and do it. So you have to be very precise with your language to get exactly what you want out of it. And what’s very cool about them too, is you can do multiple iterations of the same prompt. And so if you don’t quite get the answer you’re looking for I say something like, Okay, this is a good start. But let’s add X, Y, or Z, or let’s try that again. But in a tone that’s kinder, you can really play and just add detail, detail detail, and you’ll get something great out of it.
So here’s our first prompt, but improved. So everything that’s in italics, there is what was in the original prompt, and everything that is bolded is some additional information that we’re giving to teach our H IR, our AI tools, a little bit more about the organization. So build a timeline for a calendar year, a nonprofit fundraising campaign for an animal welfare, nonprofit organization, goals, $10,000, we would like to include assignments for the people and the time that we have started on December 1 and ended on the 31st. So this is super comprehensive. And it really shows or tells our AI tool who we are, what we’re doing and what we’re working with. And so here is what it put out. And I just love the additional detail like I would absolutely and I’m an animal person, I would absolutely fall for all of these appeals immediately. Moving a fundraiser creates an appeal letter telling Peggy the pot bellied pigs story of rescue, like how, how lovely is that compared to just send out your appeal letter, we’re writing you know, a letter in the voice of Peggy and your AI tool can write that letter for you and or draft it for you, for you to refine, rather. So it gives you a more detailed timeline, it breaks it out by role, which is great, especially for the volunteer, because they’re really manageable tasks for the volunteer, like volunteer calls five businesses about this, you know, it’s so clear. And I find it just very helpful to take you know, when when I’m stressed my brain just kind of like I see all of the tasks I have to do and kind of freeze. But something like an AI timeline helps me like, kind of get out of that free state and be like, Oh, okay, this is manageable. Here’s what I have to do. Here’s what I’m doing it done.
Now, these are great tools for the strategist. And Emily, I’m the same way I kind of take to a lot of time in the planning stages sometimes. And so if I could just give me the plan, then I could work on execution, which would be great. Especially when I was in fundraising. And I was trying to figure out, Oh, my goodness, when in the world should I send out this one email, AI can help me figure that out based on their generative information that they’re pulling from all over the web. So love that for a strategist and it’s a great way for them to save time. Now we’re going to talk a little bit about the administrator. As I mentioned before, this person is such a important.
Like, I don’t even know how to say that I think this person is the backbone honestly, because I don’t know what I would have done without my right
arm of an administrator who was able to pull information from our database that I wasn’t able to pull because I was doing 97 other things. She knew the ins and outs of our information and because of that she was able to really help inform me when it came to end of the year so she was able to determine possible segments for communication, especially because she saw the gifts come in all the time.
until she was able to see certain trends that I wouldn’t have seen. And to suggest certain things that maybe I would not have seen, because I wasn’t seeing the guests every single day. She also could look at mailmerge templates and dynamic fields for specific communications to large groups of people, this is something that DonorPerfect does is there is an ability to have fields in your communication. And so she could pull that information out. She could also pull reports on historical data, maybe comparing 2022 year end to 2021 year and and seeing any trends between the two. And then lastly, she could add some personalization to thank yous and things like that, because she had the ins and outs of the database. And that was really, really helpful for me as the strategist to be able to rely on her to give me the information she needed. This personalized thank you, I want to just call out for a second, this is something else that DonorPerfect does that I love they in your system and DonorPerfect, you’re able to assign certain things to certain staff members. And we did that a lot, especially at end of year we had dropped, we had gifts that we dropped off to different donors. And so I was able to have my administrator assign those tasks to the right staff member. And then we would know if their gift was dropped off. So that was really helpful. And a great tool with DonorPerfect.
But there are obviously things that AI could help my right arm do, which was things like professional responses to common inquiries. So for example, maybe they would ask where are the funds for giving Tuesday we’re going to go and instead of my administrator, answering that question 15 times, she could ask Chad GPT or claw AI to create a response to that, and then just send that response over and over and over and over. So her time was saved. And she wasn’t going to have to build that same response over and over. Another thing she could do was create a list of donor segments. Like we said, you know, she made me saw some of the trends that I didn’t see. And so she could put into chat chat GPT and say, hey,
you know, we know we need to reach out to ally bonds. And we know we need to reach out to other people who gave that interview last year. But who else can we give? Who else can we reach out to her and have your giving. And then lastly, she could get ideas for types of data that were helpful in determining fundraising goals. So that is a great way for the administrator can use AI. Now the same thing that Emily talked about before with the prompts. So we’re going to do another example. This will be an example on how to get AI to tell you about donors segments. So this is a very, very simple ask, this is something that I’m sure many of you have rolling around in your head right now. What donor segments? Should we send this campaign to? Easy question, everybody’s asking it. Let’s see what AI generated.
Now, I do want to point one thing out here, this I know these slides with the responses from AI are not beautiful. But we wanted to really capture this specific thing that AI put out. Obviously, Emily and I could have written these answers into this slide and made it a little bit prettier. But the AI tool spit out a list of bulleted points, they this is exactly what we got from that AI tool. So that’s why there’s this not so pretty screenshot. But it proves that AI is creating these lists, not us. This is the exactly what we got from the list. So this is a good example. These are a lot of segments that are helpful to reach out to someone that I love on this list specifically is this past corporate sponsors, one,
I don’t think I would have ever thought of reaching out to past corporate sponsors at year end, I usually would think of reaching out to them when I’m doing an event. But then being on this list actually spurred an idea and me, oh, we’re going to do an annual report. Maybe we reach out to our corporate sponsors that didn’t give this year and say, Hey, you weren’t part of any events, would you like to sponsor our annual report? But I wouldn’t have thought of that had they not been on this list. So that’s a great example of, you know, a I thought of something that I didn’t think of and now I can take some action from that.
So now we’ll look at another tip from Donnie, this is the same thing. We want you to save time on thinking. So like that list before. I could have sat down and thought of
10 of those segments. I wouldn’t have thought of past corporate sponsors. I wouldn’t have specified certain things
If I wouldn’t have, you know, it would have taken me much more time to develop that robust of the list. And I did it for me in five seconds. So this was saving me some thinking time, so that I could use the responses that they gave me in order to raise more money and talk to more people and be focused on the things that were important. You don’t need AI to produce every piece of your campaign right off the bat. You just want them to kind of answer some questions for you and maybe get you not stuck on a certain question. And maybe it will sports for more ideas, like I said, with labs, corporate sponsorships.
So now here’s a refined prompt. So the as Emily said before, the things in italics are things we use, in the first prompt generate a list of possible donor segments for calendar year on fundraising campaign, then we specified that as for a welfare organization, that their largest one time gift was $1,000. We talked about how many constituents were in the database, and that all those constituents were not necessarily donors, some were volunteers, or staff. So let’s see how I changed based on that prompt. I love this is my favorite example. Because using the specifics of the constituents and the largest gift, a, I learned that this organization was either smaller or newer. And so they were able to generate information that was more necessary for the maturity of this organization. For example, in the after the first prompt, the major donors line, said major donors 1000 Plus gifts. After the next prompt, where we said, hey, our largest gift ever was $1,000. Ai corrected that, and said, actually, for this organization, your major donors are 500 to 1000, which was not what they said before, but because they know the even charity of the organization. Now they can be more specific. Also, they gave better explanations of each of these segments on that first prompt, they didn’t, I did not generate the explanations like
branded with nostalgic messaging and what a lapsed donor is last donated three plus years ago. It didn’t specify those things last time. But now it knows that this is a new or small organization. And so maybe the person asking the question needs more information. I think that’s so cool. Like what a great proof of learning between generic prompt and a more specific prompt. And then lastly, on this slide, the other thing I love is at the bottom, it says, Hey, let me know, if you need me to prioritize a further segment, this list is so helpful. I love my tools. This is so nice. And again, this goes back to that tip, this may spur you on to more questions or better refined specifics that you want from the AI tool. Yeah, yes, I would love for you to help me prioritize that. That sounds great. Thank you.
Again, this tool is here to help you. I also loved how it took recent adopters caught my eye, I was just thinking about my dog who I adopted and how like, oh my gosh, if that shelter asked me in the first month after getting him, I would have given them the moon. You know, like I love that little beast. So it takes people who are not necessarily thought of as donors, but as the men. So I think it’s a very cool way of thinking about it. And it added that because we told that this is an animal welfare organization. So it knew, Okay, something like a recent adopter, as someone who may be interested in your organization, which is cool.
So next up, I’m excited to talk about the communicator. Because this is a person who I am right now. So the communicator is the one who you know develops the messaging tone personalization of all of your year end outreach is the person who determines the overall ethos of your fundraising campaign, your tone, your voice, all of your content. So your donation page, everything that appears there inspires people to give all of your appeals all your stewardship communications, there’s just a ton of things that you need to communicate with your donors. So well, I know, a communicator wouldn’t necessarily use AI to save draft email, because you’re all pretty competent.
And competent writers. You know, it’s very good for taking this list, kind of paring it down, taking maybe the easier, the easier
assignments, like say, an electric quick article for a newsletter, it can generate something and then you can edit it. So it’s also a very, very great time saving device for people who do this professionally.
So for using AI as a communicator,
I would recommend asking it to update previous years campaigns with new statistics of yours with news to share anything, any successful fundraising appeals you’ve already sent, you can just update them through AI and proofread it. And then then it can be done. If you’re really, really crunched for time. You can also ask AI to generate fundraising updates for especially for big days, like getting Tuesday, it can build those for you. So that all you have to do is fill in the blank and keep your supporters up to date. And you can see what your message looks like in a variety of voices, especially when I worked for bigger organizations. I felt like our voice was always so heavy and formal, because it was all written and approved by committee. But if you don’t want that voice, you can show the people who need to approve it, like, Hey, here’s what this looks like in a friendly style. Here’s what this looks like. In a formal style. Here’s what this looks like kind of funny. And you can test and try. And it’s just so much easier to do that because you are not tasked with generating that entire letter in all of those different voices. That is a massive creative undertaking, when you’re really just trying to test an idea.
So for the communicator, here’s an example of a simple prompt. And that would be to write an email, fundraising Kapitel soliciting donors at the end of the calendar year, any nonprofit, we’re keeping it under 200 words, and including a subject line and preheader. So this just includes all of the content, you need very, very basic.
It’s really not bad, I do want to call out a few of the there’s a few little like typos a few little,
what’s sort of a few little errors that are important to note, because AI doesn’t necessarily know what year it is that you’re writing in. So when it says things like as we prepare to close out 2020 If I saw that in a fundraising appeal, I’d be like, ooh, that’s somebody somebody didn’t update their three to three year old feel like this is a great.
So just be sure to proofread. However, this is not bad as it stands like it’s, it’s it’s warm, it’s compassionate, it tells people, it gives you opportunities to fill in with your own specific mission. It’s a pretty good email. So if you are finding yourself on December 21, and you haven’t sent out an email appeal yet, this is not a bad one, you know, just it’s so much better to send and ask them to not. So if you’re relying on you know, a pretty straightforward, simple prompt go for it.
However, I do think it’s important to note if the message is too generic, and if your prompt is too generic, you do run the risk of sending the same appeal that another nonprofit sends, I have never going to notice unless there’s typos. Of course, if you sent the same appeal, as you did last year, I don’t remember what you wrote last year. I don’t remember what I wrote last week. But if I get the same appeal from the Red Cross and the Sierra Club and you know, everyone has the same language, then I’m going to be like, hey, wait a minute, you know, who am I supporting here? What what is the mission? What’s going on? So yes, make sure to be specific, and to edit, edit, edit for any inaccurate information.
So here’s the the new and improved prompt. We’re writing the email fundraising appeal soliciting donors to the animal welfare organizations at the end of the calendar year. But I’d like to use a hopeful tone, I want to invoke the spirit of generosity around the holiday season, it’s very like squishy and magical, I want to include an enticing subject line preheader, and keep it under 200 words, I’d like to include merge fields for salutation first name and suggested gift amount.
So here is the updated version, which does include some nice merge fields, which is so convenient.
It’s more specific to the animals, it still does include end of 2020 Even though I wrote it or requested, you know, this, this content this year, so still be sure to proofread but it is improved. Your generosity saves animal lives reduction, you know, it gives very clear explanations of where their gifts go in a way that’s still very warm. So just a little more detail goes a very long way.
Now we’re gonna go into our last role or hat or function of your job, which we understand again, all of these roles may be you may be someone on your team, but they are all to be helped with AI which we’re excited to share. So this last role is The Networker. This could be you this could be a board member, this could be a really passionate donor or advocate. It’s really anybody who has some type of platform to share about what your organization is doing. Which we live in an age where everybody has a platform, a social media platform or a group text or something, you know, we’re all connected in 97 different ways. So any
Any person that is willing to share your message could be this network of role. This role is really specific to spreading the word and sharing goals and updates with key people. also reaching out personally to major donors. This all takes so much time. I know for me, I did a lot of this as a development director in the actual finding of the people and making sure that they want to grab coffee, or, like I said, we used to deliver a gift at year end. So figuring out their schedule, and when can I stop by and give you a gift. All of that takes so much time. So using AI for something like the initial email saying, hey, I need to meet with you, saves me major time, I still get to do the relational thing for the networker. But the TASKI things can be done by AI.
Some examples would be asking your API tool for lists for local publications where you can get in touch for ad space, a lot of visibility questions, and I will be able to pull that into a list. Unlike something like Google, if you Googled, hey, I need some ad space, it will give you a bunch of links. But it won’t give you a list that you could particularly sort through and know for sure, hey, I want to work with these people or I don’t want to work with these people. The amount of time difference between clicking into every link on Google versus seeing a list and choosing. That’s a lot of time saving. So that’s something that I can help with with the network. Also, you can automate social media posts and emails, specifically with high touch donors. So you can ask AI to help you create some specific messaging for high touch donors, maybe you can share specific information about that donor, not their name, or their address or specific personal information. But something like we have a donor who has given $15,000 Over the last four years, we know that they have ability to give more, what kind of appeal should I write in order to get that person to give more, so you’re not sharing their personal information, but you are using the their habits to learn more about how to communicate with them. And then lastly, you can create a script or talking points. I know for me as the Development Director, when I would ask my board to do like a phone a THON, or think Athan or whatever, I always had to give them a script. And the having AI developed that script would have saved me a lot of time. So these are just some ways that the networker can use AI tools, and now will give you an example when it comes to the publications.
So the prompt here, the easier prompt is create a list of publications and the 90210 zip code that offer ad space for nonprofits during the holiday season. Pretty simple, easy, straight to the point. Oh, the. So before we grow, go on to the next slides. Sorry, I think there’s a slide missing there.
It is. This gave us a list of 15 publications. But it didn’t say much about their philanthropic connections. So we want to recommend that you can be creative with asking your prompt with developing your prompt. Be creative with kind of thinking outside of the box like hey, I want
specific newspapers that will give me a free ad and will say something about my organization, and might even give to my organization. Worst case scenario, the bot doesn’t give you what you’re looking for. And you’ll refine your question or you’ll move on. But there’s no risk and being a little more creative or a little more specific or a little more prescriptive. Because worst case scenario you’re trying to get there is no risk there.
List Yeah. This is the list that was created when the first prompt went in. So it gave me you know, Beverly Hills weekly and Beverly Hills time and a couple of local stations that might be interested in what we’re doing. But you know, it’s pretty generic. Anybody could put that specific prompt in here and say, Hey, give me some publications and 90210 that would say something about something and it’s gonna pull this up. That’s very generic. But once we got more specific, and we said, create a list of businesses in the 90210 zip code that are likely to offer adspace donations or discounts to a local animal welfare nonprofit during the holiday season, the
lists got more specific and I’m so excited about this list. Love this one. So it produced a list of 10 businesses in that area code that are good targets. Now let’s go through a couple of things. One, pet food express that was not on the first list, because they didn’t know that we were looking at Pet things. The they say this is a pet supply store, and they could donate pet food or offered discounted advertising. So not only does the the tool give you an idea, but it also tells you how to use that idea. Asked for donated pet food. Next, Barneys New York was on that first list to high end department store. But then it says, Why don’t you ask them to donate a percentage of their sales. Same with Saks Fifth Avenue that was on the first list. But this says that they could offer their ad space in their circulars. So that’s something very specific to that store. And the AI tool is telling you hey, here’s some ways to specifically partner with this particular business. I love the hotel bear Bellaire, it says you can ask them for an auction item. Or even looking at Equinox gym. This one kind of made me laugh because Equinox is a very, very high end gym. And I can totally see an equinox doing a adoption event at the gym. And all these people come into the gym and seeing all these amazing puppies that they want to adopt. And it being this great
advocacy moment, not only for Equinox, but also for this animal welfare nonprofit. And again, this list is so much more specific than the first list that came out. Because we told them, it’s animal welfare. And we want to talk specifically about donated space. So the AI tool gave more information about that. And what I really want to call attention to because it’s very easy to miss is all of the things this list is not including. So I don’t know if any of anybody else here has run a live or silent auction. But you know, getting auction items I spent so much time you know making phone calls. I even just went in door to door. And the number of times I heard no, we don’t donate to charity. I’ve even seen that on some websites. So your your AI tool will see no we don’t like work with charities or if like that’s, you know, anywhere indicated on their website or in their communications, they will not include them. So you can take some of those those off the list too, which is so much easier than going into the store and hearing it and getting rejected again.
So what we wanted to kind of wrap up with is just a reiteration of ways that each of these campaign rolls can use AI to make their year end lives just so much easier. And hopefully, take take yourself a few days off and actually you know, enjoy your holidays with your families and loved ones. So you know, your strategist who helps with overall campaign timelines, and
overall ethos, or overall, you know, view of the campaign can use AI to identify, you know, build timelines and identify sector trends and find you know, very big picture ideas of things that they can run with. Instead of just imagining them all themselves. Our administrator can use AI to help with relevant recording, you can use it for creating auto responder messages and commonly asked questions, you can build an FAQ with AI to save time during the busy season.
Our communicator can use AI for things with help with campaign messaging for testing a lot of very cool ideas, and for time saving on smaller projects so that they can really use their creativity on the bigger ones. And then the more the higher priority projects. And finally, our networker can help can use AI to help with things like quick hitter, social media posts, finding untapped groups, I think that is enormous. And making sure that they are getting the campaign in front of the right people.
So now what this is the exciting part, and I’m thrilled to send you all out into the world, because it is time to go play. We encourage you to start with a really just low hanging pilot project to start something very low stakes that you’ve been meaning to something you’ve been meaning to get to but you just sort of haven’t yet. Something like an E blast or a newsletter or it’s even I love using it to mess around with things like taglines, slogans, billboards, all of your kind of like snappy small word things that are really that really pack a big punch. So I recommend scheduling just 15 minutes, not by yourself if you can help it for AI playtime, that it’s so fun to do in a group or you know, with one or two other people and just mess around. Keep adding like, do one prompt and just keep adding to it. Keep changing it and just see what you can do.
Now just as a reminder, here are some quick tips about developing your prompts. This is kind of a screenshot snapshot of all the things that we’ve talked about, like being clear and specific, using complete sentences that give all the context and background that the AI tool will need experienced experiencing with different phrasing. So using something like, we have 2000 constituents as opposed to in our database, we know that not the second one being leaving out the number of constituents. So making sure that you’re using different kinds of phrasing and developing your prompts a little more each time. Selecting the format, like I said, those screenshots were a little bit ugly, but that’s because they came directly from the, the tool. So something like give me a bulleted list, give me an email, give me a 200 Bored social media post.
Giving AI the specifics of what you’re looking for is really helpful. use key words and break down context requests, specify the level of detail check for ambiguity, like Emily said, I don’t want to get the same email twice, because two organizations just asked a very generic prompt to chat GPT. So make sure that the the results look like they’re coming from you. Consider the models strengths and limitations. This is a really interesting one. Maybe certain models are really great at photo generation. So going into that model and asking it to write you an email will not necessarily give you the response you need. Some things are you know which tool is helpful in which capacity. And then lastly, this is iterate and experiment and providing feedback, kind of having a conversation with the tool. Emily, you made me laugh earlier, because you said that whatever you ask the tool, a question that you will respond, that’s a great start. But can we I do the same thing. I talked to it like it’s a person and I’d say, thank you so much for that, I really appreciate your help. Now let’s try it, maybe it doesn’t need to be as delicate as myself that Emily may want to be. But having a back and forth conversation with the tool is really helpful, because it will help with the iteration. And you can provide the feedback that’s needed. Although actually, if I can jump in on that point, this is really cool. There’s some early evidence that’s showing that using an encouraging tone actually helps add a little humanity to the AI, the AI itself. And this is like way outside of my like brain and paygrade. So it’s not like an expert level than I am. But ending a prompt with I know you’re gonna do a great job gets you a different answer.
Or for things like like ethical concerns, I put things like remember, we have a diverse audience. And it will make sure that like what it’s writing is inclusive, or it sometimes gives me tips for accessibility, if I’m writing for the web. So take all those concerns and kind of share them with the tool and make sure like if you’re worried about, you know, maybe missing people, or I don’t know, creating a robot that’s cold and a message that’s kind of generic and robotic, use kind of language and it will spit kind language back at you. Very cool stuff. That’s so fun.
Okay, so as we wrap up a few key takeaways here is the QR code that we share earlier in the presentation. So if you didn’t get it earlier, just open up your phone to your camera app, and scan this little black and white image here. And you’ll be able to get these three really helpful tools, the urine fundraising cheat sheet, the AI guide for nonprofits and the Giving Tuesday cheat sheet. I know going to stages and then for those of you have a participant catered, I hope that it was a great turnout for you. This GivingTuesday Chi Chi can honestly be used in any kind of campaign. So still, I highly recommend downloading this funnel. So really helpful as you’re looking through your year end, as you’re considering using AI. And as you’re looking ahead for campaigns, and just a few reminders. Even a simple bare bones topic will get you information we showed you, hey, this is incredibly generic. But the AI tools still spit out useful things that you could use. If you have time, try playing with adding detail to your prompts, you’ll get better results. That makes sense. And then lastly, I can never replace you. Like we said the information needs to come from you in order to for AI to generate anything. And you got to check your AI because sometimes they talk about 2020 in the middle of 2023 and that’s just doesn’t make any sense. So it’s it’s outside of time and space but like we don’t have to
clinics, so true. So
Be sure that you know your value as a fundraiser. And as someone who’s passionate about your mission, AI is not passionate about your mission like you are, you have to give a personal voice to your mission, because you are representing the people that you serve, and doesn’t know that stuff. So you are incredibly valuable, this cannot replace you. It’s a time saving tool that will help you to get in front of people better or to serve your organization better or to be out at your programs more often. These are all timesavers, not replacers.
Thank you so much.
We I know he gave you all so much information, I hope that it has been really helpful and practical. Mainly the things we want to do is break down the walls and say you can do this go try it. We gave a couple of examples of ways to try it. And we hope that you’ll dive right in. We would love to take a minute to take a couple of questions, if there are any. So I’ll invite Laurie to join us again and to read some of these questions.
That was a great presentation. Ladies, I loved it.
We do have a list of questions I’m just gonna kind of run through. There are some that were asked more than once. So we’re gonna jump into those. One of the big questions is, and I answered a few, but I think it might be make sense for you to address it to them is, I think the understanding of where you’re using the AI because the question was, where is this and DonorPerfect. So can you explain the process that you’re doing and the fact that you’re in the program itself and, and which ones you’re using that was another big one is I don’t know what you’re using besides chat DPT.
So I can start with the DonorPerfect side and then Emily if you want to share a couple of examples. So on the DonorPerfect side, we are working on a few AI tools that will be within the product. If you’re a client of DonorPerfect, we will be having some AI bought things that are on the on the horizon we’re really excited about that will be part of the product. We also have a like we said we have that AI generative ebook that will help walk you through some ways to use AI, which is helpful. And we partner with a lot of Oregon, a lot of companies that have AI for example, Constant Contact directly integrates with DonorPerfect and they are on the cutting edge of some AI things. So those are ways that it integrates with DonorPerfect. Also, another tool is something called donor search, which is a I had generated and it helps kind of know more about your givers. It pulls information based on the people in your database and gives you more information about them as a giver. So there are a few tools that we have that integrate with DonorPerfect that will help you use AI in the day to day basis. But these things that we’ve showed today were through outside tool, you go to that tools website, and you type in the prompt. So those prompts one typed in through DonorPerfect, but we do have AI tools that integrate with DonorPerfect.
And as far as the specific tools that I use these, this is absolutely not a comprehensive list. I’m still doing so much more exploring. But it kind of depends on what I’m what tasks I’m using it for. So for content generating, like writing, specifically, I’ve tried chat GPT and clogged.ai. I really like just the structure of Claude that I have. Because I can see my entire history, every question I’ve asked, I can like click into it and see all the different responses. So I just I like the record that it keeps. That’s just a personal preference for data visualization. Akio is good. But I do just want to reiterate, be so careful with your donors data, don’t upload anything personally identifiable into there. But it’s great for things like I want to see gifts by zip code, or I want to see, like a gift amount by zip code, like what geographic regions of my community are giving the most and that sort of thing.
So that’s we got content, we got data. Oh, and for illustration, I use DaVinci, which is not free, but I use it for just like games and silly stuff that I do at home.
And I’ve used just open AI How should they do have an illustration tool? I haven’t used it in a while so I can’t remember what it’s called. But that’s a good one to
know. There are plenty of tools. Well up to Yeah, I mean, you could honestly Google AI tools and it’ll give you a whole list. So people are list of AI tools. Yes, seriously will give you a whole list of things that you can go in and try.
Okay, so let me see what else we have.
Okay, so Jen asked. She said I find my AI tells me to send emails
and posted times that don’t seem to make sense. Should I trust it? Or do I do what I feel makes sense for my audience?
A B test? Totally.
doable? Yeah, go ahead.
So if you’re not familiar with a B testing, this is where you change just one element of your message. So you have the same email, same art, not the same audience.
Maybe the same audience, I don’t know. Same audience like segments. So you have like one group of people who are major donors and another group of people who are the same type of major donors so that you’re keeping it so that you can only test one variable is kind of the goal. So then that same email at the time that recommends and send another group at the time that you would do and see what performs better, you never know.
Yeah, there’s a there’s a point of you know, your constituents, if you’ve been sending out emails,
who pm forever, and that’s the one time that people send emails, that’s because you know, your constituents, but testing is, is key, because you maybe you are missing people by sending the same email out over and over.
Okay, so
Norma asked, she said, as the communicator, what would be the cons of using AI?
Hmm. Oh, this question. I think the biggest con would be if there are mistakes, that would be the biggest fear or con. Other than that, I really don’t think there are many cons because you don’t just copy and paste exactly what came out of AI, you’re going to take their suggestion and make it better, which makes you a better communicator as well, if you’re able to take up springboard and then go in and fill out, okay, we need to be more specific about this particular program or I want to drive home this point a little bit more, or just these these areas where you can refine what AI is giving you makes you a better communicator as well.
Yeah, that’s, that’s really the only thing that I can think of. I’ve heard some friends mentioned that they’ve, they’ve said that they’ve worried that their AI their AI use has made them lazy, because they just will copy what it generates. And
that it makes them you know, less creative, but I feel like if you use it as a tool, if you think of it more as a starting block and not your finish line, then that con kind of erases itself.
Okay, so I think we have, we can probably do one or two more. Aaron said, Actually, Aaron asked, I should say, are paid AI tools needed for any of these ideas? Or are there available, available free accounts.
Everything I’ve used is free. Everything I recommend it is free, actually, with the exception of I think maybe DaVinci. But, you know, an illustration tool that you can find another for free. And open.ai was kind of the first collection and that’s, I think what most people are using, and that is all free.
Okay, but do some of them, like Chet GPT has levels Correct? Oh, you can’t do something bigger.
No option, they all are paid options for sure. Job. GPT has a free option and a paid option.
The paid option is supposed to be more secure, give a little bit better information is a little less muddied than the free option. But you can you can use the free option you’re not required to pay for the larger option and you will get results from the free option.
Okay, so it looks like Erica commented, she said that there are benefits of paying 20 hours for chat GPT. Four, it can analyze data and your documents. Oh, that’s nice. Yeah, the chat GPT 3.5, which is free and charged up to four is paid.
Okay, so I’m going to throw in one more real quick. Because
May I think has been waiting. Can you create spreadsheets? Or is it just text that it spits out?
I’m sure there are tools that will allow you to create spreadsheets. I haven’t specifically worked with spreadsheets because we are words, people. But I think yeah, go ahead and try it. I’m sure you can ask certain tools to put something into a table. I’m sure there are generative tools that go into spreadsheets but I’m just not familiar. That is what I have used Akio for and I actually even asked Chad GPT to generate a budget for me in a spreadsheet and they worked so well with me
Siri, give it a try, try rephrasing your question if it doesn’t work as well the first time I don’t know about anything more sophisticated than my personal budget, but you know, give it a go see what happens.
Emily, can you spell Akio? Yes. A KK i Oh,
yeah, all I have is like, um, Harry Potter, Harry Potter. Hmm
Okay. All right. Well, it looks like we are actually we’re a minute over. So we are finished for this afternoon. Do you ladies want to close out your session?
Yeah, just want to say thank you all for being here. You will receive a recording of this session. We’ll send it out in an email tomorrow. And we hope that you’ll dive in and give it a little try. It’s thank you so much for joining. We can’t see we can’t wait to see what you end up doing with these new tools.