How To Get Started Fundraising With AI For Your Nonprofit

Simple reasons your nonprofit should consider implementing AI.

When it comes to fundraising, there are infinite ways that you can do it. One way that you may not have thought of is AI. Artificial Intelligence can help improve and streamline fundraising campaigns, so it's something that you'll want to look into for your nonprofit.

What You Should Know About Nonprofits And AI

There are a lot of things you should know about AI and fundraising, so let's cover the basics first:

What's AI? Artificial Intelligence is a computer science that creates machines that learn from the data they're given. It replicates the human brain in data but does it much faster, making it great for many different applications.

Why use machine learning AI in nonprofits? Machine learning is how AI analyses and uses data to create new processes and outcomes. In nonprofits, it can help understand hundreds of different factors and help create better fundraising campaigns.

What's predictive modeling? This is using data to find patterns to predict future outcomes. The more your AI does this, the better it will get at it.

What's propensity modeling? This looks to see how likely an individual will complete a certain action.

How nonprofits use AI: "Typically, nonprofits use AI to improve their segmentation", says Lorraine Cannon, a project manager at UK Writings. "It takes a lot of guesswork out of the process and simplifies it."

Using AI As A Nonprofit

As a nonprofit, you'll have data on your donors that you should use to understand them. You are trying to analyze that yourself will be difficult and time-consuming. If you use AI, it can go through that data much quicker and help you get better segmentation.

That AI will help you predict outcomes even at the individual level, so you can better understand your donors and who they are. With that understanding, you can improve your donations and hit higher goals.

How Nonprofits Are Using AI

So, how are nonprofits using AI to improve their fundraising campaigns? Here are some examples:

Greenpeace: They used AI to separate their donors to see who would be more likely to respond to email campaigns. With the results, they created a mailing list that got them better results.

Parkinson's UK: This nonprofit used AI to analyze their historical donors to create a list of people more likely to donate to their latest campaign. That allowed them to get much more out of it while spending less.

How AI Works For Your Nonprofit

As you can see, AI is highly valuable for nonprofits. How would it work in your case? Firstly, you'd need to have stored data that you need to analyze, in this case, donors. This is transformed and fed into the AI, which creates models. These models are used to create predictions, and then you'll use those predictions in your fundraising campaign.

This is a very simplified explanation of the process, but as you can see, once you've got AI involved, it makes things a lot quicker and gives you a lot more detail when creating those campaigns.

Why AI Is Important For You

AI used to be a sci-fi concept, but now, everyone uses it in one way or another. As such, you'll want to consider taking advantage of it as a nonprofit.

As the saying goes, time is money, and you don't want to spend time analyzing data by hand. You also want those campaigns to be more effective, especially as the reliance on the nonprofit sector increases. Bringing in more funds means you can do more for your community, and AI helps you do that.

As a nonprofit, you must look into AI for your next fundraising campaign. You'll be astounded at how much it can improve donations and ensure you get the money you need for your services.

Guest Author Bio

Sara Sparrow is a writer with Academized, where she covers tech and especially AI news.