Following in one charity’s AI-powered footsteps

The for-purpose sector is increasingly experimenting with artificial intelligence, but how can organisations benefit most from the advancing technology?

There’s no question about it: artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay.

It’s opening our phones, turning on our lights, choosing our next movie and even finishing our… sentences. We’re even more reliant on AI than we sometimes realise, and with the introduction of generative programs like ChatGPT, that’s only going to grow.

The for-purpose sector, too, is starting to experiment with AI – from online chatbots to automated recruitment – and unearthing a range of questions in the process.

What is the best function of AI? How do you mitigate the risks? What can we learn from other organisations? Can AI reduce costs? Where is the right place to start?

Borrowing a page from Anglicare Victoria’s book

As a conservative faith-based organisation, Anglicare Victoria was cautious to approach AI, but decided to work with global AI-powered data platform Dataro to improve its fundraising outcomes after speaking with other charities in the same boat.

Senior manager of fundraising and philanthropy Paula Gething says it was a “leap of faith” entering into the AI space, but one that reaped significant benefits, helping to reduce the costs of their mail appeals as well as create a more direct campaign strategy.

“What we found was that AI [determining] people’s ability to give was much more accurate than what we were doing in a manual sense,” she says.

“We were being a lot more targeted in terms of who we were sending to and the amount that we were asking them for. We may have only used one or two previous indicators to create that amount, but AI looks at multiple different touch points that the donor has with your organisation.”

The not for profit is now experimenting with AI across a range of departments, including looking at ChatGPT to replace copywriters. Gething says it’s a welcome tool for an organisation that is “lean” on staffing.

“We’re constantly refining and testing what we’re doing now in this space, and using AI more and more to make those decisions for us,” she continues.

“We’re not a well-resourced organisation in terms of staff, and getting the budget for a staff member is hard at times. So for us, if there are systems out there that can actually do this, build the trust, retain our reputation, then we’ll absolutely look at using them.”

Getting the most from AI

Dataro’s co-founder and CTO Dave Lyndon believes AI is, and will continue to be, accessible for not-for-profit organisations of all sizes.

“From my perspective, the trend in technology is going to see less technical people being able to use it. You don’t need to be a data scientist or a software developer, [AI] is going to be in tools, it’s going to be very accessible and part of the fabric of what you’re doing,” he says.

With that in mind, how should the for-purpose sector approach AI?

While AI doesn’t have the capability to completely replace humans (right now), Lyndon suggests it is helpful in taking on mundane, repetitive or straightforward tasks – an especially important outcome for time- and resource-constrained charities.

For example, a chatbot may be quicker in helping someone navigate a charity’s website, while an automated phone agent could relieve a worker from tediously updating financial or personal details in a database.

“It can save a lot of the labour after the fact, it’s not going to replace the main job,” explains Lyndon.

“I think the best way to think about [AI] is it’s freeing people up from uninteresting tasks, and letting them focus on what things are most important, which is interpersonal relationships and using creativity to communicate ideas or the narrative about the organisation and their cause.”

Lyndon says AI is most effective when it comes to “very focused tasks”, advising for-purpose organisations to see the technology as a resource to strengthen or complement other work.

“If you have a lot of guardrails and structure around what [AI] is doing, that’s when you start to get a benefit from it. It can’t write a really good email, but what it can do is rewrite that email and adapt that a dozen different ways, making it better for a younger audience for example,” he says.

“AI is really about incremental improvements and improving efficiency, where you get percentage gains on what you’re already doing.”

Entering the ethics debate

While AI is helping to fill critical gaps for Anglicare Victoria, Gething is quick to acknowledge the charity is going slow in its approach, citing trust, ethics and data security as big issues informing future planning.

It’s a topic front of mind for most charities, and rightly so, argues Dr Simon Coghlan, a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for AI and Digital Ethics.

According to Coghlan, generative AI programs carry inherent limitations, including producing false and biased information, which he believes is on users to be aware of and challenge.

“Because [generative AI] is trained on vast amounts of data straight from the internet, and that data is of all different shapes and sizes, some of it’s accurate, some of it’s prejudiced, some of it’s false, some of it’s inflammatory,” he says.

“It can predict the next word in a sentence for example, but it’s never going to be capable of scrutinising in a way humans can, and asking if this is true or false, accurate or misleading, logical or illogical.

“Because we can’t be completely protected from the negative implications of AI, people will need to become more aware of the pros and cons.”

Despite the risks, Gething encourages not for profits to “be a little bold” when it comes to approaching AI.

“Don’t be too frightened about trying new things. We’re not really going to break a database or break a system. What we are going to do is have another point of view about how we can actually communicate with our donors better, and ultimately raise more money,” she concludes.