By Dennis Koerner, Ph.D.
As technology continues to grow and evolve, artificial intelligence has captivated the world with its impressive advancements. Whether you talk to Siri on your iPhone or chat with a customer service chatbot on a website, you have already encountered AI in your everyday life. Artificial intelligence is everywhere (even though you cannot see it). Most importantly, it is disrupting many business models and replacing them with new ones.
Artificial intelligence can solve many challenges that humans cannot, and it can do it faster and more efficiently. AI is certainly destined to become the basis of competition in many fields in the extremely near future. The use of AI technology in nonprofit organizations is no exception.
Today’s nonprofit organizations need to understand the impact of this new technology and how it can enhance their efforts. While your organization might not initially think AI insights for fundraising are necessary, they can be extremely beneficial for developing targeted marketing strategies, increasing fundraising revenue, refining your donor research and improving your operation efficiencies.
Here is how it works. To generate meaningful insights, you need to be able to process incredible amounts of data including your donor’s personal information, previous individual donation amounts, giving history, demographics and wealth indicators, as examples. This information and the insights derived from them are your strategic competitive advantage. With AI technologies, donor insights and targeted communication strategies are at your fingertips. This data creates the road map for your success.
So how do you start? We often find that the first step in the process is to define the data needed for your insight analysis by creating a data capture strategy.
The next step then creates data fields to capture the donor attributes you need. The final step is to have clear measures of the end results that you want to be able to predict.
These end results (called dependent variables) are variables such as bequest dollars, gift count or total gift dollars. A critical component to successfully adopting AI insights in your nonprofit fundraising strategies is to have a great data collection strategy and processes. The better your data, the better and more powerful your insights will be.
There is no doubt artificial intelligence is a growing trend within the nonprofit industry. Sharpe consultants have the expertise to guide you. Reach out to us to learn more. â–
Dennis Koerner consults with Sharpe Group on data analysis. He is an expert in using artificial intelligence to create business insights and predict performance measures.
