How to Improve Digital Maturity?

Carrie Powell

The Status of Fundraising in the AI Era from the Blackbaud Institute is available now. It highlights performance, technology adoption and AI usage.

According to the report, a key finding is that those organizations who identified as more digitally mature were also the most likely to exceed their fundraising targets.

Coming from a medium organization in terms of revenue but small in terms of staff, I wonder how so many organizations who completed the survey have been able to leverage technology, including AI, into their fundraising efforts.

We have minimally started using automation for some database cleanup and notifications, but we're pretty digitally immature! And as a long-time copy editor, I haven't made the leap to embrace generative AI – I do find it clunky and not up to my editorial standards. But I can see how predictive AI could be quite helpul to the development officers if they could learn how to use it as one of their tools. That said, most of our staff members aren't the ones running out to adopt new technology, usually because they lack the skills to make the leap, so I am wondering from those who have successfully integrated AI into their fundraising strategies:

• What's your secret?
• What training has worked to get your staff or leadership on board?
• What kinds of resources were most helpful?

Amanda Rapant

@Carrie Powell
Great post, Carrie!

What you wrote truly resonates with me, “That said, most of our staff members aren't the ones running out to adopt new technology, usually because they lack the skills to make the leap…"

I am a part of a small, but mighty, team of three people in the entire org. Our team isn't too tech savvy, I try to encourage and incorporate AI where possible, while remaining true to our tone/voice of our organization. By no means, would I consider our organization an “early adopter,” we're more in the “open-minded attempters” or “tentative testers" categories. In my humble opinion, my org (myself included) is just dipping our toes into basic components of AI. This could be out of an intimidation factor, but also accepting change can be hard!

My 'secret sauce' is to just try it out, you may like it or you may hate it and continue doing things your usual way. I also have a writing background, and have found that blending my own writing with AI generated text is part of my secret sauce! (Getting things setup in PowerBI etc.. is a whole other level).

Fortunately, our leader is open minded, and if I am willing to try something out, they're usually receptive to me spending time trialing something, seeing how it goes, and we can evaluate based on the results/roadblocks I stumble upon.

Our organization's leader also dabbled with AI when creating a “training” video (paid subscription, but there may be free capabilities out there) and surprisingly found it fascinating because the AI video eliminated the need to find a vendor who could help us write a script, film and produce a video for us. So it really saved us time and money!

I use ChatGPT (OpenAI) to help with time efficiency with the following:

• Creating prompts for interviewing donors (time saver, and I can edit these quickly)
• Creating outlines for event prep (timelines, tasks etc…)
• Drafting pre and post event correspondence
• Refreshing letters to donors (tax receipts or stewardship letters, appeals and more)
• Creating simple automated workflows for actions

If you're struggling with getting folks on board - I found asking myself these questions to help state my case:

What are your pain points?

How do you think AI can help you and improve efficiency for your org?

You'll likely see a general acceptance of it's use, if AI can help boost in an area of your fundraising goals & strategies. (i.e if your goal is to increase social media followers and engagements by X%, you can use AI to take one of your drafted posts and help fine tune or create extra posts); AI can also help craft a strategy, or help expand on your current strategy with actionable steps.

*it's all in how you pitch it*

• A good leader should want to ‘kill two birds with one stone,’ right? Help you, and help boost overall efficiency!

Carrie Powell

@Amanda Rapant, thanks for the great examples!

I have an editorial background, so that has played into my hesitancy with using ChatGPT, but I like using it as a starting point to generate some content that can more easily be reworked.

I have (younger!) friends who have no such qualms, using AI in their personal lives to plan sightseeing itineraries or provide highlights of a long text. I can only assume they're as comfortable using its features in their professional lives. ?

Steve Townsend

@Carrie Powell I wouldn't say we've successfully integrated AI yet, we're only just beginning to use it really. Personally I have found it very helpful to research certain things - I created an Excel macro to tidy up a spreadsheet for import which does in seconds what used to take several hours of manual editing, and I could not have done it without ChatGPT. I also use it for industry research when rating prospects, and sometimes to improve email drafts as that's not something I'm particularly confident with. But we have a long way to go!

Patti Hommes

@Carrie Powell we are in the same situation as @Amanda Rapant, a “Small but Mighty” team! Currently we use AI primarily for communication purposes, be it acknowledgments or event promotion/materials. Our Grant Manager uses AI more than any of use in writing his proposals and reports.

I like @Steve Townsend's trick of creating an Excel macro using ChatGPT. I need to explore that further!!

I will continue to follow this thread as there are some great suggestions for using AI!

James Parsons

@Carrie Powell

I'd say we're a medium sized team, but our digital maturity has skyrocketed since getting into RE NXT five years ago. Our previous system was challenging for most users, clunky and didn't really serve our needs. When we moved to NXT we made a deliberate choice to establish a data governance committee (DIG – the Data Integrity group) and a team charged specifically with custodianship over the system (Information Services and Data Management). This has included a lot of self-learning (Coursera is wonderful; LinkedIn Learning has a lot of resources too), and just reaching out to various communities with information I don't have.

I credit these two choices with exponentially increasing our digital maturity and general data culture. We're able to maintain a high quality of data and system integrity because we've allocated resources specifically to do this. This, and the attention we pay to these issues and the way we communicate to the broader team, has helped adoption. We're now at the point where we can delve deeply into purposeful reporting (not just creating reports on the fly), and are starting to get into AI.

I'm a bit of an AI skeptic – my personal rule is to not trust the results, but to verify and review. That's not to say it's not helpful, but wary of how it could be easily mismanaged. But we do use some tools – Dataro is a good one for predictive analytics – and we've been slowly incorporating them into our work with some success.

I'll admit I've also started using CoPilot a lot more with Power Automate and other tools when I'm stumped as to why something isn't working as expected. I've found it very useful, but prefer to use it as a starting point. My biggest caution is that if AI can just generate the code for me, I'm not learning how to do it myself!

Angela Finley Hunter

@Carrie Powell Thanks for sharing. We are a two-person office, and we have not embraced AI at all. We are still a little old school but hopefully in the future we will look into using ChatGPT. I have enjoyed learning how others are using it.

Aldera Chisholm

@Carrie Powell I think for many people, AI tools can be intimidating. I've been focusing on looking for “tasks” that AI can help with, small steps. For example, using ChatGPT by giving it a troublesome excel scenario and getting back a formula. It saves a lot of time. Making it a “tool” in the kit, not a solution by itself. Buy-in can come in small steps, it doesn't have to be all at once!

JoAnn Strommen

@Carrie Powell We are a relatively small org and have had the most successful fundraising years in the the org's history exceeding our goals the last several years. Essentially this was not using AI on our part. We did utilize wealth screenings which am guessing do use some AI.

We are now using AI programs to generate communication pieces: letters, emails, articles, etc. This change has been embraced by some, and not so much by others.

Yes, we are tending to drag our feet on such things as AI database clean up.

One of my personal concerns is the loss of authentic communication with our constituents. It will take great care and attention to not just move to everything coming from AI and automation in the realm of donor relations, IMO.

Dariel Dixon

@Carrie Powell I think it's a matter of two things.

• Knowing your team and their limits. Will they embrace something new.
• Knowing what's out there to use. Is this something that you can use personally or does it have to roll out to others as well?

I think sometimes you can find a tool that works well for you. I'm looking at using Scribe to finish my documentation. But it's little things…