How are you currently using AI and/or what is your future vision?

Christine Newman

From automating routine tasks to unlocking deeper insights, AI is full of potential. Some of you are already incorporating AI into your daily work, and others of you are thinking about the future possibilities.

Answer one or both of these questions to get the conversation started:

1. How are you currently using AI in your work and/or your organization?
2. What's one way you hope AI will transform your work or your mission in the next few years?

Whether it’s a seemingly beginning use case, a spark of inspiration, or a vision for how AI could help your team do more good—share it with the community!

Topher Lovell

1. I primarily use AI for notetaking in meetings. It helps me be more present in the meeting, and then I have better notes that I can to after the fact. I've been pushing myself to get in the habit of reviewing my AI notes at the end of each day in case there is something that I feel AI missed in the meeting.
2. I'm looking forward to implementing AI that will help cut down on the menial data tasks so that I can spend more time on mission-focused work.
   
   

Allan Delmare

• How are you currently using AI in your work and/or your organization?

Agentic coding for building applications

• What's one way you hope AI will transform your work or your mission in the next few years

For it to become a more capable data analyst with raw data.

Right now, you can't really give AI a large data set and ask it questions. You need to first ask it to help you build the tools to analyze the data — then you can present the analysis/findings for it to interpret. Example: you can't just give it a large CSV export and get honest answers, it doesn't have the context to manage the data. But you can ask it to help you build a pivot table, and then give it the summary/results from the pivot table, and ask it for actionable business insights BASED on those results. I'm looking forward to a future when you can just plug the AI in with a massive context window and it can consume the data, analyze it, and spit back accurate answers / reports. I guess this is possible with specialized/specific tools… but not really 'direct'

Kimberly Pierce

We are using AI tools to summarize donor interactions and create draft stewardship messages based on donor history. Looking ahead, it would be great if AI would enable fully personalized donor journeys at scale. For example, AI could dynamically generate tailored communication plans for every donor based on their unique preferences, giving patterns, and engagement behaviors — automatically adjusting the plan in real time as new data becomes available.

Amanda Rapant

I generally use AI to help draft appeals, reorganize to-do lists, create timelines, and send summaries of meeting notes to team members. I tend to use a lot of RE NXT pre-programmed features, like gift lists/scheduling canned reports and queries, and setting up alerts in RE NXT.

I'd like to learn more about how to utilize AI to help eliminate some of the time consuming tasks in my day-to-day workload.

I'd also like to learn more about when to use AI vs when to use tools that already exist in RE NXT. I see a lot of folks who have created Power Automate workflows that do the same thing as a few clicks in RE NXT, so which is better? Trying not to reinvent the wheel, but also challenge myself to learn new skills and perhaps, gain 20+ minutes a day in free time to focus efforts elsewhere.

However, I feel a bit between a rock and a hard place, since I need to encourage peers to login to the database to see workflows already at play instead of wanting to focus on the next big AI movement.

Vincent Catapano

We currently use AI to help us come up with creative and eye catching subject lines for emails and social media. As we deal with a lot of the same information it is refreshing to come up with outside the box ideas to target audiences especially amongst varying demographics.

Aldera Chisholm

I use AI to help me with Excel! It is a fantastic resource to ask in real language something like, If I have a birthdate in Column C, what formula can I use in Column D to get their actual date today.

Claudia A. Alvarez

I also use AI to help with Excel when it comes to learning new formulas to better help clean up the data I have. I like that it gives more than one way (formula to use) to get the intended result. Also use AI to help summarize notes from meetings or summarize data.

Sarah Trudeau

AI is already making a meaningful impact in my work as Director of Data & Annual Fund. One of the most practical ways I’ve been using AI is to streamline data cleaning and donor segmentation. Tools like ChatGPT and AI-powered Excel plugins help me quickly identify patterns, flag inconsistencies, and even generate donor outreach language tailored to specific audiences. It’s saving time and allowing me to focus more on strategy and relationship-building.

Looking ahead, I’m excited about how AI could transform donor engagement. I envision using AI to personalize communications at scale—crafting messages that resonate with individual donors based on their giving history, interests, and engagement patterns. I also hope AI will help us better predict giving trends and identify opportunities to deepen donor relationships, ultimately advancing our mission more effectively.

It feels like we’re just scratching the surface, and I’m eager to learn from others in this community about how they’re using AI to do more good.

Austen Brown

I use ChatGPT to improve written communications and help generate ideas. Additionally, I use it to create complex nested Power Automate expressions and Excel functions - its accuracy is about 50/50 for this, definitely a 'trust but verify' situation. Ultimately, it helps get me started and I can evolve it into a workable solution.

I also do internet searches through Perplexity; I like it because you can pose a question and it summarizes results with 3-8 listed sources. Always verify info and use common sense, but it's a great resource to work smarter not harder.

For anyone curious about AI, The Neuron is a fantastic resource to have in your back pocket - I encourage you to check it out! https://www.theneuron.ai/ I start each workday reading their newsletter has become a ritual; I love how it covers AI developments, new releases, and trends with clear, simple descriptions (perfect for a non-developer like me). It also offers informative reviews and opportunities to build skills, like recognizing AI-generated imagery.

Anuradha Parihar

We are currently using AI tools to summarize donor interactions and draft stewardship messages informed by donor history. We are also using AI to create customized communication plans for major donor, reflecting their individual preferences and giving patterns.

Heather Leonard

I use AI to help proof aka "a second set of eyes" at times. I also use it to help me come up with ideas or solutions to some questions I have once in a while.

I want to use it for notetaking

Dan Snyder

Much like @Austen Brown I use AI for complex expressions in Power Automate and also some data transformations for PowerBI where I know it can do something, but just can't remember the syntax. I have used it to refine some writing, but I don't have to write that much so I don't use that as often.

I would love for AI to write up the steps being taken in a PowerAutomate flow with explanations of what is happening. I have seen a free version (can't recall the name) and it was more technical and not that helpful in taking the technical and translating it into something non-technical/narrative.

Joan Perry

part of my role also includes social media and AI is helpful when overload cramps my creativity and I need help generating captions and text that could be repetitive and I don't want it it be. Like others, it is helpful for proofreading and tweaking content, appeals, emails, etc. Would love to use for notetaking in meetings but trying to determine what works best for that (@topher lovell)

Amy Barker

1. Like so many others I use AI for note taking during zoom calls. It takes a bit of editing but I created some macros in word to do the cleanup I need. It saves me hours each week.
2. I wish it could get more accurate with the note taking. I would love to find ways for it to share commonly used links in the chat on calls, when certain things get mentioned. That would be a big time saver.

Elizabeth Johnson

@Dan Snyder are you thinking of Scribe or something else - I'm curious?

I use it for so many things and try to use a browser with AI wouldn't be beneficial. I often use it as a partner or sounding board as we are short staffed and the people I would have run things by before either don't exist or are also so busy. It is particularly good at stripping out advertisement and web characters when you want to save an article off line and put it on someone's record.

I love when I'm stuck on a project as to what my next step should be that goblin.tools Magic To Do function can do that and estimate how long something might take. It has a smaller foot print that large language models as it is artificial narrow intelligence and it does the job to get me going!

I use it for more and will be posting the resources from the bbcon session that @Hallie Guiseppe and I are presenting on Tuesday after Adam Grant!

Kirsten Petersen

1. Like so many others I use AI for note taking during video calls. I also use it to proof written communications and generate ideas/names of things.
2. I am looking forward to being able to use it more to analyze big amounts of data

Karen Mercier

1. I use it for writing revisions, proofreading and idea generation.
2. I'd like to use it more for life management. Having something to take of small tasks that bog down my work and home life.

Julie Salzman

1. Microsoft Power Automate to pull and mail merge acknowledgement letters and envelopes
2. AI will enhance our ability to identify and engage potential donors more effectively by analyzing large sets of alumni and donor data to uncover patterns, predict giving behavior, and personalize outreach. This would allow us to focus our time and resources on the most promising prospects, increase donor retention, and ultimately help the university secure more support for scholarships, research, and community impact. AI could also streamline data hygiene and integration across systems, reducing manual work and improving the accuracy of our reporting and analytics.

Eniko Horvath

1. only editing and note taking at the moment
2. being able to automate some processes to save time for more personalized tasks

Julie Rempfer

1. I currently use AI for help writing things when my brain is dead and for helping to organize things into spreadsheets to import into Raiser's Edge. Everything else requires so much reading and proofing that its faster for me to just do it from the start.
2. I wish it could write queries or help translate some of the complex requests for numbers, data, reporting, mailing lists, etc that are so time consuming.

Sara Niemiec

• -What's one way you hope AI will transform your work or your mission in the next few years?

I'm interested in exploring what Chat for Blackbaud can do with data from my org's database. For example, if one of my team members wants to know how much a specific donor gave in a particular fiscal year or what funds they favor the most or how much we've raised for a specific fund in a given time period and I'm not available for some reason (taking care of my son, for example), I'm wondering if my team could type a question into chat and get a correct* answer without having to wait.

Shreya Sharma

We're using AI powered prospect insights to better align with our donors. And for the future, I'm hoping that we can use AI to automate processes like sending reminders for pledge in RE NXT

Sue Christensen

I use AI to help with creating more concise bios for prospect research as well as for excel formulas that are more complex than I can get my brain to wrap around, I've also used it to help me write an emeritus nomination for a couple of our bigger donors