New technologies, digitalization, artificial intelligence: can the non-profit sector and fundraising miss out on these technological revolutions? This article by Professor Giuseppe Ugazio, Director of the Behavioral Philanthropy Lab, hosted by the Geneva Finance Research Institute (GFRI) of the Geneva School of Economics and Management (GSEM) of the University of Geneva, takes us into the near future and explores some of the connections between artificial intelligence and fundraising.
1- A multidisciplinary approach
The Chair in Behavioral Philanthropy was launched in 2019 thanks to a public-private-partnership between the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations and the University of Geneva.
In this context I began my research activities on philanthropy, broadly defined, studying the motivations that lead people to engage in social causes as well as the factors that may affect these. The approach to this topic is multi-disciplinary, we use methods from behavioral sciences (including economics, neuroscience, and psychology) as well as computational algorithms applied to big-data.
In this perspective, the typical questions we ask are:
- how do different incentives motivate people to give?
- do new technologies – such as virtual reality (VR) – have a potential to contribute to reshaping the way organizations think of fund-raising, especially when it comes to attracting younger donors?
From the latter angle, we built a taxonomy of the philanthropic landscape in Switzerland by investigating in which areas organizations are working, and which motivations are behind these actions, focusing specifically on the role of emotions and moral values. To this end, we use natural language processing, a tool using artificial intelligence (AI) to aid us in identifying patterns in a large data-set comprised of the publicly available statutes from all philanthropic organizations registered in Switzerland. Using an AI tool, sparked our curiosity to further investigate if the philanthropic sector is aware of the potential of this technology for supporting its strategies and operations, and thus if organizations are using AI and how.
With this research still ongoing (to this end, we also launched a survey available at this page), it will be interesting to see to which extent – if at all – philanthropic organizations are using AI. The results of this survey will be available soon.
2- What is the added value of AI for fundraising?
In the domain of fundraising, one can think of several applications of this technology:
- It can be used to automate the creation and management of donor data-bases, ensuring that the information collected is complete and accurate. When done manually, this process is prone to several mistakes: for example, a database on donors we are researching with a partner organization we had to exclude several data entries as these were incomplete and/or mistaken.
- Similarly, AI can be used to analyze donor data and generate actionable insights by fundraisers: what are the causes a donor is more likely to be attracted to? Which types of campaigns are more effective for a given topic? When are donors more likely to decide to give?These are all insights that could be used to inform a fundraising campaign.
- Having information on who gives and for which reasons, AI algorithms can also help develop predictive capabilities that would help fundraisers target audiences more likely to be interested in supporting their causes.
- On a more interactive lens, one of the most known applications of AI is in chat-bots, which could be used by organizations to address questions from potential donors, for instance guiding them on how to make a donation or informing them about the currently ongoing programs they could support.
- Finally, provided that data is being collected, organizations can use AI to analyze the impact and effectiveness of their campaigns and programs, thus identifying patterns (informing points 2 and 3 above) in their donors as well as having a better overview of the areas in which they can improve.
To summarize, AI has an enormous largely untapped potential to support philanthropic organizations.
3- The limits of AI
However it is important to keep in mind that, like any technology, AI also entails risks: first being deployed on digital data it entails cyber security related risks: databases of donors could be stolen, or tampered with; second, AI based tools are known to be biased – exacerbating biases commonly found in human decision makers – thus developing such tools require special attention to ensure that biases are kept in check or at least that the developer is aware of their presence. Last but not least, AI is at the center of several ethical debates, developing and using AI tools thus requires the user to be informed of these debates and, we believe, proactively engaged in promoting tools that are ethical and inclusive.
Do you need expertise and support for your organization? Let’s talk about it!
To keep up to date with the latest articles, follow me on LinkedIn and subscribe to the newsletter.
Copyright © 2023 E | C Consulting – All Rights Reserved – To use this content, please ask for permission in advance and cite the source if agreed.