How Artificial Intelligence Optimizes Fundraising Efforts
Nonprofits have the ability to tap into Artificial intelligence (AI) technology to streamline important fundraising efforts. AI's ability to automate routine tasks has the potential to save you time, money, and energy, and collect donations faster. From an operations perspective, this also means that AI can enhance internal communications in countless ways.
By 2020, revenue generated from AI-based systems is expected to hit $47 billion, a drastic jump from the $8 billion it generated in 2016. As more funds pour into this relatively young industry, we’re sure to see new and better applications for AI within the business and fundraising spaces.
Here are noteworthy ways AI can optimize your fundraising activities:
1. Get a hang of Marketing Automation
Without a well-built marketing campaign, it’ll be hard for your fundraising plan to gain momentum. Email marketing and automation tools are robust marketing automation tools that help ensure your donor communications are seamless and timely. Create numerous triggers to engage with donors automatically -- for example, you can set it up so that when someone makes a donation, that person will automatically receive a thank you email, push notification, and/or digital badge.
2. Use a Chatbot to Collect Donations
Though they sound futuristic, “chatbots” are really just messaging tools for a service that requires access to specific kinds of information.
Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular in the customer service realm because they can handle first-line support and direct queries to human personnel as needed. You might also consider utilize a chatbot to receive money from donors. Last year, Charity Water became the first nonprofit to accept donations through a Facebook Messenger chatbot.
Designing and implementing an effective requires a greater investment in time and money than the other AI fundraising tactics listed here, especially if you recruit a third-party company to build the bot. However, once your chatbot is up and running, the payoff in workload reduction -- and donations, hopefully -- can be significant.
3. Get Help from a Virtual Meeting Manager
Fundraising means you're spending time scheduling and rescheduling meetings, sending out briefings, and setting reminders. Zoom, offers an automated assistant that will take care of all of these tasks for you. You send a message to your assistant bot (through Slack, SMS, or whatever your preferred means of communication is) telling it to schedule, postpone, or cancel a meeting; the bot then goes through your calendar and makes the plans. It can also automatically send meeting briefings, arrange introductions, and even book travel.
Zoom offers a free Standard Plan that gives you access to unlimited meeting scheduling and morning briefings, plus the ability to choose a name for your smart assistant.
Of course, personal smart assistants like Siri, Cortana and Alexa could be used for smart scheduling to some extent, but these tools haven’t been specifically developed for this purpose. They do, however, allow for basic scheduling functions from your smartphone.
4. Tap Into the Power of the Crowd
Your organization employs some talented people, but perhaps you’d like to outsource a few tasks to ensure your fundraising bases are sufficiently covered. In that case, BrightCrowd may help you reach your goal.
Start by asking for help, whether you want assistance with introductions to potential donors or help writing press releases about planned fundraising events. The BrightCrowd app interprets your request and searches through your network to find people who can help. You don’t have to pay anything to sign up, and there are already over 100,000 people using it. You’ll almost certainly find people who have the skills you need to raise money confidently.
