Ask top nonprofit executives what keeps them up at night and the answer is likely to be money. No matter the size of their organizations or their missions, odds are that their groups are both perpetually tight for cash and under constant pressure to meet never-ending demands for services and policy changes.
But that might not be the universal answer for much longer. We have entered the age of automation — of robots, chatbots, artificial intelligence, machine learning, conversational interfaces, cyborgs, and smart devices (a panoply of tools that we call “bots”). These advanced technologies could enable nonprofits to raise more money, and therefore do more work, in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost it takes today. And maybe that’s a good thing — or perhaps not.
Here’s what some technologies are already allowing us to do.
Data science has the power to transform nonprofit work. Leaders are thrilled by the opportunity to scour vast amounts of data for connections but unnerved by the prospect of data tainted by bias and unseen algorithms deciding who gets services. For our July cover package, the Chronicle examines how philanthropy is grappling with what it means when machines take on tasks that humans usually to do.
Raise awareness and increase engagement. Yeshi is a virtual-reality image of a young girl in Ethiopia created by Charity: Water to educate potential donors. She talks about the 2.5-hour walk many Ethiopian girls and women make every day to get clean water. The conversation with Yeshi is “smart,” meaning that she asks and answers questions with a variety of images, maps, text, and videos.
Identify potential donors. First Draft, a system developed by the fundraising company Gravyty, uses artificial intelligence to identify the right time to cultivate prospective donors and draft fundraising emails to them. The software also generates a weekly action plan for staff members that includes suggestions for reaching out to donors with a personal touch, showing them their gifts matter, and following up.
Respond to inquiries and questions. Through its #HereIAm campaign, the British charity Mencap allows people to interact with a chatbot named Aeren who can mimic the responses of youngsters with learning disabilities. Based on public attitude surveys, Mencap reported a 3 percent increase in understanding of the needs of the disabled after supporters engaged with the bot.
These examples are exciting, but let’s not get distracted by the shiny objects — bots used in these ways are really just a more advanced set of tools for doing what nonprofit workers do today. What would truly be transformative would be to use technology to change how we raise money.
Today’s fundraising is nearly always transactional and, except at the top-donor level, rarely about building lasting relationships. Fundraisers say they work this way because, well, it works.
M+R’s 2016 “Benchmarks” survey of online fundraising appears to confirm this, reporting that “email revenue grew by 25 percent in 2015, faster than the 19 percent rate of online revenue growth overall.” This seems fine until you read the next paragraph: “With open rates, click-through rates, and response rates all declining, this increase comes down to volume. Volume, in two ways: more people, and more messages.”
This is how and why only 40 percent of donors give to a cause more than once, meaning 60 percent don’t give a second time. Worse still, after five years, only 10 percent of donors are still giving to that cause.
This is a titanic failure. And if we’re not careful, automation could put fundraising transactionalism on steroids, when it should make it easier for us to spend more time building lasting relationships with supporters.
Breaking the focus on transactions is vital for amassing the donations nonprofits need to keep up with demand. But we must also pay attention to what could happen if we aren’t careful about how we use technology to create strong bonds with donors.
Automation, if misused, could turn donor cultivation into donor manipulation. It cracks open the door for fundraisers to use the information they gather through chatbots and other conversational technology to manipulate people into giving more than they would have otherwise.
This is not a theoretical concern. Woebot is a chatbot that is popular with people who use Facebook Messenger. It is chatting with thousands of people about their mental-health concerns and issues. Over time, Woebot will know an incredible amount about a user’s life and vulnerabilities.
We know of no misuse of this data or of any nefarious plans; however, there are no regulations stopping the company behind the app from changing its policies. What happens if Woebot’s creators decide they want to use this data and insert subtle requests for money into these conversations?
Such concerns are legitimate; they point up the need for advocacy for new protections, and a new focus for watchdog and monitoring organizations. But they should not prevent us from seizing this moment to reimagine a brand-new field of fundraising.
Freedom From Rote
Organizations are about to be handed a gift: staff time freed up from rote tasks. This time should be laser-focused on building deep and strong relationships with supporters. Here are steps to move in that direction:
Focus on donor loyalty. The best quantitative proxy for your relationship with your donors is to look at the share of donors who stop giving. Nearly every nonprofit will find room for improvement. The only way to keep donors giving again and again is to involve them in your cause and organization and show how their gifts make a difference.
Rather than using algorithms and bots to focus entirely on acquiring new donors, we must figure out ways the technology can help us engage more closely with people who give. Algorithms can be programmed to help identify current supporters with whom a human interaction will have the most impact and lead to high donor loyalty.
With that data, nonprofits can assign staff members to spend significant time in conversations with donors to learn more about what interests them and how they feel the organization can do better. Fundraisers should also bring donors together to meet one another and learn more about the cause. Ultimately, no technology can substitute for the power of people to connect with one another.
Rethink donor communications. An axiom of 20th-century fundraising was that every communication should include a gift request. But what does it do to your relationships with donors to make every communication, every story about the organization’s work, a pitch for money?
Artificial intelligence can tailor communications to the particular interests of donors in a more efficient way, because the algorithm is faster, and better, than the human brain at analyzing past conversations or gathering publicly available information online. Refocusing communications on the interests of donors rather than the needs of nonprofits opens up tremendous opportunities for fundraisers to share stories about their organization’s work and impact — and for donors to offer up stories of their own — in ways that create deep, powerful, and lasting relationships.
Thinking about donor communications as an opportunity for relationship building that enables organizations to encourage supporters to bring their ideas, their creativity, and their social networks into helping nonprofits innovate and solve problems. But this only happens when organizations become interested in engaging donors as whole people and problem solvers, not just as data points to race past on their way to the bank.
Get everyone involved in fundraising. Seeking money should not just be the job of the development office. Bots can be excellent way to break down internal barriers and help activate a culture of philanthropy and innovation.
Consider Oxfam, an international charity with 20 affiliates that work with organizations in 90 countries. With more than 10,000 employees, “Oxfam faced the challenge of balancing separate hierarchies and encouraging innovation while at the same time providing central leadership and decision making,” according to a Facebook case study of how the charity utilized the company’s Workplace collaboration platform.
Oxfam uses Workplace bots to alleviate rote and time-consuming tasks. For example, it was hard for staffers to share ideas and insights with colleagues at other Oxfam affiliates; their only communication tool was email, and developing new knowledge would require searching thousands of files on internal drives. Deploying algorithm-powered bots that quickly search internal communications and staff members’ files created a knowledge base of ideas and insights that the staff can use to make fundraising more innovative.
Bots that build collaboration can help any organization activate an internal culture of philanthropy, wherein all hands can cultivate and engage supporters and do it with common values, vocabulary, and practices.
Facilitate effective team meetings. Virtual-assistant bots can help find available times and schedule meetings without the back and forth that even a tool like Doodle involves. And bots can do even more to make team meetings efficient.
Imagine a development staff that has deployed internal bots. Every morning, the bot’s algorithm cruises through the week’s correspondence and files on internal drives. It then creates and sends a message summarizing the status of projects to all team members. It also asks three main questions: “What did I do yesterday?” “What am I doing today?” “What’s blocking me?” The answers can used as part of a weekly status meeting of the team.
The bots will have thus helped to organize and inform a process of reflection and continuous improvement that can lead to both small and large breakthroughs. And they have eliminated a notorious time waster — everyone giving a verbal status report during the meeting.
Now imagine taking all this free time and new knowledge, all these new ideas, and sharing them with donors in ways that allow them to join us in solving problems. Let’s use the gift of productivity that bots and other technologies offer to reinvent fundraising in ways that help us harness all that our supporters can contribute, as donors, innovators, and advocates.
Beth Kanter and Allison Fine wrote “The Networked Nonprofit” and are both advisers to nonprofits. Kanter is also co-author of the “Happy Healthy Nonprofit.” Fine writes a regular advice column for the Chronicle.
