In late November 2022, the artificial-intelligence company Open AI launched ChatGPT — a bot that scrapes the internet for content, parroting its language, tone, and information to write original answers to questions posed through a chat. Users were quick to identify its limitations — for one, it knows little, if anything, of what’s happened since 2021 — but its power to supercharge the writing process was both tantalizing and a little scary. The internet filled with users asking ChatGPT to write a musical, draft a term paper, or explain coding errors in the voice of a pirate.
At nonprofits, savvy fundraisers saw the chatbot’s potential to automate mundane, time-sucking tasks like writing social-media posts, drafting thank-you notes to donors, and completing grant applications.
“Everyone everywhere is overworked; there’s too many things to do,” says Cherian Koshy, vice president of development at Merit America, a nonprofit that helps people without college degrees start successful careers. “A.I. is just one very ubiquitous opportunity.”
The two immediate benefits of ChatGPT, as opposed to other A.I. tools, are that it’s simple and free — although it isn’t clear if it will remain free forever. For now, anyone can create an account with Open AI and start asking ChatGPT questions. Open AI offers users examples of how to use its bot — such as by asking it to simply explain quantum computing — and offers a few warnings, including the bot’s tendency to answer queries incorrectly or include harmful or biased information.
Beating ‘Blank-Screen Syndrome’
ChatGPT offers a great starting point for everyday tasks, fundraisers say. It’s knowledgeable of search-engine optimization best practices, and users can coach the bot to adopt different tones for different audiences — chatty for a blog post or deferential for a letter to a trustee. Users can also upload examples of the voice they’re aiming for into the chat for the bot to mimic.
“If you’re writing something like a fundraising appeal or a social-media post or a brochure or something for your website, it absolutely overcomes the blank-screen syndrome,” Koshy says.
Using the bot, fundraisers who struggle with writing can skip the hours of agonizing over a perfect first sentence and start work from a prewritten first draft. “You have to think of yourself as an editor and less as a writer,” says Gayle Roberts, chief development officer for Larkin Street Youth Services, a San Francisco nonprofit that serves young people experiencing homelessness.
Editors, Roberts says, are preoccupied with the purpose, audience, and tone of a piece of writing. When using ChatGPT, the fundraiser’s job is to offer the bot specific prompts so it stays on message and writes to the correct audience. The newest iteration of the chatbot, GPT-4, is so advanced that Roberts routinely prompts it to “sound human” or “tone it down 25 percent” to get it to use casual language or fewer exclamation points.
Fundraisers shouldn’t be dismayed at the bot’s ability or fear they’ll be replaced by it, Koshy says. Rather, they should use A.I. to offload the tasks that get in the way of the parts of their jobs they love.
“If you are at your core a writer — that’s what you love to do, that’s what you’re passionate about doing — then those A.I. tools are not for you,” he says. But a fundraiser who is a talented writer, he adds, might appreciate an A.I. tool that takes meeting notes for them or queries their donor database.
Fundraisers should think about what they love about their jobs and consider the tasks that take away from time they spend on those things. Fundraisers who enjoy meeting with donors, Koshy says, should ask themselves, “How can we get that stuff off our plate faster so that we can build those authentic face-to-face relationships?”
The answer just may be ChatGPT or other A.I. tools.
‘It Lies’
Fundraisers may be getting more done with ChatGPT, but they still need to be careful. It’s not a one-and-done tool, says Jon Biedermann, vice president of fundraising strategy at GiveSmart, a fundraising technology platform. Users often have to ask the bot the same question in several ways to get the response they’re looking for. Still, Biedermann says, “it saves 85 percent of your time.”
Also, there’s the question of accuracy. When it searches for answers, ChatGPT consults a vast trove of information — a trove that stopped growing in 2021. There’s a lot that it doesn’t know or understand. Or, as Roberts puts it: “It lies.”
“It’s kind of a sycophant,” she says. “It wants to give you an answer, and if it doesn’t know the answer, it will make one up for you, and it won’t tell you it’s making it up.”
Biedermann encourages users not to think of ChatGPT as a search engine and to always fact check any data it spits out. “People think it’s Google, and it’s not,” he says. When Biedermann asked ChatGPT to write up his professional experience, for example, the bot falsely asserted that he founded his first fundraising technology company, DonorPerfect, when he was 12 years old.
Bias is another issue with ChatGPT — something Open AI acknowledges as one of the tool’s limitations. “If not carefully reviewed, your robot friend could be writing something that could be very offensive to your donor,” Biedermann says. It’s one more reason to view ChatGPT’s work as a first draft.
Risks to Watch
There’s also the question of whether using ChatGPT to write donor communications could erode the authenticity and trust that make the fundraiser-donor relationship so powerful. But Koshy and Roberts both wave that concern away. Roberts spent years working as a contractor for nonprofits, where she often ghostwrote fundraising appeals in the voice of a nonprofit’s executive director. “Business writing is collaborative writing,” she says. “Nobody should be thinking that a grant proposal is literature.”
Plenty of fundraisers also follow templates written by well-known fundraising consultants like Gail Perry to write thank-you notes to their donors. Koshy compares using ChatGPT to using one of those templates — except the bot is able to generate endless variations of that template. That’s a huge advantage when it comes to thanking donors who have made multiple gifts, Koshy says.
“If you take a Gail Perry thank-you letter template, then what do you do the second time?” he says. Koshy has even generated new thank-you letter templates for his team to use by uploading tried-and-true templates into ChatGPT and asking it to create new ones that follow the same best practices.
ChatGPT is an expert mimic, and this presents some dangers to both nonprofits and donors. The tool, Biedermann warns, makes it extremely easy for bad actors to distribute phony fundraising appeals to donors.
GiveSmart and companies like it, Biedermann says, have seen a marked uptick in credit-card fraud in the time since ChatGPT became ubiquitous. “I’m not going to say that that is causation,” he says, “but I’ll be darned: It’s strong correlation.” Biedermann encourages donors to scan for imposters by making sure the appeals they receive come from email addresses registered to the nonprofit’s domain name.
‘A Cultural Change’
ChatGPT isn’t a perfect tool, but its knowledge and technology are here to stay. Biedermann likens this technological leap to the development of the smartphone: While smartphones didn’t immediately gain total market share, they are now ubiquitous, with few people seeking to go back to the era of the flip phone. Early adopters say ChatGPT will help people get more done — not replace human workers.
“I’m not firing anybody,” Roberts says, “but these are tools that people need to learn to be able to stay in the marketplace.”
Roberts has asked managers on the events, operations, and institutional giving teams she oversees to teach their staffs how to use ChatGPT and encourage them to explore other A.I. tools. “It’s a cultural change,” she says. Leaders need to inspire their employees to be curious about these tools and give them the resources to learn how to use them, she says.
People may be uncomfortable using A.I. in their workday or worry about how fast it’s developing, but this technology is not going away. Even with their risks, Biedermann says, A.I. tools are a net positive for the sector. “This is going to dramatically increase efficiency in our sector.”