AI for Fundraising Success: How to Kickstart Your Nonprofit’s AI Journey

Our mission at Starlight is to brighten the lives of seriously ill and hospitalized children and young people. The moment they are diagnosed their life and the life of their family really changes. This is where Starlight steps in to give these families and Read More

Our mission at Starlight is to brighten the lives of seriously ill and hospitalized children and young people. The moment they are diagnosed their life and the life of their family really changes. This is where Starlight steps in to give these families and children and young people just moments of being a normal family and of having fun. Our decision to move to the Microsoft Cloud for not for profits was really based on a number of of decisions, we

had a quite a comprehensive list of items that we needed, met, and Microsoft could tick off practically everything on that list. We’re very used to using Tim’s outlook Excel Word, Microsoft CRM just was very intuitive and very natural for people to navigate around. We

found that the Microsoft offering has a common data model. And that really appealed to us, we can have other apps that we can simply plug in, and then unplug very simply, the

common data model meant that all of our data will be connected, it meant that all of our marketing efforts were connected to the same data we could segment so we could connect to our donors and optimize our fundraising efforts much better with this product than what we had before where our data was all a bit disconnected and disjointed and very difficult to access. We made the mistake in the past of over customizing our CRM and the fact that the Microsoft world is in that low code. No code environment is very appealing to us. I

think something that has been really powerful has been the relationship that we have had not only with Microsoft, but also with barrhead, who are our implementation partner, even when we went back to them with some functionality that we said was missing not only for us, but for the sector. They work to get that into the system. And that’s going to actually make it a better offering for other nonprofits when they look at this system.

As a national organization, it’s really important for starlights team to be able to come together and collaborate and this technology is going to enable us to deliver on what it started its mission which is to brighten the lives of seriously ill children and their families.

All right. Well, welcome everyone. My name is Amanda tattered ski and I am a senior DonorPerfect training specialist. And I want to welcome you all to Craig Parker session AI for fundraising success. How to kickstart your nonprofits AI journey. Craig has a decade of experience in the nonprofit world and now a leader at Microsoft tech for social impact. Craig Parker is passionate and ambitious and helping his partner succeed. As global SAS partnerships lead for the digital natives partner program, Craig is responsible for recruiting and accelerating the business growth of independent software vendors that serve the social good sector. Craig lives in United Kingdom and enjoys spending time with his family, including two high energy suns. Before I turn the session over, I’d like to address a few housekeeping items. All presentations are attached to the session and can be downloaded for your review. Please be sure to add your questions to the q&a tab so we can address them during the question and answer part of the presentation. And all sessions will be recorded and found on the DonorPerfect website post conference. So let’s give a warm welcome to Craig. And I’m going to turn it over to you. Take it away.

Thank you, Amanda. And well. wonderful welcome. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here with everyone. And I’m really looking forward to the discussion we have today. So yeah, let’s, let’s dive right into it. Because I thought the video was, was excellent, actually. So I’m really pleased that we got the opportunity to to highlight that some fantastic work going on there. And yeah, thanks very much for Marina for running up for us before we kick off. So I imagine I imagine the reason many of you are here today is that the title of my talk has the two letters that we’re seeing everywhere at the moment, but I know everyone still wants to know more about AI. And yeah, I think I’d love to keep getting the feedback in the in the chat as we go through to make this a discussion really. I’m going to run through a few, a few slides to bring us some of the insights that we found I guess in the last while For six months to 12 months of the whirlwind that we’ve been on in this new era. So first of all, thanks so much for choosing this session and coming along and spending your time with me today. And before I get into into into who I am, I also want to celebrate the new partnership that we have, we’ve done a perfect, as Amanda said, at the beginning my responsibilities towards bringing partnerships of the world’s best nonprofit software to life with Microsoft, we really couldn’t be any more delighted, the DonorPerfect have chosen to partner Microsoft, we’ve, it’s it’s something that we’ve seen from afar, our customers tell us it’s just a fantastic tool and a fantastic way for fundraisers to really understand donors to connect in ways that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do so to be able to call don a perfect partner, and to look forward to bring in some of the the AI that I’m that we’re going to speak about today. Yeah, it really is an honor. So I wanted to say thank you to the donor, perfect team for putting the trust in Microsoft. And we’re looking forward to what’s next. And all of you across the world have got lots to see as things started to come and develop. So onto on to my session a little bit about me, I think Amanda covered some of this. I am in the UK as he worked on my accent. But I think we saw that Miriam is from even further afield. And later over in Sweden, I’m sure many of you across the world. I want let me start really with Microsoft and why it’s doing what it’s doing with nonprofits. And I’ve been at Microsoft for 15 years, I’ve done lots of different roles across Microsoft. But one thing has been consistent all the way through. And that is the commitment that Microsoft’s got to philanthropy to social goods and social impact. And understanding our responsibility in the world as one of the biggest tech organizations in the world, how we have a responsibility to make make a difference. You know, these numbers are pretty staggering, really, you know, if if you think the Microsoft knew they were nearly $4 billion to the sector, and grants discount the software and services, hopefully many of you benefited from that if you’re using Microsoft technologies at the moment. I love the fact that it’s not just as a corporation, Microsoft feels generous, it’s the people. And every day I come to work, I’m fortunate enough to work with people that really understand the importance of leaning into these challenges, and are prepared to dedicate their time and generosity towards supporting it as well. And we are extraordinarily fortunate to work with hundreds of 1000s of nonprofits who put their trust in Microsoft, to run their businesses to connect with donors to create impact in the form of field service, applications and a myriad of other things as well. So it the sheer scale of the work that we’re able to do is quite humbling. And it’s something that’s been a part of Microsoft, right since the very beginning. We, though are a tipping point in in nonprofit technology, specifically in the the sector is at the point where I think it now has got a level of maturity to understand the power that technology can have. And that’s intersecting with the fact that we’re at this AI moment we’re at this AI era. And so nonprofit solutions come into market with DonorPerfect with Microsoft, bring in AI right to the fingertips of not data scientists and technologists, but actually folk on the front line fundraises really is what the opportunity for us all at the moment is. And, you know, it was a it’s been around for a little while. The the engine is really revving now and you know, many of you won’t have been able to turn on the TV opened up your PC without suggestions that AI is going to either be the greatest thing since sliced bread or it’s got some pretty dark sides that that you need to be worried or concerned about. And so today, you know, I want to really try and look at and think about how we can overcome maybe some of that hyperbole, and and and get some practical ways that it’s going to be able to support you in the work that you do. One thing that I always want A reference when we get into these discussions, is, AI is already being used. So for those of you on the call that do have a slight nervousness about AI and the future and where it can be used, I do want you to think of some of the areas that you probably already engage with have aI built into it already. And so things like translation when you if you are lucky enough to travel abroad, and you meet someone with a different language, you can use apps that have been freely available for a while to help you communicate. virtual assistants, things like Siri, on your iPhone have been around which use an element of AI autocorrect simple things simple things like being able to autocorrect in word processing systems or things like that. And all these other ones as well. These are where AI has been for a long while. But I think the difference now is AI now is for everyone. Maybe those use cases we’ve just seen have been the preserve of the data scientist or the technologist who has the is in their dominion, and then they release that to the world in a very narrow way. Now, everybody’s got the opportunity in the platform to be able to engage with AI in a way that’s meaningful to them and creates impact in the work that they do. And so that’s the shift, the shift is away from developers and data science and into the hands of democratizing the power that AI can bring. And so that, you know, that’s an opportunity for all of us to lean in and think about. And when you think about Microsoft’s perspective there, we’ve released in the last six months, a product called Microsoft copilot, I want to start by acknowledging the name copilot, because I think it does a really good job of maybe just a lay in some of the concerns that people have when they think about AI being all in control and taken advantage of a situation for its own ends. And the difference really between autopilot, which is I think where scare mongers would have us believe AI is and the idea of copilot. And this is something that is going to be there to give you advice to give you guidance to support you if things aren’t quite on track, but is ultimately not in control. And, you know, these are some of the most important principles that we have at Microsoft as we think about developing AI and given access to people to AI right across the globe. If we don’t take away anything else from today, I want you to know that Microsoft’s commitment to trust, privacy and ownership in AI is right at the top of our priority list. And you can rely on Microsoft to really give you the the tools, but also the control. And yeah, that brings us into the AI principles. Microsoft is very transparent, you can find these online, I think I think they’re linked at the end of the session as well. The commitment that Microsoft’s got to its customers, to governments and to its own employees around the way that we think about developing AI to make sure that it’s used in the right way. And it’s doing the good that it should be doing. And not some of the other things that we want to we’re not always going to get it right. But I think it’s all about being open and transparent about the way that we think about AI. And I urge you all to go and take a look at these on the Microsoft website.

So that’s a little bit about Microsoft’s commitment in the sector. That’s a little bit about what’s going on in a macro scale around AI and where it’s coming from and maybe you know, some of the big issues around trust that we need. Let’s shift gears now to the work that all of you do. And in the end the important ways that the challenges and opportunities that this might present to us. I don’t need to tell you this, you hopefully but sadly be looking at this and and this would be your experience. You know, it’s staffing and burnout in nonprofits in you know in a world where where the the competition for talent is only increasing the idea that working in a nonprofit leads to greater burnout not only means that we don’t get to some of the best talent but it also means that we’re not getting the best work if we do get that time. And so some of these statistics are you know, not pretty reading but I think are representative of the amount of of pressure and impact and work that you guys have to do on donor engagement, again, in a world where, you know, the macroeconomic headwinds look difficult, and people are being squeezed with cost of living crisis around the world and finding that difficult, donor retention is fallen. And so we have to differentiate and think about how we can provide that experience and keep people in love with the causes that they love, in ways that that perhaps we haven’t done before, and, you know, really leads into the total donations decreasing over time. And, you know, we need we need to think about changing the way that we donors experience the work that you all do and, and and AI really have a role there for us. I love this, obviously, many of you will have read Adam Grant or seen hate some of his work. But the I think, certainly my experience at Microsoft, at one stage, the idea of burnout and overwork was that they were teaching me new methods on managing that stress or saying no to things or all the various different crazy efficiency methods that I have to run through a with you, I think that’s really just putting a sticking plaster on I think the opportunity with AI is to create efficiency, but it’s to do it in a way that reinvents the work that we do. So that we’re not just trying to jam more in the same stuff, it’s we’re getting more impact, and fundamentally re creating reform in the way that we the way that we work. This for me, does, it completely changed the way that I looked at the adoption curves of technology. And so again, I haven’t been at much for a long while, I’ve seen the advent of instant messaging of changes in SharePoint and ways of storing documentation and lots of other things that have needed adoption. And this is actual real data. And it shows that in a quite a big study that over a year, people started to see the benefits of co pilot and using generative AI, when they did the 11 by 11. And so that means 11 minutes a day, they used it to help them with a task. And they did it for 11 weeks. And you can see the results, your productivity went up, which is important. But I think some of these other really critical factors as we think about staff burnout and delight delivering the work that we’re all doing, relieving those meetings, how do we how do we remove that time spent in those meetings that we don’t want to be in? How do we make sure that people are coming to work and enjoying their work, especially in your sector? And you know, how do we make sure that we get our work life balance so that we’re we’re getting the most, you know, from our entire teams and not making making their lives outside of work? Not enjoyable, as well. So, there’s a lot of context around the sector, when it’s thinking findra, how fundraises are starting to recognize some of the opportunities I want to go into, I suppose three areas, three use cases that I think all of you can think about after the session and start to play around with as we think about prompts as well. The first is high volume and high volume engagement. And this is all around content creation, where you’ve got lots and lots of communication today. How can I personalize that and differentiate that and and generate that content so that we’re not doing that all the time? Then on the high touch engagement? Well, if once we’ve started to be able to build that and personalize that that content, how do we how do we really start thinking about targeting it and get taken on journeys? So that we know we’re doing the best type of content for the right type of people? And then finally, in operations and admin, the the bane of everybody’s life, I suppose. But it’s really important. How do we just make the most of our time, engaging with our colleagues and staff, removing some of the noise capturing meetings, those types of things? So I wanted to put it in the context of maybe two types of people that are sat watching me at the end of the PC today and the first is someone that deals with donor communication. Someone is working directly with donors to help them understand the impact they’re having to help ask them for modern age. shins and more generosity? How can we think about where AI can play a part there? Well, you know, whether you’re someone that writes all the time, and that might be informally formally, or you’re just somebody that is writing, for the first time, everybody is going to suffer with a bit of writer’s block. And this is where the idea of co pilot really comes to the fore, in that, we can ask co pilot to start us off in some content or some communication that we want to make. I’ll note that, you know, the perfect is already starting to leverage some of this in our tools today. And you can go and see that I did play around with it, I thought it was fantastic. It did a great job. And, you know, it allowed me to really decrease the time I had to sit there thinking and structure in the way that I might want to build out some communication or a campaign. So being able to quickly create that content gives us a starting point. Then, then we think about well, how, what types of content do we need to produce? Or what type of communication do we need to produce? When we’re trying to create something that’s a broad reach email, I wanted to use that as an example. To help you think about the prompts that you might use when you do go and play around this with this after the session today. The three letter acronym that we use is ask. And I want you to think about speaking to an AI or generative AI as just working with a really friendly colleague, you don’t have to be overly formal, there’s no syntax that you need to use as in any coding. But I do think you need to give it the you need to give it enough information so that it can go and do its best work. So really starting out with the action, what is it that you want? What style does it need to be, if we’re, if we’re communicating with on a formal basis, we need to tell it that it needs to be far more. And if we’re communicating on a more lighter basis, we need to be able to give it that information as well. And then where does it go and get its context from it’s got access to a vast array of information and data. Let’s give it the context so that it knows where to go and get that from. And you know that that allows us to go and write a big broad Read, read Gmail, it also though, gives us the opportunity as we talk about co pilot again, to actually iterate. So it’s not creating the final comps, it’s not creating the final campaign, it’s giving you the structure, it’s saving you the time, and the energy of having to start from scratch. And it’s giving you the opportunity to then really bring your creativity to the fore as you add your own personal touch, change the tone, change the lamp and maybe give some more information that they might have missed. And by the way, I’ll step back in italics here, you’re seeing some of the ways that you might want to prompt further from you as we go through. So make the email shorter, include a call to action, and, and it can start then iterating as well as, as a co pilot, then perhaps you want to, I’ll hands up, I’m not a marketing I work with go to market team very closely, but the magic behind it. I do know, though, that a concerted effort requires going out across multiple channels. And so if you’ve created a beautiful email that you think is gonna go out broad reach email, you might want to back that up with a follow up social posts. So you might want to back that up with something for a newsletter. And so how do you think about that, and can you quickly keep that consistency and bring in

a follow up or an adjacent communication that’s going to really cement the messages that you’re trying to bring on. And then this is the bit that’s amazing is then you can start to personalize the emails quickly. So you can you know, add in personal context by asking it to go and look at the CRM and give you the information and add information that’s specific to the donations they’ve been given. But you can change the tone. If this is a donor that’s that high given you might want to work in right at the top of a fortune 500 business, you might want to change your tone to something a lot more formal. If it’s a high school student is running on campus fundraising for you, there’s definitely a different tone that you might want to strike. And so how can you build out the content in such a way that it does that? And then how do you do that at scale? You know, Microsoft is all about scale. And you know, if you’re in the fundraising business, you’re also trying to get Trying to get to scale. And that is often the biggest challenge that you face in bringing that magic that I know everyone’s got on this call, bringing that to scale. And so once we can start thinking about it on an individual basis, that means that we can, we can scale that out across an entire campaign, so that every donor knows that they’re special, and they’re important to the impact that you’re trying to create. Probably my most used use my most used case, this is for using live language models. Live Chat GPT is just summarizing complex content. Every day, I’m sure you are given a report on what donors are doing in this demographic, or what some of the trends are around giving in this geography, or just internal reports that help you understand previous campaigns, very often reading through an entire PDF or big report, you might not have time for that. And you really need to get the key insights that you need straight away. And so summarizing that complex content to something that’s more manageable help you understand, that then also gives you the opportunity to communicate that more effectively, if you’ve got to transmit that to a large number of people. But it gives you the opportunity to dive into the detail more again, hopefully, everyone’s seeing this theme of copilot you’ve summarized, but actually I now I’m really interested in something that is summarized and I want to go deeper, you’ve got that opportunity to iterate and go down again to that next level of detail because you’re in control. So that’s, I think, you know, some, I think, some really good examples of the way that we know fundraisers Isn’t it right now and they’re starting to experiment and trial, I want to move on to sort of a major gift officer and think about some of the ways that they will maybe take a different lens on a less tactical less day to day basis, then maybe taking a broader lens on on fundraising. And this is where the fact that Microsoft is building AI into all the products that you know and love. It gives it gives you the opportunity to really benefit from it in in the flow of work. And so if you’re someone like me who lives in Outlook, and is that’s the way that you manage your time and you communicate with others, the fact that the AI is built directly into that product means that you have the opportunity to leverage all of these great things directly where you are. And so a couple of examples. And then finally, if you’re a fundraiser a major gift officer, the CRM is the lifeblood of everything that you do. And so actually having the AI being able to connect directly into that gives you a whole new opportunity and lens to be able to take a view on bringing the AI’s insights out of that CRM, which is a big pool of data into something that’s more manageable, more actionable, and ultimately gives you the opportunity to create more impact. And so a couple of bits, just just just so you can see it in action, I was gonna do a live demo. But I’m in the UK, everyone’s all over the world we didn’t, I didn’t feel confident in my internet connection, it would that it would do. So what you can see here is an email coming through, and the AI that is picking up the email. So it’s in the AI in Outlook is picking that up. And then and then and then this card on the right hand side that you can see in copilot for sales, it’s actually pulling the contact it needs from that, and then entering that into the CRM as it sees fit. And so you can see that it’s it’s giving you that context, you can either agree with that or not agree with it, you can put it into the into the CRM or not. You can change it, you can drop the email, you can iterate on it. And so this is an example of directly in the flow work, you’ve been able to take an email coming in about a major gift opportunity appearing in the CRM automatically and then being able to do various things in the CRM to address that opportunity. And maybe I was telling fibs when I said my most used use case for judging. And co pilot was the company complex, summarizing complex data. Actually, it’s in teams. I use teams every single day. More than I probably should and now that copilot is built in to teams is been an absolute godsend. So I’m able to, first of all, transcribe the entire session. So I can ask everyone if they’re okay to record and it will transcribe the entire session. Now, there are a couple of things. First, it means my follow ups are really, really easy, you know, I can get the actions out from that meeting instantaneously, and get things moving as quickly as I need to. Secondly, I can look back at that, and understand, maybe something that I hadn’t quite understood, or I’d missed. And I can do that by searching for speakers by key words. You know, and really give me some give myself the opportunity to really dive deeper in. And then, you know, finally, I can share this around. So if this is a call that someone in my team has missed, and then they need to catch up, and it’s a follow up, they’ve got the opportunity to go and watch it back jump to the point that’s really important to them. And fundamentally, this has saved me hours and hours and hours of time as we go. So, where to begin? Well, I talked about the adoption plan the 1111, I keep that in your mind, as you’re thinking about using copilot keep that in your mind. First of all, take some of my use cases, find your own, it’s cool, but agree on what those things are. Find the people that really want to go and do this. There’ll be there’ll be people young, they might be old, they might be anywhere in between, there’ll be people are really interested in this, and you want to try and drive that energy. readiness is really important. You’ll see at the end of my session here today, that I’ve given you some resources so that you can go away and look at this, all of these free from Microsoft. So you can make the most of this. And then this 11 by 11 habit, keep it in your mind. If you can, if people can be doing 11 minutes a day, over 11 weeks, they’re going to be in the habit. And that fundamentally, we talked about reforming the way work works. This is the this is the entry point of doing that. Well plug for our nonprofit community, fantastic new place to go if you’re a nonprofit to learn about what Microsoft’s doing to benefit from the experience of the group experience across the globe. And to find out a little bit more about some of the events that we run directly. And I’d love to see everybody there. I don’t want to spend too much time on this. I’m sure we can cover it later on. But you know, if if you’re a nonprofit there today, and you don’t know whether or not you’re benefiting from what Microsoft just does out of the box in terms of granted software and a discount on software. This is a snapshot of it. I think we’re going to share these decks afterwards. So you can find this. You’ll see on the next slide. Sorry, one after this, how you can go and make sure that you’re benefiting from all of the technology offers that we have. These links will take you to free training guides, tips, hints, tricks, experience all the above. So go and take a little look that I then invite anyone in the seven minutes that we’ve got left to give me a few questions and tell me Is any of this better? You good?

Well, we have quite a few questions in the chat. So let me see here. All righty. Let’s see here. Perfect. So Christina is asking what in what happens to the information I put into copilot copilot? does it remain proprietary to me? Or does it become part of the public soup copilot use in other relationship analysis and learning? And conversely, does what I enter in the copilot remain there to enable its understanding and relationship with me.

Great questions. So first thing is definitely everyone go to our AI transparency page which which has our principles and you can read the detail of this. And you also might have seen Satya announce copilot being built into Windows PCs the other day. So for those of you that have seen some of that you might get you might understand a little bit about how we think about this. The day that you have in co pilot is your day. And so when you’re searching the web, it’ll be it’s anonymized. It does go into training the model even more so the questions that you ask are going to train it but it’s completely anonymous. There’s no There’s no connection to you in regards that so at the end, for example, at the end of each session, it won’t it doesn’t you’re not able to go back in the previous sessions to you know to recover all questions that you’ve asked from from, from the AI terms of inside an organization. So when you’re running copilot, let’s say, within your nonprofit across your Microsoft 365, environment, again, Mike, Microsoft, that is all run on your data. And it’s proprietary to the organization. And in great Microsoft standard, that is all controlled, you know, a tenant level. And so that can be controlled to the enth degree about, you know, how, how much data is tracked or not track. It’s fundamentally your organization alone it, I think, for more specifics on that, because it’s a really important point. And I wouldn’t want to misspeak, if you’re asking very specific questions, do go to the AI, responsible AI, which Rachel has kindly put in the chat there actually did a pretty good job of making sure that you can read that with real clarity. So I recommend everyone go in there.

Easy. So then Tammy asked, she says she’s a huge advocate for the transformative power of AI. But she’s currently struggling to get buy in from her board and Executive Director. Just he’s asking if you have any tips for gaining approval and buy in from those key decision makers?

No, no, I think that’s good. I well, I mean, thanks, Tommy, for being an advocate. And I look forward to seeing what you’re going to be able to go and do, because it’s all of you that are gonna go make this work. And the first thing I’d say is definitely point them at the responsible AI stuff. I know, I’ve just said that. But I’m gonna say it again, because helping leaders and executive boards understand that this is safe, Mike trust committed to their privacy and to trust, I think is a critical first step, then I think the second is maybe just introducing them to the 11 by 11 rule, if we could talk to an exec or a leader about 11 minutes a day, in order to get the types of productivity gains, the happiness gains, the contentment gains, that we that the Davenant seems to suggest we can then you know, ask them to commit 11 minutes feels like something that they might be open to. And then as I said in the in the adoption ideas, just picking maybe one use case two use cases that you know, within your organization would make a big difference. And that’s why that’s why I’m really passionate about AI because I really do believe Tommy that it’s the engineer your engineering II that’s gonna bring it to life. And so if you’ve got the the ideas, taking them to your, to your exec with, with some of the things we talked about today, I had hoped that they’d be receptive and and you’re able to take forward

using arm and I think that’s all the time we have for questions today. So thank you, Craig. And thank you everyone for attending the session. We hope you have some great takeaways. Our next session is going to be beginning at 310. We have Dana Snyder with talking about sparking a reoccurring first mentality with your supporters. And Natalie Anderson from Sage talking about Spark synergy, aligning fundraising and finance to ignite mission impact. And they will be recorded. So go ahead.

Just quick, I just want to say I’m gonna hang around for a little while in our there’s a breakout area for Microsoft. And so look if anybody has got any further questions. I know. We run out of time. I’d love to see you in there for a short period. Okay.

Absolutely. Everyone, have a great day.

Thank you, everyone. Thanks for listening.