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Nine ways to boost your fundraising campaigns with AI
26 Nov 2024by Laura Stanley
We explore how charities can optimise their fundraising and marketing campaigns with artificial intelligence, sharing insights from Microsoft Tech for Social Impact
How to get started with artificial intelligence (AI) is a question many charities are asking themselves as we approach 2025.
For charities, AI is set to be a game-changer. With limited resources and budgets, AI can help charities minimise the time spent on laborious administrative tasks and instead help them redirect their focus to creative work, shaping the future of their charity and driving more impact for their communities. Now that AI is becoming more accessible, with organisations of all digital abilities and budgets able to implement it, the next step is working out where the technology can be most helpful. Which tasks can be easily automated, and which areas will AI benefit most?
Microsoft Tech for Social Impact (TSI) has created a guide to help charities determine where AI can be most suited to their fundraising and marketing activities. Nine Steps to Optimize your Fundraising and Marketing Campaigns with AI shows charities how to improve their campaign management with Microsoft 365 Copilot and offers tips on how to create strong prompts to yield better results. It also outlines different versions of Microsoft 365 Copilot and what they can do for your charity, with reference to its responsible AI practices.
Here, we share just a few of the key insights from the report and discover how AI can boost charity campaigns now and in the future.
How to boost your charity campaigns with AI
Use stronger prompts
When using generative AI tools such as Copilot, you usually start with a prompt—a question you need answering or a short brief for creating text or images. The better a prompt is, the more useful the response will be.
Microsoft’s report shares four key components to make prompts more precise and focused to your needs:
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Goal: Specify what response you are looking for. Do you need a list with bullet points, a specific word count, presentation slides, or script?
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Context: Provide context for the request, including target audience. For example, “provide highlights of a year-end fundraising campaign for trustees” or “create an invitation to volunteers for mass fundraising events.”
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Sources: Consider where you’d like data to come from, including the time period. Microsoft notes that Copilot can draw from “relevant data from LinkedIn” or magazine articles from the last year. You can ask specifically for fundraising ideas from Charity Digital, for example.
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Expectations: Be as clear as possible about what you need, making it easier for Copilot to understand and deliver precisely what you’re asking for. You can specify tone or call-to-action. If you’re generating an image, provide a colour scheme and type of image you want.
Get to know your audience
One of the key parts of creating a fundraising and marketing campaign is understanding your donor base. Charities must know who they are aiming their campaign at to make it effective. How do different demographics prefer to donate, for example? How do they prefer to be contacted? An Instagram fundraiser will be less effective if targeting donors who prefer to use Facebook.
With Microsoft 365 Copilot, charities can easily analyse donor behaviour across different segments, with minimal effort. It can show us how donors supported annual and one-off campaigns in the past, the proportion of repeated donors, and more. With this information, Copilot can also help identify those most likely to donate again and the engaged donors you can approach for more involvement, whether for larger or more frequent donations or a volunteering role at an event.
The report provides example prompts that can help charities summarise and understand their donor behaviour quickly and effectively, and the tools that will help them achieve this.
Create your core messaging
Creating a core message behind your campaign essentially summarises the purpose behind it to donors, trustees, volunteers, and anyone who is engaged with your cause. Microsoft TSI points out that charities need to create “a theme and core message that establishes its purpose in a memorable and compelling manner.”
With Microsoft 365 Copilot in Word, charities can support and encourage team creativity by proposing possible campaign themes and drafting supporting messaging. Charity professionals can then apply human oversight to determine which themes work best for their needs and build upon them accordingly. Copilot can summarise discussions and document actions that need to be taken next, meaning nothing gets lost and making it easier for ideas to come to fruition.
Microsoft TSI provides a great example of how AI can generate possible campaign ideas, allowing Copilot to explain its reasoning and allowing charities to make informed decisions about which path to take with their charity campaign.
To discover more tips on how AI can help your fundraising and marketing campaigns, including how to implement a budget and develop compelling content, check out Microsoft TSI’s full report here.
You can also find out more about how AI can help your charity with Microsoft Tech for Social Impact’s charity-specific resources here.
Laura Stanley
Laura Stanley
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