AI is for nonprofits
This may have been a provocative headline months ago but after last week’s inaugural Global Nonprofit Leaders Summit, the verdict is in: AI is here, and it is for everyone when used responsibly. The summit kickstarted a new dialogue on AI for nonprofits that covered themes from responsible use to technical skilling and training, to collaborative models, to in-action use cases in program delivery, marketing, operations and fundraising.
Perhaps the most important message of them all is that AI is for everyone - big and small nonprofits, all cause categories, and all roles—admins, fundraisers, marketers, executive directors, and COOs. Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith talked about the growth of the nonprofit sector in the U.S. and the world. There were only 15,000 U.S. nonprofits before World War II in the U.S. By the end of the century, the sector had grown to 1.5 million nonprofits– all because of passionate humans and a brand new tax code. He defined the 10 million global nonprofits as “the sparks of humanity” with 250 million people working to serve the world.
AI offers a new foundation for progress for this sector, as Kate Behncken, Global Head of Microsoft Philanthropies, shared. AI democratizes how much the sector can innovate and how much AI can be designed to represent our human needs and challenges. Dr. Fei-Fei Li said, “AI should be governed by human roots. At the end of the day there is nothing artificial about artificial intelligence, it is made by people and it going to be used by people and it has to be governed by people.”
Here are the biggest themes that came from the summit:
AI use is a question of purpose, risk, and rewards
All experts and nonprofit leaders who use AI agree that whether leveraged in program delivery, fundraising or marketing to donors, AI must be governed by ethical guardrails. The core principles of those guardrails come down to equity, justice, and prosperity. Nonprofit leaders are always inviting interdisciplinary dialogue and bringing together diverse perspectives, and AI is the same. Rebecca Finlay, CEO of Partnerships on AI, urged us to center humans needs and rights in the development of technology. She also talked about government policies that help to mitigate both bias and risk. When we set fair practices for large language models (LLM), we can answer the question on whether AI will augment or automate that piece of work. Natasha Crampton, Microsoft Chief Responsible AI Officer, shared how Microsoft thinks about human agency and building systems that are “by the people and for the people.” For nonprofits, the consideration of the economic and social context of AI should not be ignored. In fact, to think through the fear, uncertainty, and doubt, the Charities Aid Foundation shared hot off the press data from thousands of donors indicating donor readiness for and encouragement of charities using data in their fundraising and program efforts.
AI readiness is a data conversation. And data is a culture conversation.
Perhaps the most poignant and sobering moment around practical applications came down to a conversation about data. But data is really people. We use the word data – but we need to keep people centered in data decisions and, “We need to be respectful and careful and protect it appropriately." Justin Spelhaug, Microsoft VP, Tech for Social Impact, led a session on data collectives to allow nonprofits to come together to solve big challenges. Only 10% of the attendees in the room were part of a data collective. Common data models are at the root of facilitating interoperability. Woodrow Rosenbaum, Chief Data Officer of Giving Tuesday, highlighted the Giving Tuesday Data Commons, a tool that works to understand the full spectrum of human generosity. The Commons is tracking interoperable data—varied assets that can still talk to each other to standardize and connect data better. In the long term, collaborating with developers will help to curate and extract the data that meets common challenges and delivers the right data set for the solutions. Open data sets and digital public goods are the substrate that lays the foundation for more bespoke AI solutions. National Forest Foundation’s Jess McCutcheon confirmed that data and AI projects are really culture projects, and she talked about the uphill battle to bring along staff to ensure they feel ownership in this AI change.
AI skills are in demand, so are human skills
Meg Garlinghouse and Karin Kimbrough from LinkedIn presented the gap between the in-demand skills and in-demand jobs. AI skills for board-level and C-suite officers are important. Meg provided an example of Board.dev that will train technologists to equip them with what they need to do if they serve on nonprofit boards. Meg encouraged nonprofits to think about their talent management and hire humans who understand the impact of AI. She shared consistent data stating that 70% of executives say soft skills are more important than AI skills. Talent is needed to make AI work in a very human world. At the summit, we saw that learning AI is better as a community sport. We held a Generative AI skills workshop to train nonprofit professionals while on site—and over 300 in-person attendees received their certifications. We also talked about the Digital Skills Hub where leaders can find tools to share with their teams in all roles.
Nonprofits are at the heart of AI innovation
And nonprofits should be at the heart of AI design. Vilas Dhar, President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, in his closing keynote led with, “Those who are proximate to the problem, should be proximate to technology.” But his message took this one step further with a call to all nonprofits to become deeply involved in training and designing LLM technology for their use so it can serve local communities well. Jared Spataro’s demo of Microsoft Copilot showed how to query for information and design prompts that best meet the needs of the sector and provided practical examples to retrain your own prompts.
The summit’s core message ended with the hope and knowledge that the nonprofit sector is a leader in this tech revolution. As Woodrow said, “If you want to build good tech, build it to do good because then you are going to be taking on the hardest challenges and the tech you develop will be really robust.” The nonprofit industry should lead the most profound solutions because of our ability to work together.
The summit is just the beginning of using AI for impact. As Kate said, it may feel like a sprint, but AI for impact is a marathon. And we’re here to run it together. We want to hear from you—and learn from you—about how you will take the insights and learnings from these conversations back to your organization and start putting AI into action for mission impact. AI transformation starts here. We can’t wait to see what comes next.
Microsoft
