AI for Nonprofits

Chapter 5.1AI as Your Institutional Memory

Based on insights from an interview with Astrid J. Scholz, PhD.

A lot of the excitement about “AI for good” or “AI for nonprofits” focuses on two major concerns in the social sector: fundraising and program delivery. It is therefore not surprising that significant energy in this book and elsewhere is focused on using AI to parse the interests of funders, use their publicly available documents to write better grant applications, and digest information to craft better communications. On the program delivery side, there are some clever applications of AI, such as using chatbots to connect clients to the content, services, and experiences they need.

All this is important, but it overlooks a major use case for AI: to leverage the knowledge of what has already been done, and why, to address the wicked problems of the world. As an industry, the nonprofit world routinely forgets what it already knows. Theories of change and logic models evolve, staff leave, and data about why, what, and how an organization is working is stored in disparate systems and storage media that may lose backward compatibility.

AI enables us to analyze past projects for efficacy more quickly than human effort would allow and suggest optimization iterations for the future. What if instead of continuing to repeat ineffective approaches due to staff turnover, we were able to learn instantly what has worked within our organization, what hasn't, and get ideas about how ...