Adding Artificial Intelligence:
A Smart Move

Nonprofits are typically slow to adopt new technologies. Here’s why they shouldn’t shy away from AI

American businesses and consumers continue to ride the tech train, buying up every new digital device and program that come to the market, and then melding those innovative new tools into their lives and workplaces. But one group has been reluctant to hop aboard: the charitable sector.

Even though 85 percent of Americans already use mobile apps and other innovations powered by artificial intelligence, nonprofit groups remain notoriously slow at adopting AI tools that could make them more time- and cost-efficient. The perceived high costs of AI, along with privacy issues and the individual way each charitable organization has traditionally collected and used its data, has kept many from upgrading.

But, one by one, reasons for those fears are disappearing, say the leaders of organizations that currently benefit from artificial intelligence programs.

AI tech is becoming cheaper, thanks to companies like Salesforce.org that offer products with subscriptions at greatly-reduced prices. Improvements in algorithms and security have made the new tools safer and freer from bias against certain groups. And because new digital platforms are flexible enough to fit a variety of organizational data sets, AI is easier to use than ever.

The efficiencies AI can create for groups make it a perfect fit for cost-conscious nonprofits, charity managers say. The time to invest in technologies — such as chatbots that improve client service, or algorithms that scan data for the best donor prospects — is now.

College Forward, which works in Texas to stem the tide of college dropouts, partnered with Salesforce.org in 2012 after being awarded a foundation grant to upgrade its technology.

Eventually, Salesforce.org and College Forward took the information the organization had compiled on students and reconfigured it into an AI-supercharged student-services database. The group recently added another company product — the Einstein Prediction Builder — that analyzes data and predicts which students might be at risk for leaving school.

The results have sharpened the group’s vision of who its students are and what they need. Algorithms now flag students who need interventions more accurately and much faster than human efforts can, Buchan adds, while improving the organization’s ability to find more students to bring into its programs.

“AI has multiplied our impact by a factor of 10 — something that simply couldn’t be done if we used the typical nonprofit playbook,” says Buchan, adding that organizations, like for-profit businesses can’t reach millions of customers without AI.

Beyond scalability, AI helps groups improve what they do.  “We owe this new level of sophistication to the homeless or to veterans or to whoever it is we’re trying to serve,” Buchan adds.

College Forward has gone one step further with its AI, creating its own app — called CoPilot — that dozens of partner organizations serving 400,000 students now use. Beyond expanding College Forward’s mission to include like-minded groups, CoPilot earns the College Forward around $1 million in licensing fees each year.

For other groups, AI represents a way to better use sometimes-limited resources.

“We let the machines do the heavy lifting with all our small stuff,” says Michael Grandel, director of business intelligence at the National Aquarium. “Computers with AI can do the dumb things — like sorting and sifting through big piles of data — smarter and more efficiently. That allows us to allocate more time for our people to do things they haven’t be able to do before. It helps us add value to our operations.”

The National Aquarium puts AI to work on improving the multifaceted programs it runs for its thousands of members and 1.3 million annual visitors. It has plugged in several AI products from the Salesforce Einstein line, using Einstein Analytics as its linchpin.

The tools help the organization learn which members are donors, and which members are most likely to become donors. It scans AI-generated data for clues as to which groups should receive promotions and targeted messaging, such as environmental calls to action or invitations to certain events.

Besides offering super-intelligent products at discounted rates, Salesforce.org can link organizations with free technical assistance and other systems that help groups use their data more wisely.

Salesforce.org connected Reading Partners, an organization that trains tutors to teach children nationwide to read at grade level by fourth grade, with Cloud for Good, an IT services company that works to enhance the capabilities of Salesforce platforms. What’s more, Reading Partners took advantage of a Salesforce team of volunteers to get its AI-centered technology up and running.

“We’re a data-driven organization that puts data first, so our partnership with Salesforce seems natural,” says Lola McCall, Salesforce administrator at Reading Partners. “We’ve been working together to set up dashboards around our Salesforce database. They’re helping us reach our goals of improving our fundraising, as well as student engagement, performance, and recruitment.”