Legacies and AI: Tips for getting started
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In a world where fundraising and marketing teams are busier than ever and often under resourced, how can Artificial Intelligence (AI) increase our capacity, accelerate our learning, and open up whole new possibilities for legacy fundraising without jeopardising vital supporter relationships?
Remember A Charity’s director Lucinda Frostick shares her thoughts and top take-outs from a panel session at this year’s Legacy Strategy Summit.
Rarely a day goes by where the topic of AI isn’t in the news; whether that’s because it’s enabled the latest breakthrough in cancer treatment or for fear that AI is developing too fast and will put an end to the human race.
Whether we know it or not, most of us are already using AI tools on a daily basis, be it a Google search, voice-activated assistants like Alexa and Siri, the algorithms that direct what we see on our social media feed or the suggestions that pop up on our Netflix or Amazon accounts.
But generative AI takes things up a notch – and that’s where things are getting exciting. It brings in machine learning technology, which has the capacity to develop new content, designs and synthetic data. And that’s what we focused on in our panel discussion at the Legacy Strategy Summit 2023.
Steve Law, Senior Legacy Promotions Manager at Macmillan Cancer Support and Emily Casson, Digital Fundraising and Innovation Leader at the Salvation Army, joined me on the panel, sharing some great ideas for how fundraisers can get started. Here are some of the top takeaways from that session:
Be bold and give it a go
We may all be talking AI, but according to a poll run during our session, fewer than half of us at the Legacy Strategy Summit had given it a go. Emily’s advice is to spend even just 10 minutes finding out how you can save an hour. Go on to ChatGPT and ask it to explain itself, telling you how best to use it. As with anything else, the more you experiment with it, the better you’ll have an idea of what it can do – and where it can be most helpful for you.
It doesn’t have to be overwhelming
There may be almost limitless opportunities for using AI to enhance your legacy programme & build capacity, but there are some very simple and practical suggestions to get things off the ground.
Among the many ideas shared during the session, examples ranged from asking your AI platform to draft legacy ad copy that meets your campaign brief or writing an email to supporters – with variants for several different supporter groups.
Why not ask AI to draw up your next blog or – to build internal engagement – launch a competition for staff, challenging people across the organisation to generate the best script for a short legacy campaign video using AI alone?
Or perhaps you want to ask for new campaign ideas, to create new imagery, (noting the watchouts in the section below) or – as Steve is doing – to help draw up your legacy strategy? You might even ask your AI platform to populate a spreadsheet of local solicitor firms in a 5-mile radius.
Free AI tools and platforms to explore
Among the abundance of AI tools on the market, there are several that are both free and easy to use, which can be great for beginners. We’ve already referenced ChatGPT, but why not try Canva’s Image Generator or Google Bard and explore what prompts produce the best results for you.
Some important watchouts
While AI has the capacity to shave off many hours a week for marketing and fundraising teams, it’s not without its flaws. The watchouts we explored on the panel ranged from the need to ensure communications were suitably compassionate and sensitive, through to the challenge of in-built bias and how we can ensure AI-driven content is diverse and representative.
We also discussed the need to carefully consider copyright issues – particularly when it comes to image generation and understanding what original artwork components may have been used as building blocks to create this new imagery and whether those rights are reserved. Steve highlighted that Adobe have released another AI tool within Photoshop that is producing great results using only art it has permission to use.
Then of course there’s the significant issue of accuracy. Just as internet sources can vary, we can never take it for granted that information developed or created through AI is 100% accurate.
With that in mind, we humans most definitely still have our place in ensuring our legacy communications are truthful, emotive, appropriate, and inspiring… for the time-being at least.
Human or AI - can you tell the difference?
Can you tell which of the above images are AI generated and which are genuine campaign images from The Salvation Army?
Head over to our LinkedIn page, to take Emily Casson's AI identification challenge.
Disclaimer: This blog was not generated by AI…. but it possibly / probably should have been.
Further reading: For those of you who want to explore AI topic, you can follow Steve Law’s newsletter on LinkedIn: NonProfits + Robots = ?