AI, Fundraising and You with Nejeed Kassam
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AI is one of those buzzwords that has recently taken over people's minds. We imagine AI as a futuristic, thrilling, and scary opportunity. But we don't always recognize how it affects us or our work. The cool thing is that AI is being brought into our sector and has a lot of potentials to help organizations leverage their data to do more focused work or analyze and find new opportunities.
In today’s podcast, our guest, Nejeed Kassam, Lawyer, CEO and Founder of Keela, an impact technology company, talks about AI and how it helps small nonprofits manage their donors, mobilize resources, and raise more money.
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Myths that Nejeed wants us to walk away from:
AI will replace your job as a fundraiser. Nobody's coming for your jobs. You can't automate fundraising. That's not realistic. What you can do is allow folks to be less burnt out, allow them to prioritize more effectively, allow them to see patterns and focus their work in different ways. Effective use of artificial intelligence in fundraising is going to happen when it's deployed appropriately and then the fundraisers can take that knowledge and make decisions, steward better, and build stronger relationships.
Spending time on data has no benefits for your organization. Quality data has many benefits for organizations. Aside from compliance, data helps organizations to prepare for donor meetings, and then to use it for reporting and analytics. Nejeed advises organizations to spend time, be disciplined on their data, and do things right when setting up to save time going forward. Data can be a really foundational pillar for institutional capacity.
Nejeed’s thoughts around AI and Fundraising
AI predictions help drive decision-making. Using patterns from data that you have collected will help drive your decision-making. It gives you a good probability of the giving behaviors of the donors from your database. Data can tell your organization a story about your donors that is not recognizable when we don’t see the big data picture. It can also help you identify ask levels or make decisions about where you spend your time and energy.
Forecasting helps fundraisers. Understanding forecasting can help you understand your organization’s programming realities. It can understand whether you’re on track for where you want to be. You can make decisions when you have an idea of where you're going. It also helps identify when to ask for support, how much to ask for, and more.
Benchmarking for fundraising. Data helps your organization to measure efficacy and focus on thinking about how you are doing relative to your goals. Being able to check yourself, being able to hold yourself as an organization and as a fundraiser accountable is really valuable because then you can lean on all these data points in these predictive analytics and know where you really need to dig in and not.
Favorite Quotes from Today’s Episode
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“No, you can't automate fundraising. That's not realistic. What you can do is allow folks to be less burnt out, allow them to prioritize more effectively, allow them to see patterns and, um, focus their work in different ways because of the AI ultimately the effective use of artificial intelligence and fundraising is going to be because it’s deployed appropriately and then the fundraisers can take that knowledge and make decisions and steward better and build stronger relationships.”
“But, you know, that's what I'm saying. It's predicting the future, but it's not, it's guiding behavior. If I can, instead of cold calling 900 people on my list who I don't know maybe interested, if instead the data is signaling something is possible or likely, or has a high probability of happening that helps me do my job better.”
Resources from this Episode
