137 – Is AI Safe for Non-Profits? What You need to Know Before You Start

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast, brought to you by wowdigital.com, your best place for non-profit websites and design, now including fractional CMO support. Are you curious about using AI in your non-profit, but maybe you’re worried about getting it wrong? Today, I’m going to unpack how to use AI safely, ethically and effectively so that it actually helps your mission rather than putting it at risk. So stay tuned.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. I’m your host, David, and in today’s episode, I’m going to be talking about things all around AI and how to use it safely in your non-profit without the hype, panic or putting your organization at risk. But before I continue, I want to mention that our podcast needs your help. If you find this episode or any of our others insightful, interesting or helpful, please like, subscribe, share, and comment. It really does help the podcast immensely, and it helps us reach more non-profits who are the ones that are doing important work.

So for those of you who might be new here, I’m David Pisarek. I’m the founder and CEO of Wow Digital. We work with non-profits and charities across the planet, helping them improve their websites, digital systems, and online fundraising. I also host this podcast to help non-profit leaders make smarter digital decisions without jargon and overwhelm. So let’s jump into it right now.

One of the questions that I’m asked kind of frequently is: Why does AI feel exciting and risky for non-profits right now?

The answer is really this: non-profits and charities are typically about 8 to 10 years behind the industry. And because AI is so new, I mean, we’ve been using it in our agency for about 5 years now. But ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini are all fairly new. And many organizations don’t have policies on acceptable use. So what can you put into AI? How could you be using it? One of the things that we often talk about is that you shouldn’t be putting donor information into AI.

So one of the great use cases, cases for AI, is to take a download of all your donation information, let’s say from 2025, 2024, multiple years, throw that in and say, ‘Create some charts that show us trends.’ But quite often in those exports, you’ve got personal information. So you might have name, email address, phone numbers, the type of credit card, things like that. So if you want to use AI to get data fairly easily, so you can make decisions. So you know, ‘Oh, you know what, in May we don’t get a lot of donations, so maybe in March and April we ramp up some communications around that. Cool.’

I would advise that you should totally use AI for that, but you need to scrub all that personal information out of the data before you upload it.

So that’s probably one of the things. Get some policies in place, and make sure you’re not putting any information out there that could harm a donor or the organization. That’s how you can safely use AI.

Another way you can use it is, for example, with a news release or a blog article. I often recommend, on the wall behind me, if you’re not watching this podcast, we’re on YouTube podcasts, so you can see the video of this. We’re on Spotify, we’re publishing the video up there. Plus, on our website at wowdigital.com, check out the video because on the wall behind me, I have a content calendar. We use this one, but we run a process with our clients around content as well.

So what you could do is you could take a news release or blog article, and you can throw that into ChatGPT, whatever AI platform you want and say, ‘Make this into six social posts for me.’ Right. And it’ll cut it down into bite-sized chunks. You can tell it you want an email that talks about this topic. Here are some of the articles that we published, news releases, some of our thoughts, and have it draft an email for you.

The one thing to know is that you shouldn’t just take information from AI and publish it on your website. Publish it on social. You need to validate it, you need to verify it. So the AI will get you probably about 80% of the way there. But it’s not perfect.

So don’t just copy and paste it; still review it, read it. But it will definitely help save you time over and over and over on things like that.

Another question that often comes to me is how non-profits can protect donor trust and their brand while using AI?

And one interesting use case for this is to set up alerts, so you can use Google Alerts, which has been around for years and years and years. But you can set up AI agents so that whenever your brand, your name, or a topic in your specific sector that you’re working with comes up, it can send you notifications. So you can stay on top of Google reviews, you can stay on top of any mention of your organization in the news and be alerted right away. So that you can go out and do the marketing, do the PR, do the conversation piece that does need to happen. That’s one of those ways that that can definitely be used.

So, guidelines. I did talk a few moments ago about getting some policies in place around guidelines, and I did kind of mention just very briefly, you know, acceptable use. So what should you put in, what shouldn’t you put in?

You should have in there policies, things around the idea of what to do if you feel that something has been compromised, who do you contact? What are the next steps? That type of thing. You want to make sure that you’ve got Multi Factor Authentication or two Factor Authentication, so MFA or 2FA is enabled on your account. So that way it is locked for you.

I would also avoid using the free versions of the platforms. There are some additional enhancements that you get with the paid versions of them. Plus there’s a little bit additional security that’s typically found in the platforms. So for the 15 to $20, maybe $30 a month, it’s well worth it to protect the account a little bit better. And you also get a bit additional features and functionality for that.

So the next question that I’m often asked is, what’s a really great first step for somebody that wants to explore AI without breaking things in the organization or your workflows?

First thing to do is to just take a deep breath, relax, it’s going to be okay. I would open accounts on the top four platforms and give each one the same prompt. I can tell you from a lot of my colleagues I talk with, because I’m in a group of about 200 other digital agency owners who meet fairly regularly and have lots of conversations. We’ve definitely been talking about AI over the last few years.

A lot of people really jumped on to OpenAI, so that would be ChatGPT very early on, ourselves included at the agency here. What I’ve been hearing a lot of and what I’ve been playing with as well is that Claude actually gives you better results. So if you’re looking at content writing or development and things like that, so rewriting a case for support, donor documentation, some basic copy for your website or social media posts, what we’ve been finding across the agencies is that Claude will actually produce better quality results for you, but it can’t do things that other platforms do.

So I would pick up a prompt, figure out what it is that you want to do, throw it into a few different platforms, and see which one you like the better output from.

After that point, just start using that one, right? And then stay in tune with this podcast because we’ll be talking about AI probably for the indefinite future. I think it’s here to stay. I don’t think it’s going anywhere, but that would be the the first step is to create some accounts, free ones.

I know I just said moments ago not to use the free ones, but for a basic prompt like “take this news release, take this blog, and do this with it,” you can see what the output is. And there shouldn’t be any harm if that did get leaked to anybody because you’ve got that release published on your website likely already, so there really shouldn’t be any issues around using it for that kind of purpose.

Well, I hope that you found some of the things that I mentioned insightful and helpful around how you can use AI in your non-profit or charity and how to do it in a safe way. So I hope that everybody listening gets at least one tidbit that they can take forward and do something with.

And I want you to, within three days of listening to this episode, go create an account on an AI platform, try out two or three different platforms with the same prompt, and let me know how it goes.

Come back and leave a comment on our website at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com on this post, so if you’re also curious about how you could leverage AI or even automations, because you can do all kinds of stuff with AI and automations in your non-profit, but you might want some guardrails in place to make sure that everything is safe and working well. Just head over to wowdigital.com/consult/ to book a free strategy call with me, and I’ll walk through what makes sense and what doesn’t, and how you can move forward safely.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. If you want any links to anything or to the resources I mentioned on this episode, just head over, like I said, to nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all the details.

Until next time, keep on being successful!