Closing the AI Gap for Nonprofits
Artificial intelligence is here. It’s in your voicemail, your spam filter, the software your team uses every day. The question isn’t whether AI is part of your organization’s work. It’s whether you’re getting anything meaningful out of it.
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“Most nonprofit professionals are using AI, but few organizations are getting a lot of value from it.”
Karen Graham, Consultant, Educator, and Tech Leader has watched AI reshape the nature of nonprofit work in real time. The benefits are real: time savings, access to knowledge, more capacity at your fingertips. But so are the concerns including the insidious risk that AI leads us toward a surface-level understanding of the communities we serve, when deep and nuanced understanding is exactly what makes nonprofit work effective. Research backs up what many nonprofit professionals are already sensing: the tools are there, but the organizational value hasn’t caught up yet.
“In the short term, I’m more worried. In the long term, I’m more hopeful.”
Karen doesn’t shy away from the real concerns: job security, data privacy, environmental impact, and the risk that over-reliance on AI risks erasing the deep community understanding that makes nonprofit work effective. But she also offers a clear-eyed framework for moving forward responsibly. She shares clear actions we all need from using organization-managed accounts and setting proper data permissions, to understanding data quality before you trust your results. She even has some low-risk ideas for places to start including ways to use chat bots to support your critical thinking, not replace it!
“Let’s be well informed and let’s participate in shaping what the future looks like.”
The human skills at the heart of nonprofit work, the relationship building, empathy, knowing your community, aren’t going anywhere. If anything, Karen believes they may become more valuable over time as technology like AI grows. The goal isn’t to hand our work over to a machine. It’s to use AI thoughtfully, in ways that free up time and sharpen thinking, so the people doing mission-driven work can do more of what only they can do. Nonprofit professionals have something important to contribute to how AI develops. We should be part of the conversation to shape these tools around the needs of our communities – not the other way around.
This episode is both a challenge and an invitation and full of practical guidance useful strategies on where to start.