Having served as the Chairperson of a nonprofit for five years, I know too well the operational challenges that come with limited time and resources. Especially when the nonprofit is largely volunteer based, as the one I was heading, Think Africa. Being from an IT background, I am always open to trying out technologies that can support by automating tasks and thus lessen the burden. In this post I share 3 ways where I see ChatGPT being beneficial for nonprofits, especially in those areas that I have found to be time consuming but necessary to keep the nonprofit going.

Many of us have probably by now heard of ChatGPT since its launch late last year. ChatGPT, which is short for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is an “advanced natural language processing tool trained to provide information and assemble content together based on prompts entered by a user. With the ability to continuously learn and adapt to new information, ChatGPT can remember past conversations and constantly iterate based on user prompts.” (Source). It is developed by Open AI, and is just one of the many existing tools utilising advances in large language models (LLMs) – “advanced Artifical systems that are designed to understand and generate human-like text based on the patterns and information they’ve learned from vast training data. These models can be used for various tasks, including natural language understanding, text completion, language translation, question-answering, text summarization, and much more.” (Source)

ChatGPT is currently free for anyone to use over the Internet. I do see the irony in writing this post as anyone could type ‘Write a blog post on how AI-powered technology like ChatGPT can benefit nonprofits.’ and you would get the list but I do supplement the points with context, which hopefully will lead you to formulate your own prompts. It is definitely an exercise in asking clear and succinct questions. 

An advantage I find to using this over searching over Google is that you get the text ready rather than piecing search results together yourself.

This post touches on the following benefits: 

• Grant writing and Fundraising
• Marketing
• Event planning

Grant writing and Fundraising

At the nonprofit that I was heading, we for instance wrote and submitted close to 10 grants in the past year. This is a time consuming task and it’s a gamble, in the sense that you put in the effort with no guarantee that you will get it, but yet if you do not do it, you wouldn’t get enough funding for all the projects. ChatGPT is not going to do your job fully but it can help you write an outline for a work plan, find statistics and data to put into the application which is especially important for problem formulation. It can also help in suggesting an action plan to solve a particular problem. In addition, it can suggest upcoming grant opportunities for a particular project. 

If starting a project from scratch you could use ChatGPT to first find a problem to solve, e.g. “What are the top three challenges that the African diaspora are facing in Finland?” 

Once you have found the problem you would like to work on, you could narrow it down again with ChatGPT to get facts and statistics on the problem e.g.,”How many people are unemployed and underemployed among the African diaspora living in Finland?” (Note this prompt did not produce results as ChatGPT is still limited in the data that it has access to) but you could ask for instance “List five problems that are caused by unemployment in Finland among minority groups”. Then delve further to ask “List 5 actions that can be taken to address unemployment among the African diaspora living in Finland”. 

You can continue to ask about the budget of one or more of those actions, refine the language so that it is clear and concise, and eventually you can piece all the above together to create a work plan that can be submitted. 

What I also found handy is that you can ask ChatGPT to “List grant providers in Finland focused on economic integration of immigrants”. Note, it might help to put this prompt in Finnish as many of the grant pages are in Finnish.

Other than grant writing, there are other ways ChatGPT can help with Fundraising, from giving you ideas on Fundraising to creating Fundraising campaigns. For example, continuing from our previous prompts, one of them  by using the following prompt “We need to raise 5000€ for a one day thought leadership event on the economic integration of immigrants in Finland. Can you give me five ideas on how to do this?’’. And Voila, you get ideas for activities. But often in a nonprofit it’s not ideas that are lacking but the ability and resources to execute those ideas effectively. For that you could also use ChatGPT more specifically, for example by prompting “Create an action plan for … (describe the activity)”.

Fundraising can also be done through partners and sponsors. However it’s not always easy to identify those companies that would be best to partner with. Here ChatGPT can help you identify relevant potential partners. For example, in some of Think Africa’s projects we have been interested to know the Finnish companies that are operating in Africa and thus could be potential partners for some activities. Using ChatGPT, you can enter a prompt like “Give me a list of 10 companies or organisations that are based in Finland but also have operations in Africa”

Marketing

There is a lot that ChatGPT can help you with here. Marketing is essential for any civil society, yet it is a demanding task. Although there are more, here are three areas where it could save you effort.

Creating a marketing plan. Continuing from our previous prompts from the grant writing, you can create a marketing campaign for the project by providing the topic, the platform, and any additional details you can offer. For instance a prompt like “Create a marketing plan for a one day thought leadership event on the economic integration of economic integration of immigrants in Finland. The campaign will last two weeks, promoted on LinkedIn and has the goal of creating awareness and driving registration”

Getting hashtag ideas. Prompt: “Give five compelling hashtags for the above event”

Optimising subject headers. One of the most disappointing things is when you spend a lot of time designing e.g., a newsletter only to see very opens. Of course there are other things that affect, but the subject impacts a lot. Same goes for emails. Chat GPT can help you brainstorm on creative headers, “Give 5 examples of compelling subject headers for (describe event)”

Blog writing – Blogs are a great way to keep content on your website fresh. Old content often gives the feeling that the organisation is inactive. But it is not always easy to find time to write new content. ChatGPT can help you in that area and whatever it produces can be read for tone of voice and accuracy before it is posted. Prompts could for example “Write a 300 word blog post on the Finnish government’s efforts on the economic integration of minorities”.  Read it through for tone and accuracy before publishing.

Event planning

At Think Africa we organise over 50 events every year. Events are great for connecting and sharing information and general brand awareness, but you also need new ideas to keep them fresh and attract an audience. Not only ideas as those ideas also need execution, ChatGPT can help you in planning the event and in thinking of the logistics. With a prompt like the below, you can obtain a plan for an event: “Generate an interesting program for a one day thought leadership event on the economic integration of immigrants in Finland. Create also the event plan”. You could also ask for ideas to get volunteers for the event.

There are many other uses of ChatGPT that can save time in a nonprofit, from writing operational policies, speeches, thank you messages, fundraising request emails, volunteer or job positions, analysing meeting minutes, translations, the list goes on. If you have not had a try with it yourself, you can access it here – chat.openai.com. There is also a paid version available.

If you have used it before, what are the best tips for getting the most out of it? Feel free to get in touch on this.