There are two sides to AI – supply-side and demand-side. Supply-side is how AI will significantly impact the Charity’s stakeholder groups.
Regarding supply-side, for a Charity that is a professional membership body or professions regulator, AI will have profound impacts on the members /registrants’ future careers and therefore on their future needs from the professional membership body/regulator.
Demand-side is how the charity is directly impacted by AI. Currently available tools like Anthropic’s Claude app can already speed up reporting and improve process efficiency.
On the demand-side, how AI systems will operate in a charity comes from their training. While their training comes from the data they are exposed to. Therefore, a part of a charity’s strategy for using AI, is to start capturing more kinds of data now. This includes:
- data about funder segments and funder prospects,
- data about staff and board skills,
- data about beneficiary segments and beneficiary future needs, set against beneficiary demographics.
AI policies v AI strategy
AI policies are needed as guardrails on how the charity uses AI. The policies need to reinforce compliance with the charity’s values (be ethical, preserve confidentiality, preserve human dignity and be fair).
AI strategy is about using AI for competitive advantage. If the success of a given charity rests on how well it manages the gap between funder expectations and beneficiary expectations, then AI is an opportunity to improve that success rate.
Culture v Strategy
If culture is strategy in practice and if in future, a given charity creates a business model heavily reliant on AI (think data driven, mass customisation, AI profiling of both potential funders and potential beneficiaries), then will charity culture in such a charity largely be AI-driven? If so, then only by investing early in ethical and fair AI systems can the charity hope that its brand image and charity values will be adhered to.
Simon
Leave a Reply