Inside AI – George Irish

By George Irish

“AI can’t write like a human”

I hear that often, especially from fundraising colleagues who work in the content production cycle (crafting donor comms, writing appeals). Sometimes it’s used to justify their hesitation to start exploring AI’s potential.

I can’t say that the statement is wrong – because AI doesn’t write like a human – but I believe AI can play a transformative role in improving our fundraising processes.

We’re generally aware now that ChatGPT and other AI chatbots (like Anthropic Claude or Google Gemini) can be valuable assistants for many daily work tasks such as summarizing meeting notes, transcribing conversations, and compiling documents.

But can AI also write high-quality ‘flagship’ content for fundraising appeals?

The answer may be ‘Yes’ – with a few important cautions.

If you make a simple request to ChatGPT today to write a fundraising appeal for your charity or nonprofit, you’ll be disappointed with the results.

Here’s an example of an AI-written appeal generated from a simple prompt:

Stand with Us in the Fight for Human Rights

Dear [First Name],

Today, more than ever, people around the world are facing unimaginable injustice. From imprisoned activists and silenced voices to entire communities torn apart by violence and discrimination, human rights are under attack.

At Amnesty International, we fight every day to defend those whose voices are suppressed, ensuring no one is left behind in the struggle for freedom and dignity. But we can’t do it alone. We need supporters like you to continue this vital work.

[appeal continues …]

It’s not very impressive – generic and unconvincing.

AI chatbots like ChatGPT have significant limitations when it comes to writing effective donation appeals:

  • Lack of fundraising expertise: While AI chatbots have broad general knowledge, they lack the specific, experience-based expertise needed for effective fundraising writing.
  • Task-based approach: AI tends to approach writing as a series of steps to complete, and assembles texts piece by piece, which means it struggles with crafting larger narratives and consistent emotional tone.
  • Randomness as a substitute for creativity: AI chatbots have built-in randomness that can sometimes produce novel combinations of words and ideas, but this doesn’t often translate to meaningful creativity in a fundraising context.

As well, there’s the underlying factor that AIs don’t think at all like humans.

 

ChatGPT may appear to be thinking in words and sentences but it’s actually doing calculations with numbers. When you type something, your words are converted into numbers. The AI analyzes them to find patterns that predict what numbers should come next. These predicted numbers are then converted back into the words that you see as the response.

AI chatbots can’t truly understand fundraising concepts, but they can learn to recognize and replicate the patterns of successful fundraising writing.

How to make AI write like a fundraiser

So, how can we improve an AI’s fundraising writing skills?

One possible approach is called ‘fine-tuning’. This involves training the AI model on sample sets of both good and bad fundraising content. The model studies the samples and learns to emulate the good patterns while avoiding the bad ones.

For fundraising writing, this means the AI learns to identify effective patterns in language, such as emotional tone, storytelling techniques, and persuasive language, which it can then apply to generate compelling fundraising messages.

Fine tuning works, but it is complicated, expensive, and sometimes unpredictable. Consider the example of an AI trained to identify pictures of dogs vs. wolves. The model appeared to perform well, but researchers discovered it had learned the wrong thing – it was actually distinguishing between wilderness backgrounds (for wolves) and domestic settings (for dogs), rather than identifying the animals themselves.

This highlights a key challenge: if we use sample-based training for AI, how do we ensure it’s learning the right lessons about what makes fundraising effective? This is an active area of AI research that could lead to the development of a fundraising-specific version of ChatGPT.

An alternate approach is to provide the AI with a boost of fundraising expertise through ‘prompt tuning’.

Prompt tuning means giving the AI a detailed set of instructions and resources that increase its specific expertise and guide it to create improved outputs.

If you’ve used ChatGPT you’ve likely already done some prompt tuning, as in when you ask it a follow up request like: “Try again, but this time focus more on …”

This is where human fundraising expertise and insight come into play. Writing an effective fundraising appeal is complex and human writers rely on their own personal mix of fundraising best practices, individual experience, language mastery, and understanding of audience, messaging, and campaign priorities.

The prompt-tuning approach is to codify this fundraising know-how into a comprehensive instruction set that’s passed to the AI model, including:

  • a summary of fundraising best practices
  • a writing guide for effective fundraising storytelling and asks
  • formatting instructions for your appeal (length, structure, reading level)
  • brand and style guide for your nonprofit
  • campaign source materials (backgrounders, press releases, interview transcripts)
  • Audience insights, messaging, and learnings from past campaigns

All of this rolled together into a ‘mega-prompt’ and submitted to ChatGPT can give you surprisingly good results.

Here’s an improved example of an AI-generated fundraising appeal using prompt tuning:

Subject: Navalny’s Legacy: Join the Journey of Resilience in Russia

Dear [Name],

The world has tragically lost a beacon of hope and courage: Alexei Navalny.

Despite poisoning attempts, imprisonments, and constant threats, Navalny never wavered in his fight for a free and democratic Russia. His resilience inspired millions, and showed that one person’s determination can spark a movement. Even in his final days in a remote Arctic penal colony, his spirit remained unbroken.

But Navalny’s journey didn’t end with his tragic death. It continues through the countless Russians who, despite great personal risk, are carrying on his legacy.
Will you stand with those continuing this journey of resilience? Your support can help ensure Navalny’s vision for a free Russia lives on.

[appeal continues …]

This appeal has much-improved storytelling, empathy, and emotional connection, as well as specific campaign relevance.You can test out this out for yourself using a web app that I’ve developed to demonstrate the potential of an AI-powered appeal writer.

 

GoodWriter does the heavy-lifting of prompt-tuning and already has an instruction set of best practices and style guides built in, ready for use. All you need to do is fill out a few form fields to outline the content of your appeal, and the app will return a complete, prompt-tuned appeal text, ready to be reviewed.

A number of fundraising CRM platforms are also exploring AI-powered appeal writers:

Dataro’s AI Assist:  https://dataro.io/ai-assist

DonorPerfect Fundraiser Bot:  https://www.donorperfect.com/bot

These are still early models, but they already show real promise in their ability to craft compelling fundraising appeals.

AI’s role in fundraising will continue to grow as the technology evolves and we gain more experience in effectively combining the strengths of human and AI fundraisers.

It’s important to ensure that AI is always run under human oversight. AI-generated content is only a tool for augmenting human creativity and is not a replacement for skilled fundraisers. The human connection between fundraisers and donors will remain at the heart of effective fundraising.

George Irish is a veteran of strategy, coaching and consulting for AI-powered charity fundraising. He works with Amnesty International Canada and Greenpeace among other organizations. He writes this column exclusively for each issue of Foundation Magazine.

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