Tag: AI
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AI tools can ruin a lot more than your fundraising
Last week, I talked about the threat bad use of AI tools poses for your fundraising. There’s a bigger threat. For you personally, and maybe even to human culture itself: AI saves us from the agony of thinking. And thinking — the kind that’s difficult, agonizing, with no success guaranteed — that’s where most human…
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What AI might mean for consultants and freelancers
I wrote a large (and, we hoped, financially pivotal) project for a client. There were going to be a lot of eyes on my work. We knew that. It would include uninformed board members and people from departments not normally involved in (or held accountable for) fundraising. It was going to be a challenge. Then…
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How AI could wreck the future of fundraising
I’ve written elsewhere about a moment early in my career that marked a turning point. Let me paraphrase: My mentor at the time was looking at some fundraising copy I’d written. He was clearly frustrated. Then he said the words that turned out to be the magic words: The mistake you keep making is you…
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7 things to worry about when you use AI in fundraising
You can’t really avoid AI. Even if you completely boycott it, people around you are using it. It has meaningful downsides. Here are some issues you should be aware of. None of them have anything to do specifically with fundraising. I don’t have answers for any of these things. Maybe they’re inevitable. But we should…
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Stupid AI tricks you need to stay aware of
The best AI tool is not intelligent. It’s not conscious. It doesn’t “know” anything. It mimics those things by seeing patterns and spitting them back. That’s all. It does that at incredible speed, and it finds and spits back patterns of mind-boggling complexity. But there’s no intelligence involved. That’s why AI makes bafflingly stupid mistakes.…
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4+ tips for using AI to build your fundraising
Hello, AI Tool. Please write a direct mail appeal for our organization. If you use AI like that, you will get a powerful demonstration of the old adage, Garbage in, garbage out. Which is exactly what’s happening in some parts of the fundraising world. More and more and more garbage. You don’t have to do…
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The AI slop wave and your fundraising
I once worked at a place where a good way to get ahead was to say a lot. To hold forth in meetings. To filibuster by talking nonstop. To send out long, complex emails with lots of bullet points, multi-page memos. And powerpoints. Oh, the powerpoints. With paragraphs of text. And inexplicable clip art. I…
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Revealing AI use to donors: How to make it work
AI-generated “photos” have the potential to solve a lot of problems: No privacy issues. Being able to show things you can’t get a decent photo of. It can save time and money. But are there anything downsides? Maybe, says Market Smart, at Revealing AI use can hurt nonprofit results and relationships (unless you explain why).…
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The high cost of sloppy AI use
You’ve been seeing it too, right? A coworker, a client, a salesperson sends you a document. It’s clean, typo-free, grammatically correct — a lot more so than we’re used to seeing in real life — excellently formatted… But there’s something wrong with it. Beside the eerie level of surface perfection, it can be hard to…
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The fundraising AI that would wreck fundraising
This guy was working on creating a fundraising appeal AI. The plan was to have a product where all you had to do was fill out a simple form, and it would instantly give you a powerful, sure-to-work direct mail appeal or email. Okay, that might be possible. I’ve seen startling evidence that a well-trained…