AI and big data streamline the art of charitable giving

Artificial intelligence, data analysis and digitisation are increasingly being applied to the process of charitable giving — helping philanthropists to make more informed choices about how they donate their money, and to track their real-world impact.

Digital transformation is already an “imperative” in helping philanthropic organisations “grow and scale” and serve communities in the modern world, argues Becky Ferguson, senior vice-president of philanthropy at American cloud software provider Salesforce.

She stresses that philanthropic organisations need reliable data in order to provide “a single source of truth” — vital for ensuring donors’ funds are spent on the right causes — and robust IT systems to process it. This can provide a basis for leveraging emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, she explains, to provide a “deeper insight about grantmaking portfolios” and “more strategic decision-making”, to give grantees the best chance of success. 

Improving their tech can help philanthropic organisations “radically” extend their global reach, according to Stephen Gott, charity solutions expert at the non-profit division of software company The Access Group. 

Digital transformation can help to manage and automate those processes and paper trails, helping the philanthropist see where their attention is needed

He says digital technology can be used for automating manual processes to ensure philanthropic projects meet their set milestones and, if needed, recoup improperly spent funds. He explains: “Digital transformation can help to manage and automate those processes and paper trails, helping the philanthropist see where their attention is needed, as well as potentially speeding up the vetting process.”

AI also has the potential to change the day-to-day working lives of philanthropy industry professionals. 

For example, they may now use machine learning — a type of AI that learns from large data sets and performs tasks with little human input — to identify potential crises and target resource allocation, suggests Ajaz Ahmed, founder and CEO of digital agency AKQA and founder of charitable grant-giving organisation Ajaz.org.

He believes AI’s ability to carry out predictive modelling could have helped children and families in need in UK, “prior to the issue of increasing poverty becoming as acute as it has, enabling better preparedness and response planning”.

And, for philanthropic organisations that have global offices, AI can aid communication, Ahmed adds. He explains that AI-powered natural language processing can perform translations and turn written and spoken words into audio, Braille, sign language or other accessible content formats. This can enable non-profit bodies to “reach a broader audience”. 

On the admin side, workers in philanthropic organisations can use automation to streamline their daily workloads and reduce overheads, Ahmed says — making it possible to “allocate more resources to their core missions”.

They can also ensure those resources are allocated in the most optimal way, explains Luke Freeman, executive director of tech platform Giving What We Can. For example, when delivering new programmes, non-profit bodies now collect data to give their donors more transparency, and improve all-around decision-making.

Their investment in fast payment technologies . . . is a large part of how quickly they can deliver donations directly to recipients

They can even use tech to make highly effective interventions on the ground, that would otherwise be far harder and more costly to implement. Freeman cites the non-profit organisation GiveDirectly, which allows donors to send cash to people living in the world’s poorest countries via their mobile phones. “Their investment in fast payment technologies and SMS-based registration methods is a large part of how quickly they can deliver donations directly to recipients,” he observes. “They currently have the technical capacity to reach more than 5mn people per year should they receive that level of funding.”

Individual wealthy donors, too, can benefit from philanthropic technology. May Delaney, a private client lawyer at the firm Harbottle & Lewis, explains that clients are increasingly using donor advised funds — a tax-friendly, centralised vehicle for making charitable donations. These provide online application forms and central portals for uploading funds, for choosing charitable causes, and for tracking the impact of their philanthropic activities.

“We expect to see this become even more sophisticated over the coming months and years,” says Delaney, “so that, soon, all stages of a giving journey can be managed digitally.”

Donating through technologically advanced charitable organisations also gives wealthy donors more “bespoke” reporting, which can encourage them to seek an even larger social impact through their philanthropic endeavours, argues Max Martin, global head of philanthropy at private bank Lombard Odier. 

But he admits that implementing a digital transformation strategy can be an expensive and time-consuming process for non-profit bodies, requiring “changes to the workflow, staff, and strategy . . . this costs money.”

Given many non-profit organisations typically have small budgets and a lack of in-house technical expertise, implementing a digital transformation strategy can take time, as well. In addition, within a sector more used to long paper trails, red tape and traditional ways of working, it may also feel like a culture shock for staff.

Even so, Martin believes forward-looking donors will help to fund the capacity building that needs to take place, and the research on which interventions are the most effective.

But with digital transformation unlikely to “happen overnight”, as Ferguson of Salesforce puts it, she reckons philanthropic organisations should start with a small, iterative approach where they “focus the technology in the areas that will have the greatest opportunities to scale”.

“Prepping for implementation is the perfect time to challenge existing ways of working to better align with a business’s core values, then build those into the technology,” she advises. 

Challenges aside, Ferguson sees a bright future for philanthropic technology, especially within corporations. She concludes: “We can experiment and venture into new areas of innovation, where there is an opportunity to be at the forefront of adopting new technologies that help solve the world’s biggest challenges.”