Ideas for small and mid-size nonprofits to keep sane as January 1 looms
If you work in the world of nonprofits, do you get to enjoy the holidays? I’ve never worked internally at a small or medium size organization, but I have heard horror stories from friends that lead me to imagine the answer is almost universally “no”.
The conflation of tactics — email, in-person, grant requests, matches — seems overwhelming from the outside, which is what makes harnessing the power of automation and artificial intelligence essential.
While there are limitations to how much data can be processed by third party AI service providers, I have noted countless tasks that development staff are doing each day with virtually no donor data involved that can be offloaded.
The most obvious — digital content writing. Is AI the perfect, flowing linguist? No. But even free versions of ChatGPT and Perplexity can provide a foundation. Every nonprofit can offload some of the base level content writing to AI, with some time budgeted for cleaning and enhancing. When you’re firing on all cylinders, one more task can be that one that breaks you. Passing off this easy start to a machine can improve your efficiency on other tasks.
When it rains, it pours. And email inboxes can be a disaster in the busy season. I’m a big proponent of getting to inbox zero (although I’m rarely there). At the very least, I work to eliminate the scroll bar in Outlook each day. AI can help sort emails and craft fast responses. I’ve even found plugins that help prioritize emails based on variable criteria, like perceived time to complete the request. These nifty tools are far from perfect, but I’ve noticed they have helped me increase productivity and feel less bogged down.
Finally, I keep writing about the importance of a robust CRM. Each year, I’m amazed to find that there are nonprofits that have their donor relations management tool, email marketing tool, and membership database separated. And every Q4 I’m sure that there are development managers who are kicking themselves for not making a new CRM the focus of the past 12 months. Right now, there’s no quick fix. But my biggest advice, make 2025 the year that you tackle removing the silos and merging everything into one robust CRM.
End-of-year giving or nightmare? was originally published in Thoughts? for Jersey on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.