Most of what gets written about AI and nonprofits is written by someone selling an AI tool. That is worth remembering before you trust any of it, including this. But dismissing the whole subject means missing a handful of uses that are genuinely small, boring, and useful, the kind that quietly save a small team a few hours a week without changing who you are or how you work.
This is that list. It is short on purpose. It leaves out most of what gets pitched to nonprofits, because most of it is not worth your time, and some of it is worth actively avoiding.
Where it genuinely helps
The pattern across everything on this list is the same: AI produces a first draft, a person makes it real.
- First drafts of routine writing. A grant paragraph, a program description, a first pass at a social caption. Something you would otherwise stare at a blank page for twenty minutes to start. Getting a rough draft in ninety seconds and then editing it is faster than starting from nothing, as long as a person who knows the organisation reads every word before it goes out.
- Turning a messy recording into usable notes. A board meeting or a volunteer call that someone would normally have to sit through twice to write up properly. A transcript and a summary in minutes, checked by whoever attended, saves real time every week.
- A first pass at translation. If you are trying to reach French or Portuguese-speaking communities and nobody on staff is fluent, a first-draft translation reviewed by someone who actually speaks the language is far better than nothing, and far cheaper than professional translation for routine material. We build this same idea into our own sites, KoomBei's is available in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, precisely because language should not be the reason someone cannot find you.
- Sorting incoming enquiries. When messages arrive from four different channels, a first pass at flagging what is urgent versus what is a routine question saves the person doing triage from reading everything at the same priority.
- Drafting FAQ copy from real questions you have already collected. Once you have a pile of actual questions people have asked, turning them into a clear FAQ page is a good use of a first draft you then tighten yourself.
The pattern
Everything on this list is a first draft, never a final answer, and never sent out without a person who knows the organisation reading it first.
Where we would stop you
A few places where the convenience is not worth the risk, in our honest opinion:
- Anything with a beneficiary's or donor's personal details. A name, a location, a medical or financial detail typed into a consumer AI tool may leave your control in ways that are not obvious from the interface. If you do not know exactly where a tool stores what you paste into it, do not paste anything identifying a real person into it.
- Anything that speaks in your organisation's voice publicly, unchecked. A financial statement, a press response, anything with numbers in it that a funder might later ask about. These need a person's judgment attached, not just a person's copy-paste.
- Anything you could not explain if someone asked whether a person wrote it. Not because using a tool is dishonest, most people now assume some writing gets help this way, but because you should always be able to stand behind what is published under your name.
A place to start, this month
Do not try to adopt all five uses at once. Pick one, ideally the meeting notes or the enquiry sorting, since both are low-stakes and immediately measurable. Try it for a month. Keep a person editing every output. At the end of the month, decide honestly whether it saved real time or just felt modern. Keep it only if the answer is the first one.
Tools will keep changing month to month, and whatever is trending when you read this will likely be replaced by something else within a year. What does not change is that no tool replaces a real relationship with the people you serve, or the judgment of someone who actually knows your organisation. If you are weighing whether any of this belongs on your own site or in how you communicate, that is exactly the kind of question worth a real conversation rather than a guess. See how we think about the digital side of an organisation more broadly in why your NGO needs a website.