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Unless you have had your head buried fairly firmly in the sand for the last couple of years, you will be very much aware of the rapid advancement of AI. In this article, we look at how small charities can start to benefit from the AI boom.
Unless you have had your head buried fairly firmly in the sand for the last couple of years, you will be very much aware of the rapid advancement of AI.
Everywhere you turn, AI seems to be dominating the news. Depending on what you read, it is either going to transform society for the better, take all our jobs, destroy the planet, or possibly do all three before lunchtime!
Whatever our feelings about the explosion of AI technologies, one thing I think most people can agree on is that AI, in some form at least, is here to stay. It is likely to affect the way we live and work in much the same way that the internet and smartphones have.
This article will leave the bigger moral, environmental and slightly terrifying dystopian discussions for another day. Instead, I want to focus on something much more practical, how small charities and non profits can use AI to improve productivity, efficiency and creativity.
The 2026 Charity Digital Skills Report found that 74% of small charities are now using AI tools in some way, but only 24% are using them actively or strategically. More than half, 55%, are not taking any specific steps to develop their use of AI.
I suspect that reflects how many of us are using AI at the moment. We are experimenting. Asking it questions. Trying different tools. Occasionally being impressed, occasionally wondering why it has confidently invented something that definitely did not happen.
For small charities, there are plenty of areas where AI can be genuinely useful.
Small teams are often working with limited time, limited budgets and limited resources, while still being expected to communicate regularly, raise funds, support beneficiaries, manage volunteers and somehow find time to update the website as well.
AI can help relieve some of that pressure.
At the same time, limited digital skills and a lack of training can make it difficult to embrace. Used badly, AI can produce inaccurate information, generic content or communications that simply do not sound like your organisation. In the worst cases, that can cause real damage to trust and reputation.
The good news is that using AI does not have to mean launching an ambitious new technology programme, hiring an AI consultant or creating a twelve month digital transformation strategy.
Used carefully, it can simply become another practical tool in the toolbox, helping a small team make better use of the time, knowledge and information it already has.
And that is where we will start.
Artificial intelligence covers a huge range of technologies, many of which we have been using for years without necessarily describing them as AI.
Recommendation systems, spam filters, voice assistants and automated customer service tools all use forms of artificial intelligence. So, despite how it sometimes feels, AI did not suddenly appear overnight.
The big change in recent years has been the rapid development of generative AI. Tools such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google’s Gemini can generate and work with text, images, documents and data using instructions written in normal, everyday language.
For a small charity, that makes AI much more accessible.
You can ask a tool to summarise a lengthy document that nobody particularly wants to read, help organise a collection of slightly chaotic notes, suggest ways to structure a report, analyse common themes in feedback or improve the clarity of something you have written.
You can even ask it to make something “sound less like it was written by AI”, which feels slightly ridiculous, but can actually be quite useful.
The important word in all of this, though, is help.
AI is most useful when it supports human judgement rather than attempting to replace it.
AI can do amazing things very fast, but is also capable of being completely wrong while sounding remarkably confident.
That is why the person using it still matters.
Let’s look at areas where AI can be effectively used within the charity sector.
This may be one of the least exciting uses of AI, but it could also be one of the most valuable.
AI can be a genuine time saver when it comes to repetitive tasks, summarising lengthy reports, taking meeting notes and producing internal documents. Not glamorous, admittedly, but neither is spending 45 minutes turning six pages of notes into three useful bullet points.
AI can help turn rough notes into a structured summary, pull actions out of meeting transcripts, rewrite an email more clearly or produce a first draft of a document.
The value here is not really about producing more. It is about creating shortcuts and reducing the amount of time spent on those slightly thankless tasks that somehow manage to fill half a day.
Used well, AI can take care of some of the admin around the work, leaving your team with more time for the work that actually needs a person.
This is probably the use of AI that most people think of first, but it is also one of the areas where things can go wrong quite quickly.
AI can be incredibly useful during the content creation process without needing to be the thing that actually writes the final content for you.
You might use it to generate ideas for an article, turn a long report into possible social media themes, help restructure a newsletter, suggest questions supporters may have about a campaign or improve a difficult first draft.
It can also help you get much more from work you have already created.
But there is an important warning here.
Your charity still needs to sound like your charity.
Publishing generic AI generated content simply because it is quick is unlikely to improve your communications. In fact, it can very easily do the opposite.
AI loves words. Lots of words. Give it half a chance and it will enthusiastically produce much more than is ever required.
Left to its own unregulated devices, it can quickly flatten your brand voice, remove much of the personality from your writing and produce what we might technically describe as AI slop.
The real value of AI in communications is not asking it to replace your voice. It is using it to help you find ideas, organise your thinking and make better use of the knowledge and content you already have.
Across the charity sector, 31% are now using AI as a thinking partner to work through decisions. Among small charities the figure is lower, at 27%. Charity Digital Skills Report
This can be genuinely useful.
You could give an AI tool the outline of a project and ask it to challenge your assumptions.
A useful prompt might be: Here is our objective, our audience, our budget and the approach we are considering. What assumptions are we making, and what questions should we answer before proceeding?
That is a much more valuable use of AI than simply asking it to “write a digital strategy”.
We have already touched on some of the risks around AI, but there are a few more warnings worth raising.
Firstly, AI can be just as confidently wrong as it is right.
It will make assumptions, fill in gaps, invent facts and occasionally wander off in a completely unexpected direction, all without the slightest hint of embarrassment.
That is manageable when you are using AI as a tool to support your work and checking what it produces. It becomes much more dangerous when those human checks start to disappear.
If you are using AI to summarise research, somebody still needs to verify the important bits. Confidence is not the same thing as accuracy, even when the answer is beautifully formatted and contains several convincing looking bullet points.
Secondly, in my experience, AI can turn into a bit of a “yes person” remarkably quickly.
Ask it whether your slightly unusual new fundraising idea is brilliant and it may enthusiastically explain why it could transform your income. Tell it five minutes later that the same idea is terrible and it may produce an equally convincing explanation of why you should abandon it immediately.
AI is often very good at following the direction you give it. That is useful, but it also means it can reinforce your existing thinking rather than genuinely challenge it.
This is particularly important when using AI as a thinking partner for strategy or decision making.
The temptation with AI is to start by asking, What can we do with it?
If you are just starting out with integrating AI a better question might be:
Where are we currently spending time on work that could be made easier?
Start small. Pick one or two low risk tasks, test whether AI genuinely improves them, agree how the output will be checked and then measure whether you have actually saved time or produced better work.
If it saves you ten minutes a week, that is useful. If it saves you three hours a week, even better. If it creates another process that somebody has to manage, check and apologise for, perhaps quietly put that one back on the shelf.
AI is unlikely to solve the capacity problems facing small charities on its own.
But used sensibly, it can remove some repetitive work, help people make better use of information and give small teams extra support in areas where time is limited.
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