Chatbots are increasing in demand and the market size have grown 5 fold in the past five years. With COVID, the expansion of AI, and a generation that is more used to texting than talking it is easy to see why and expected to continue the growth. The different uses of chatbots has also grown from a novelty item, to customer service component to vital tools used throughout an operation. This has expanded into the nonprofit industry where chatbots are now being used to help answer questions to donors, answer questions about their goals and impact in the community, and help with onboarding and training. Chatbots can be a true tool that will enable nonprofits to do more with less.

Use Cases Of How Chatbots Can Help Nonprofits

Using AI Chatbots To Help With Donors And Impact

How Are Our Funds Being Used

Getting donations and people to invest into your nonprofit is critical to its success and growth. Whether it is a main source or supplemental source of income, being able to speak to donors is important. At OverIndexed Solutions we developed a prototype for a nonprofit that wanted a bot to speak to donors on how their funding was being used to help the people they serve. Using their data we were able to connect them to a chatbot that could answer questions that donors would ask.

Are We Showing Impact

Upon the conclusion of the prototype demonstration OIS was asked if we could develop a bot to put on their website to answer questions about their community impact and the difference that was being made. The team quickly pivoted and was able to develop a functional bot that leveraged their organizations internal reporting, newsletter information, and some existing website information to provide a resource to the community at large a way to ask about their impact. Deployment of this is expected to be on the company website.

Using Internal Chatbots To Onboard And Align Staff

AI Tools To Help Onboarding

At OverIndexed Solutions we have worked with a few nonprofits that have been interested in getting a chatbot developed to provide a resource for their new hires. In most cases it has been use as a support mechanism that a new hire can ask questions. While the nonprofit was happy to help new hire answer questions, she indicated that sometimes it takes When asked about how much time it has saved a nonprofit one group responded about '10-50 hours a month' They plan on using that time to expand their services

Chatbots For Team Alignment

One group we worked with was in a heavily regulated sector and how the team responded was of critical importance. The internal chatbot was created and attached to their Slack instance. It was able to pull data from a variety of inhouse documentation sources and provide guidelines for staff to follow when answering specific questions. The Executive Director felt the chatbot aided and sped up email responses, marketing material development, and press releases. She said, "We had the years of institutional knowledge in a variety of documents and forms and this allows us to apply that in a meaningful and practical way." She also liked that as rules and regulations changed, she just needed to update the documents and the team got the latest information.