AI Tools for Nonprofits: 30+ Top Picks & How to Get Started
Adapting to new trends and technologies is essential to secure long-term nonprofit success, and one of the newest developments in the nonprofit world is the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). The sudden buzz brought on by revolutionary tools like ChatGPT represents an opportunity for nonprofits to embrace new and innovative ways to connect with supporters and raise more for their missions.
For your organization to effectively tap into the power of AI, you first need to invest in the right nonprofit AI tools. In this guide, we’ll explore a range of top options and give you tips for successfully implementing these tools into your organization’s workflows. Specifically, we’ll cover:
- Understanding AI for Nonprofits
- Top AI Tools for Nonprofits
- How to Get Started With Nonprofit AI Tools
AI holds the potential to help your nonprofit build relationships and raise money like never before—if you leverage it effectively. Let’s get started!
Understanding AI for Nonprofits
Before diving into some AI tools to consider adding to your nonprofit’s tech stack, let’s quickly review the basics of nonprofit AI.
What is artificial intelligence?
Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the ability of a computer to “think” like a human—i.e., to recognize patterns in data, process information, and make recommendations. The more an AI tool is trained via machine learning technology and high-quality datasets, the “smarter” it becomes.
Despite the popularity of recently released AI tools, AI has been around for a while. For example, Google Maps relies on AI to help you navigate to your destination, social media platforms use AI to show you content that your past behavior indicates you may like, and Siri taps into AI to help answer questions and complete tasks on your smartphone.
How can AI help nonprofits?
To see how AI can help a nonprofit like yours, it’s important to understand the two main types of AI tools available to your organization, generative AI and predictive AI:
- Generative AI, which powers tools like ChatGPT, is focused on creation. It can help you generate text, images, video, and other types of original content.
- Predictive AI, which is used in solutions like DonorSearch Ai, makes predictions based on historical data and patterns. It can help you understand your donors’ giving behaviors and preferences so you can confidently design your fundraising strategy.
No matter what kind of AI you’re working with, your nonprofit can experience numerous benefits when you tap into these tools, such as:
- More successful fundraising. When you’re better equipped to identify donors and predict their behavior, your fundraising efforts will be more effective, especially when it comes to securing major gifts.
- Increased supporter engagement. Predictive AI can help you understand your supporters’ connection to your cause and determine how to engage them more deeply in your work. Generative AI can then assist you in creating targeted communications so your organization is consistently reaching its supporters in personalized ways.
- Accurate data analysis. AI can process a large amount of data quickly and accurately. Whether you want to know about your donors’ preferences, the effectiveness of your programs and services, or how efficiently your organization is operating, AI can help you analyze that information.
- Cost and time savings. AI can take over mundane tasks like data entry, giving your team more time, energy, and resources to focus on tasks that drive more value for your organization.
Some nonprofit professionals worry that AI will be difficult to weave into their existing operations or may even take over their jobs altogether. However, when you pick the right tools, implement them with care, and recognize the continued importance of the human touch in nonprofit work, you can experience all of these benefits and more!
How many nonprofits use AI?
According to a 2024 survey, 58% of nonprofits have incorporated AI into their communications strategies, and 68% use it to analyze data. Both of these rates exceed for-profit sector implementation—among business-to-consumer (B2C) brands, only 47% and 64% use AI for communications and data analysis respectively.
When societal interest in AI began to rise, it was said that AI was the future of nonprofit fundraising. But now, AI is becoming the present. So, if your nonprofit hasn’t incorporated AI into its operations yet, there is no better time to get on board!
Top AI Tools for Nonprofits
There are hundreds of AI tools for your nonprofit to choose from, each with different purposes and strengths to meet various organizational needs. To make exploring your options easier, we’ve broken our list of the best solutions into six categories.
Must-Have AI Tools for Nonprofits | Fundraising & Donor Management Tools | Content Creation & Marketing Tools |
Data Analysis Tools | Event Planning Tools | Tools for Administration & Efficiency |
Must-Have AI Tools for Nonprofits: DonorSearch Predictive & Generative AI
At DonorSearch, we’ve built on our success as the preferred, trusted prospect research platform of more than 13,000 nonprofits by developing industry-leading generative and predictive AI solutions. These cutting-edge tools help your nonprofit identify and reach out to its top prospects with the highest degree of accuracy, giving your team actionable insights for more confident fundraising.
Overview of DonorSearch’s AI Solutions
DonorSearch’s AI solutions are built by fundraisers, for fundraisers. They include:
- DonorSearch Ai: This comprehensive machine learning solution provides custom predictive modeling of prospect research data to help your nonprofit prioritize outreach to its top potential donors and create an enhanced major gift pipeline.
- Enhanced CORE: Essentially an entry-level version of DonorSearch Ai, Enhanced CORE offers point-and-click visualization and standardized predictive models to help your nonprofit get started with AI more easily.
- ProspectView Online 2 (PVO2): This prospect reporting tool uses generative AI to summarize the most important, actionable information on each potential donor you identify, helping you tailor your cultivation strategy to their preferences.
With these high-powered AI tools, your team can more successfully interact with each of your potential donors, building up to a tailored donation ask that the individual responds positively to.
Why Choose DonorSearch’s AI Tools?
When you decide to invest in DonorSearch Ai, Enhanced CORE, or PVO2, you’re getting much more than cutting-edge fundraising tools. You’re partnering with an industry-leading team that can help you tap into:
- Solutions tailored to your specific needs
- Unparalleled customer service
- Integrations with top nonprofit tools
- Free educational resources
Plus, your nonprofit can rest assured that it will not only see a return on its investment but will also have tools in its tech stack that can scale with your organization and drive more impact for your mission.
But don’t just take our word for it—check out this video where one of our clients, Blue13 Dance Company, shares what they’ve been able to achieve with DonorSearch Ai:
Fundraising & Donor Management AI Tools
Much of your team’s time likely goes toward fundraising and donor management tasks. Here are some tools to streamline your workflows in this area and free up time to focus on your donor relationships.
Grantboost
Every nonprofit professional knows that grant writing can take a lot of time and energy. Grantboost, an AI-powered grant writing tool, was designed with that pain point in mind and aims to help nonprofits more easily secure grant funding.
To use Grantboost, your organization provides information about its team, mission, and values as well as information about the grant opportunity. The Grantboost AI tool creates a customized grant proposal based on the information you’ve provided using grant writing best practices. Your nonprofit can then edit the proposal as you see fit.
Grantboost offers three different pricing plans—Grantboost Free, Grantboost Pro, and Grantboost Teams.
Handwrytten
Handwrytten was founded in 2014 to scale handwritten communications.
To use Handwrytten, type out the note you want to send to a prospect or donor (or tap into the company’s AI tool to get help with writing your message). Then, choose from a selection of cards, with the option to use your nonprofit’s stationery.
Then, Handwrytten’s custom-designed handwriting robots (yes, physical robots that hold real pens!) to handwrite the notes in a style of your choice. AI tools make sure the note looks like a real handwritten note. From there, the company mails out the notes for you.
Individual card pricing starts at $3.25, but your organization can also shop Handwrytten’s subscription plans and bulk options.
Gift Genie
Gift Genie is a new AI tool on the market that allows you to provide information about a person and then get gift ideas customized to their interests and personality that you can take a closer look at using Gift Genie’s rapid-Amazon-search feature.
For example, we typed in the following information as an experiment: “My major donor likes fishing, spending time with family, and volunteering with my environmental conservation nonprofit. They do not like sweets, but they do enjoy fine wine.” Gift Genie then suggested gifts like fishing gear and accessories, family board games, an outdoor picnic set, and personalized wine glasses.
Gift Genie is a handy tool for anyone looking to send a meaningful gift to a supporter. Currently, the tool offers five free gift brainstorms, but we expect more updates soon.
Content Creation & AI Marketing Tools
Nonprofit work is founded on strong relationships, and relationships require consistent outreach and communication. But have you ever sat down to write a donor email and struggled to find the words? Or wondered what type of image would be most appropriate to share alongside your next social media post?
Fortunately, this is where AI-powered content creation and marketing management tools come to the rescue!
ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, & Perplexity
We’ve grouped ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, and Perplexity together because these are all chatbots based on large language models (LLMs), meaning they’re tools you can have “conversations” with to help you complete a variety of tasks. For instance, you might ask one of these tools to create an outline for your next educational blog post, provide a list of icebreaker questions for a volunteer orientation meeting, or generate a piece of HTML code for the backend of your website.
Let’s take a closer look at what makes each tool unique:
- ChatGPT: ChatGPT is arguably the most popular of these chatbot tools, with more than 100 million users. The most recent version of ChatGPT, GPT-4, offers live online browsing and connects with DALL-E, another popular AI tool also owned by OpenAI, that creates images from descriptions provided by the user.
- Gemini: Formerly known as Google Bard, this tool offers similar functionality to ChatGPT. It can also browse the web but can’t create images.
- Microsoft Copilot: Originally called Bing Chat, Copilot is Microsoft Edge’s native chatbot tool. It too can access the internet, and it offers a unique feature where you can choose a conversation style for more precise results. Similar to ChatGPT, it also provides DALL-E functionality.
- Claude: Claude, created by Anthropic AI, is unique in that its AI is trained on real-time information, so it can easily respond to queries about current events and issues. It can also read up to 75,000 words at a time and quickly summarize concepts. However, it can’t create images, and reviewers find it harder to use than ChatGPT.
- Perplexity: Perplexity stands out as a chatbot that can browse the web, provide complete answers (and additional information) to user queries, and cite its sources. It can also include links to multimedia like videos and images in its answers, though it can’t generate its own images.
As you decide which LLM-based chatbot to use, consider your nonprofit’s budget and needs and how they align with each tool’s offerings.
Also note that it’s best practice to edit any responses provided by these tools, as you’ll want to ensure any content you create features your nonprofit’s voice, is based on accurate information, and aligns with your values. While these generative AI tools offer many exciting capabilities, they’re not perfect.
Grammarly
Grammarly, a popular typing assistant known for reviewing spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes in users’ writing, now offers AI capabilities. With Grammarly’s generative AI tool, you can quickly brainstorm, outline, draft, and edit written content, whether you want to shorten the writing, adjust the tone, or improve it in some other way.
One of the great things about Grammarly’s AI capabilities is that you can provide the tool with information about your tone and voice to help it generate content that is more aligned with who you are as a communicator. It can also help you quickly respond to emails.
Grammarly offers free and premium options for individuals and teams and enterprise options for organizations.
Canva
Canva is an online graphic design platform that now offers AI text-to-image functionality. You simply provide the tool with a prompt like “donors at a nonprofit gala” and Canva will generate images for you, allowing you to experiment with different styles and use its editing tools to achieve your desired final product.
Canva also offers Magic Write, an AI text generation tool that can help you get a leg up on the written side of your multimedia content.
You can take Canva’s tools for a test drive with a free trial.
Synthesia
Have you ever wanted to create a professional-looking video for your nonprofit, but you didn’t know where to start?
Enter Synthesia. This AI tool allows you to input a video script and generate natural-sounding AI voiceovers in over 120 languages which you can then turn into engaging videos. You can even add an AI avatar as a narrator in your video. Then, you simply make your edits to the video as you would in a slide deck.
Synthesia pricing starts at $22/month, but to scale the tool for your entire organization, you’ll want to talk to their team about their enterprise pricing.
Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Fill
Adobe Photoshop is now offering a powerful new feature called Generative Fill, which empowers users to add, remove, or expand content in images they’re creating in Photoshop.
To use Generative Fill, Photoshop users simply type in a text prompt and then gain access to a wide variety of options to choose from to add to their image.
You can use Generative Fill by starting a free trial or purchasing Adobe’s paid plan, which starts at $23/month.
Gling
Gling offers user-friendly video editing features for YouTube videos.
All you need to do is provide your raw recorded video file. Gling’s AI then detects unwanted silences and disfluencies, seamlessly removing them to give you time back in the editing process. You can then edit the video further and export it.
You can try Gling out with a free trial or subscribe for $15/month.
Roll
Roll is another video production AI tool. It advertises itself as a platform that lets you “create studio-quality remote videos with just your phone.”
Roll will help you in the production process by helping you correctly frame and light your videos, and then it will completely automate the editing step, saving you oodles of time. Your team can even add suggestions and notes in real-time, and you can publish your video directly from the platform.
Roll offers a free model for a one-time two-hour recording and then charges $50/month for individual users and $200/month for small teams.
Midjourney
Similar to DALL-E, Midjourney can generate images from text prompts. But how do the two platforms compare?
According to Shiksha Online, Midjourney is better for upscaling images and allows you to get more variations when you provide certain suffixes in your text prompts. However, DALL-E offers more options for editing and extending your images.
To access Midjourney, you’ll need to join its community on Discord. The platform also offers four subscription tiers based on your organization’s needs.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact recently partnered with OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT) to roll out AI capabilities on its platform. You can now use it to write tailored emails, text messages, and social media posts with ease after providing just a few keywords.
Plus, you can use Constant Contact’s automation tools to create conversion paths for individual donors and send appropriate messages on the right channels for every stage.
Constant Contact offers a lite plan ($12/month), a standard plan ($35/month), and a premium plan ($80/month).
FeedHive
FeedHive is a social media management tool that allows you to create, schedule, publish, and manage your social media content at scale.
It offers AI capabilities that help you write social media content, get suggestions to make your posts more engaging, predict your posts’ performance, and choose the best time to publish new posts. If your nonprofit frequently interacts with its supporters on popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, or LinkedIn, FeedHive can help you make sure your content is up to par.
FeedHive is $99/month for organizations like nonprofits.
LinkOut
LinkOut is the tool your nonprofit needs if you’re frequently reaching out to prospective donors or corporate partners via LinkedIn.
All you need to do is visit a LinkedIn profile, open the LinkOut tool, and provide it with some information about yourself. LinkOut will respond with a personalized cold outreach message for the person you’re hoping to connect with.
Test LinkOut with a free trial.
RespoAI
RespoAI advertises itself as a “growth-hacking tool for social media.”
While you can create posts with RespoAI, its standout feature is its ability to generate comments, retweets, and replies for you. Actively engaging with your audience and other social media users allows you to keep your cause at the forefront of your supporters’ minds and draw in additional support, but it can be a time-consuming task. RespoAI can help you get a head start.
Try RespoAI for free by adding their browser extension to Chrome.
Keywrds
If your nonprofit is interested in boosting its online visibility using search engine optimization (SEO), you know just how important it is to use the right keywords in your web content to catch the attention of your website users and search engines alike.
But selecting high-quality keywords is easier said than done. That’s why Keywrds was created.
This AI tool allows you to quickly and easily generate relevant keywords, along with their search volume and difficulty level. You can then use those keywords to generate topics for your web content.
Keywrds costs $19/month to use.
AI Tools for Data Analysis & Insights
To make real, sustainable progress toward accomplishing your nonprofit’s mission, you need data on your side to power your decision-making. Here are a few tools that can help you tap into data analysis and give you useful insights.
Google Cloud Smart Analytics
Google Cloud Smart Analytics is a data analytics platform that allows large organizations to build up their data clouds and make growth-focused decisions.
The platform offers a variety of tools backed by AI capabilities, such as BigQuery, a data warehouse, Cloud Data Fusion, which offers data integration capabilities, and Looker Studio, which allows you to create engaging reports.
As mentioned above, Google Cloud Smart Analytics is best suited to large organizations that are especially tech-savvy. If you fall into that category, you can get started using Google’s tools for free!
ChartPixel
ChartPixel‘s mission is to demystify data and analysis. Its user-friendly platform can help you easily collect, visualize, and analyze data.
All you have to do is upload your data or questionnaire. From there, ChartPixel generates a gallery of charts with AI-provided annotations and statistics that help you make sense of what you’re seeing. Plus, if your data has any gaps or conflicting entries, the tool can clean things up.
You can sign up for free on ChartPixel’s website.
Tableau
Tableau is a visual analytics platform from Salesforce. Its AI capabilities provide trustworthy and contextualized insights and natural language interpretations of your data.
You can also integrate Tableau with tools like Slack to quickly communicate the insights you’re seeing in your data so you can turn those insights into informed decisions.
Tableau’s most popular pricing model costs $75/user/month.
Flowpoint
Flowpoint is a tool you can use to boost conversions (donations, registrations, etc.) on your nonprofit’s website. The tool uses AI to detect any issues related to your website’s technical side or user experience in addition to website visitor behavior.
Flowpoint will look at the data related to your website conversions and offer tailored recommendations for improvement so you can see better results from your web presence.
Flowpoint’s pricing starts at $49/month.
AI Tools for Event Planning
Events are great opportunities for your nonprofit to get to know its supporters, build memories together, and secure support. However, they can take a lot of time and energy for your team to plan and execute. Let’s explore a few AI tools that can make event planning easier for your organization.
Spotify DJ
Spotify is a popular music streaming service and now offers an AI feature called Spotify DJ to its premium users. If your next nonprofit event needs music, consider giving it a try!
Spotify DJ recommends and plays music for you, helping you discover new genres, artists, and playlists while also keeping your favorites top of mind.
You can use Spotify DJ for free for a month with a new Spotify Premium account. After that, it’s $11/month.
Gatherly
Gatherly creates virtual event spaces, coordinates event logistics, and auto-generates agendas, all thanks to its AI. Your virtual event attendees can even “walk” around your event venue and strike up spontaneous conversations.
To design your perfect event, you can pick from a variety of venue maps. Gatherly will also provide you with a customized event landing page and attendee data.
You can subscribe to Gatherly’s starter model for $500/month, but you can also pay to use the platform per event.
Cyncrocity
Sometimes, you, as a nonprofit professional, need to attend an event to make an important connection with a prospect or partner. Cyncrocity can help you keep a pulse on events these key players attend that aren’t widely promoted.
For instance, say you use the tool to learn that a thought leader your organization looks up to will be attending a conference near your headquarters in a few weeks. You could then coordinate with that individual to meet up with them and speak about your cause!
On the Cyncrocity app, you can look through featured events, cities, organizations, and speakers to discover any connection opportunities near you.
The Cyncrocity app is fairly new, so we expect more updates to come. For now, you can use the tool for free.
Presentations.ai
Presentations.ai is another AI tool that is in its early stages but still offers powerful features for nonprofits planning and running events.
This tool allows you to create showstopping slide decks customized to your message and your organization’s brand. You can also chat with Presentation.ai’s AI-powered chatbot to get ideas and generate content for your decks.
The platform is currently in its beta stage, so you can try it out for free!
vFairs
vFairs is an event management software tool that allows you to plan virtual, hybrid, and in-person events with ease. For instance, vFairs can help you build an immersive virtual event space or even create an event app.
vFairs now offers ChatGPT capabilities within its email campaign builder and an AI writing assistant for social media posts, event landing pages, speaker bios, questions for moderated panels, polls and surveys, press releases, and more. It’s an excellent option if you need to create high-quality content ahead of a big event.
You can pay for vFairs via an annual plan or a per-event model. Contact their team for pricing.
AI Tools for Administration and Efficiency
Do you ever wish that you could streamline some of your menial tasks to focus on more important, big-picture projects at your nonprofit? Check out some AI tools that can help you with your administration and efficiency needs.
Dialogflow
Dialogflow is a Google tool that allows you to create lifelike conversation AI chatbots to use on your website and elsewhere.
A chatbot can be a great asset for a nonprofit website should any of your users have any questions about how to access your resources or take action for your cause. Plus, they’re available to help 24/7.
Diagflow flow is reportedly a user-friendly tool that doesn’t require coding. You can try it for free.
Krisp
Krisp is an AI-powered virtual meeting assistant. It allows you to cancel out background noise and echoes, and can even help change accents into attendees’ natively-understood accents. Krisp can also provide you with meeting transcripts, notes, and summaries that you can share with your team.
One of Krisp’s popular use cases is for call centers, so this may be a great tool for you if you’re considering a large-scale telefundraising campaign sometime soon!
Krisp is free for individuals and $8/month for small teams.
TurboHire
If you’re a leader at your nonprofit, you know how much time gets sunk into the hiring process. Why not get things moving more quickly by using a recruitment automation platform like TurboHire?
TurboHire allows you to source candidates from multiple channels, sift through resumes, screen applicants with AI, conduct interviews with automation, and track your applicants throughout the process. That means that you’ll find the right people for the right jobs in less time.
You can get started with TurboHire by booking a free consultation and demo.
Spoke
Spoke is an AI-powered note-taking tool for virtual meetings that works with popular meeting platforms like Zoom and Google Meet. With Spoke, you can easily capture minutes from your meetings and then quickly get transcripts and summaries.
Spoke is a great tool for internal meetings, but it can also help you train your team for more effective external meetings. You can also use it to add important information to your CRM.
Spoke is free for individuals, but you can start a free trial of its next pricing tier to access more features.
How to Get Started With Nonprofit AI Tools
As you can see, there are a variety of nonprofit AI tools for your organization to choose from, so how can you be sure that you’re selecting the right ones? Follow this basic process as you get started:
- Determine your needs and budget. What does your nonprofit need out of an AI tool, and how much can you afford to spend? Your answers to these questions will greatly affect your AI solution shopping experience. Also, secure buy-in from your board and other leaders at your nonprofit before you start considering different tools.
- Identify and evaluate your options. Start by reviewing lists like the one above or getting recommendations from trusted colleagues in the nonprofit sector. Read up on each provider’s features, pricing model, and reviews. Once you have your top picks in mind, reach out to the provider and request a demo so you can see the tool in action before committing to it.
- Commit to leverage AI responsibly. There are real risks associated with using AI improperly, so proactively mitigate issues by creating an AI policy for your entire organization to follow before implementing any tools. The Responsible AI Framework (developed by the Fundraising.AI collaborative, of which DonorSearch is a member) is a strong starting point for ensuring your nonprofit’s policy prioritizes data security, inclusiveness, accountability, and transparency.
- Implement your chosen AI tools. When you’re ready to start using an AI tool (or tools—the best nonprofit AI strategies integrate generative and predictive solutions), utilize any implementation, training, or support services your provider offers. Be sure to ask questions and familiarize yourself with each tool’s features so that you feel comfortable using them.
- Train your team to use your new solutions. Hold informational sessions for staff members on using your chosen tools (your provider may also be able to help with this!). Ensure everyone is on the same page about your AI policies and how you plan to integrate these tools into your existing workflows.
By implementing these tips, you’ll be able to not only find the right AI tool for your nonprofit but also get the most out of it from the very beginning.
Final Thoughts
AI is here to stay, and nonprofits that embrace AI tools and use them responsibly will stay ahead of the curve and see better results for their missions. Begin shopping for AI solutions for your nonprofit by using the list of recommended providers above—we may be a little biased, but we recommend starting with DonorSearch Ai, Enhanced CORE, and PVO2!
For more information on nonprofit AI, check out these resources:
- Fundraising Intelligence: Using AI to Enhance Philanthropy. Dive deeper into what fundraising intelligence is, how it works, and how it can benefit your nonprofit.
- AI Fundraising for Nonprofits: Embracing the New Frontier. Explore the benefits and use cases of fundraising artificial intelligence in more detail.
- Moves Management: How to Cultivate Donor Relationships. Discover one of the best applications of nonprofit AI tools: creating tailored donor engagement strategies.