Is Your Team Afraid of AI? Here’s the Fix

Dan Kershaw, executive director of the Canadian charity Furniture Bank, is an AI enthusiast. He led one of the first charity fundraising campaigns that used AI-generated images. The images depicted austere apartments with bare floors, piles of clothes for bedding, and cardboard boxes for tables. Most clients did not wish to share pictures of their homes so he used AI images to convey to donors the importance of the mission: preventing people from living with a roof over their heads but little more. 

Kershaw has implemented AI tools in various aspects of the nonprofit’s work since then, and he’s seen a common reaction among his staff.

“Some people are very curious about it,” Kershaw says. “Most people are not.”

Tim Lockie, founder of the Human Stack, a company that helps nonprofits integrate  technology, finds that most people are ambivalent. “Your skeptics who are resistant or reluctant or your users that are the most enthusiastic account for less than 10 percent of all of your users,” Lockie says. “Everybody else is in that comfortable middle.”

So that means leaders have an opportunity to encourage staff to use technology in ways that help move the nonprofit forward. Lockie, Kershaw, and other nonprofit AI adopters recommend that leaders create some parameters for use, facilitate an open environment where people can try things out, and make learning easy.

Laurie Soenen, executive director of advancement services and annual giving at the College of Charleston, who is in charge of an AI fundraiser, an avatar dubbed Alex, was initially hesitant herself. Alex emails and texts prospective donors, often sending information about events happening on campus that would be of interest to them. Prospects can opt out when Alex initially contacts them and explains that she is AI. But the key to getting more buy-in was helping staff understand how AI can make their jobs easier. She made it clear to staff that the virtual fundraiser would be interacting with prospects who hadn’t had a lot of contact with the college recently. The goal was to warm up prospects so they would be more engaged when a human gift officer came calling. 

Now that Alex has begun to hand donors over to gift officers, they are seeing that this is a tool to help warm their prospects, not to take their prospects, Soenen says. “AI cannot, in my opinion, do as good of a job as a human officer can. It can only get to a certain point, and then humans need to jump back in and manage that individual. And to secure those larger donations.” 

Set Parameters: People Want Guidance

Some nonprofit professionals resist using AI out of fear that it will take their jobs or that it will make a big mistake that will harm the organization, says Lockie. To help allay concerns, it’s important to have a framework for use that people can reference.

Staff are often reluctant to try AI because they are unsure about what they can and can’t do with it. Amy Starnes, chief innovation officer at the Best Friends Animal Society, says it is important to set parameters to help staff understand the guardrails for use. Fundraising.AI offers a framework nonprofits can use.

She recommends designating a chief contact for AI-related questions — either at an organizational level for small groups or at team levels for larger nonprofits. “There are foundations that you need to put in place first,” Starnes says.

Ensure Psychological Safety

Once there are some parameters in place, it’s important to set up an environment where staff feel comfortable using it, says Michael Kinney, vice president of donor systems and engagement at Children’s Miracle Network.

Allow people to use the technology in low-risk settings. Let them get their feet wet, and then deeper conversations can happen. 

“We can’t talk about ethics and bias and things when the majority of the people haven’t really experienced what AI is doing,” Kershaw says. “Until you’re really working with it, it’s hard to be objective about it. I’m trying to raise everybody’s literacy so we can have shared conversations.”

Nathan Chappell, founder of Fundraising.AI, describes psychological safety as having guidelines and allowing people to start small with things that are low stakes so a flub won’t harm things. Have staffers find the “highest yield but lowest risk problems to solve,” Chappell says. “They’re not trying to use AI to do the biggest, boldest things right away.” Have them look at an outdated, mundane, or routine problem that nobody likes and see how AI can solve that problem, Chappell says.

Encourage Group Experimentation and Knowledge Sharing

For Kershaw, getting staff buy-in has meant talking about how AI is part of the future. “You can’t have volunteers and staff who say, No, no, not using a computer,” Kershaw says. “But we are having conversations like this around AI.”

So to get people on board, he’s demonstrating AI use personally but also creating opportunities for staff to test out AI in no- and low-stakes situations. For example, one afternoon, everyone tried “vibe-coding” — using plain language prompts to get AI to code a program. They had the aid of Lockie of the Human Stack and the company’s free online tool, the Promptinator, which takes plain language prompts and improves them so laypeople get better results. 

In this case, the Furniture Bank staff asked Gemini to code Christmas-theme versions of classic video games. “The group of 12 people who were in the room, they did Space Invaders, Pac-Man, all of that,” Kershaw says. “Then the learning occurred. AI came back and somebody says, ‘That’s not working.’ And that created the opportunity for, ‘Is it working for you?’ If you and I were working together, I’d share my results, and we could talk about what we did.”

Events like this are often accompanied with pizza to give it a fun, party feeling. “Every organization buys pizza for something,” Kershaw says. “So I’m just saying, let’s celebrate it as we’re learning.”

“We actually do a lot of play,” Kershaw says. “When we’re learning something new, we start with, let’s play with it in a silly way. I find there’s a flywheel effect.”

Starnes, of the Best Friends Animal Society, says getting staff using the technology is the most important thing.

“Getting hands-on is probably the thing that I encourage people to do the most to understand what it can mean,” Starnes says. “You can watch all the webinars in the world. You can read all of the articles, all the news headlines that are coming out, but there really isn’t a substitute for playing with this stuff and seeing what the potential could be.” 

Furniture Bank also has a dedicated AI Guidance Slack channel where people can ask questions and share “all the crazy things” they discover they can do with AI. 

Kinney, with the Children’s Miracle Network, adds that having a shared forum where people can document how they’re using the technology is important “so that people aren’t starting back at square one in their own little silos of ‘how do I use this?’”

The Furniture Bank also will buy books and resources for the staff library on AI when staff members make recommendations. Kershaw says helping staff become comfortable using AI is imperative for it to be used successfully.

“If organizations don’t do this, it’ll never happen,” Kershaw says. “And that really worries me.”