Dear diary: My first date with AI
File under: "Artificial Intelligence and me"
Dear Diary:
My first date with AI
(Later that same night: Dear Diary, I'm definitely going on a second date!)
Color me: mildly skeptical. Then I took AI out for a test drive (results shown below). Pros: AI is insanely fast. Entry-level AI costs your charity nothing. It's well-trained, too. Cons: AI writes so much better than your boss or board chair will ever do. Good luck with that.
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Prepare to be surprised (I was)....
You don't have to watch the whole thing (it goes on for almost an hour).
BUT please watch at least BITS of this eye-opening Nonprofit Storytelling "Tactical Thursdays" YouTube video ... in which the super-talented Steven Screen asks Artificial Intelligence to write a fundraising appeal at a certain grade level, to a certain word count.
At 11:57 in the video,
the prompts you'll need to launch your AI project have been completed, after an eye-opening interview of an actual nonprofit. See grainy screen-grab of those prompts below....
The prompts are submitted to AI (in this case, via Chat GPT).
At 12:04 the AI magic starts to happen ...
breathtakingly fast. Shanon Doolittle, who assists with Tactical Thursdays, starts hyperventilating: "Oh my god! Oh my god!! Oh my god!!!"
By 12:14 in the video
10 seconds later, AI has generated a competent letter. It will need a small amount of human editing.
(Secret-sauce tip: once you've been sufficiently astonished, go back to 4:37 in this YouTube video to watch Steven Screen conduct a terrific, concise interview of the charity's chief fundraiser. Steven's questions laser-focus on what an appeal letter will need. They drill into the emotional. And the questions are "granular," as he says. It's a brilliant learning moment ... for me, too. Who knew you could do a competent "intake" interview in a matter of minutes? (BTW: Your prompts will determine the quality of your AI results. So if you're not getting useful results, keep altering your prompts.)
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Here's what I needed help with. "Dear AI: Charity newsletters have a common problem...."
Headlines.
Most fundraisers don't go to journalism school (have met two exceptions in 30 years).
Fundraisers tend to under-appreciate the immense power of headlines ... when, in fact, headlines are pretty much all that matter in a donor newsletter. Headlines play a dominant role in the skimming layer of any publication, digital or print. The skimming layer is all the bigger, bolder, briefer type + photos and other art.
What doesn't matter as much? Paragraph 3 of that article you've labored over for weeks. With every paragraph, you're losing readers, eye-motion studies show. So make your case early and fast.
Can Artificial Intelligence help with the headline problem? I ran a test with ChatGPT on headlines.
This was my very first AI prompt: "Please write a headline and a subhead for a quick story about the environmentally-safe numbers attached to the heads of seals in a wild-animal hospital."
The response arrived within seconds:
Headline: "Wild-Animal Hospital Adopts Environmentally-Safe Numbering System for Seals, Ensuring their Well-being"
Subhead: "Innovative Approach Replaces Harmful Tags with Eco-Friendly Solution, Promoting Conservation Efforts and Protection of Seals"
Not bad!! That kind of sums it up! But it wasn't what I needed exactly for my target audience: compassionate donors. So I added one more sentence to my first prompt: "Be sure to thank donors for their support."
Seconds later I got this AI donor-leaning response:
Headline: "Wild-Animal Hospital Revolutionizes Seal Tagging with Environmentally-Safe Numbers, Grateful to Generous Donors"
Subhead: "Innovative Solution Promotes Conservation while Honoring Support from Dedicated Contributors"
Then I wondered, how far can you push AI, so I added one more sentence to my prompt: "Have some fun."
And this arrived:
Headline: "Seals Get Fashion-Forward Makeover with Eco-Friendly Head Tags, Donors Make it Possible!"
Subhead: "Wild-Animal Hospital Combines Style and Sustainability to Protect Seals, Thanks to Amazing Supporters"
Thanks, AI. This was just a test. Results received in under 2 minutes. Enough to get started on a human-powered rewrite....
What the actual newsletter headline looked like, as published pre-AI; written by two collaborating humans for the magnificent Marine Mammal Center:
This particular issue of the Marine Mammal print donor newsletter arrived at 23,675 mailboxes. In response: 974 gifts came back. The average gift size was US$99.58. Gross income for this newsletter mailing: $96,991, yielding a substantial profit for this fabulous mission.
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Find ye a mentor?
My chief mentors in AI right now are the Coopers, Brett and Julie; the "I'd trust them with anything" team at FundraisingWriting.com. (Subscribe to their free, intense blog.)
Brett (just recovering from his latest birthday) had this important footnote for new AI users like me ... and you:
"Tom: your prompts are good ... EXCEPT you'll get better luck if you copy and paste at least part of your donor comms piece into the prompt to have AI read and analyze it before producing the headlines and subheads and so on, based on its analysis. You can say, 'Read and analyze the following appeal letter I wrote, then write 20 good headline options using various donor-centric styles and lengths.' (Or something like that.)"
An informed opinion from a different heavy tester:
Behavioral scientist, Kevin Schulman, writing in The Agitator, had this recommendation: Maybe try Chat-GPT (which is free), just to get a feel for the controls. Then, if you want to get serious about AI helping you with your donor comms, move along to GPT 4.0. His words: "We’ve gotten dramatically better results using it."
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Fundraising Writing now has a YouTube channel called Win It In A Minute, where Julie Cooper interviews Tom Ahern ... and more! These are very short videos, each focused on a single donor-communications challenge.
Dear Reader: This is an excerpt from Tom Ahern’s e-newsletter. Did you miss crucial back issues of this how-to e-news? Immediately available! Just GO here. (And scroll down just a bit to sign up for Tom’s revenue-boosting tips and insights. In your inbox regularly. It’s free.)