How to use ChatGPT and AI for your nonprofit’s digital marketing

Mar 11

What is ChatGPT?

By now you’ve probably heard of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence tool built on an LLM (large language model) that gives you the ability to ask it seemingly any question and it will give you the answer in written form. Think about it like Google Search on steroids. And it’s important to understand how these platforms work. They are essentially scraping the internet and condensing the highest ranked content into well-written responses. So please understand, the content that ChatGPT is giving you is not original. It’s borrowed from other sources, and arranged in well-formed posts.

I’m not here to debate to the ethics of a tool like this. I’ll save that for another post, but for the sake of this post, I’d like to give you 5 ideas on how to use this tool to help you be more efficient and effective in growing the reach of your organization through ChatGPT and other AI (artificial intelligence) tools.

ChatGPT and AI Best Practices

Prompts Are King

Your experience with ChatGPT is only going to be as good as the prompts that you feed it. While it’s an easy comparison to think of it as a much smarter Google Search, you must learn to use it differently than Google Search. For example, the more specific the inputs for ChatGPT, the better your results. On Google you may search for “digital marketing tips to reach donors for nonprofits” and get a list of links that could lead you to helpful content. The problem with this is that it takes time to wade through that content to find what you’re looking for. While you can input the same thing into ChatGPT and still get more well formed thoughts, you can be even more specific, and get better results. Instead you could input into ChatGPT, “Give me 10 ways to reach new donors through digital marketing for my nonprofit” and you’ll receive a well-written list of 10 specific ways to reach new donors through digital marketing.

Ideas > Content

ChatGPT and other AI tools are amazing, but it is still early days for this technology. It makes mistakes. Also, please understand that it will write summaries and blog posts for you, but I would highly recommend not just copy and pasting this content. For a couple reasons:

It’s technically not original content. It’s borrowed from other sources. This is where it gets sticky with the ethics of these tools, and it’s yet to be seen how they’ll be citing sources in the future.
Google’s search algorithms are prioritizing “people-first” content, meaning that if it’s easily detectable that the content is written by AI only to game the SEO rankings, then it could be flagged.

For these reasons I recommend using these tools to generate ideas instead of actual long-form content, especially if that content is going to be used publicly on your website. See some ideas for prompts below that you could use to grow your digital marketing using ChatGPT.

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5 Prompt Ideas For ChatGPT For Your Nonprofit’s Digital Marketing

These are just some ideas of prompts you could input into ChatGPT for your nonprofit’s digital marketing:

Give me a story outline for a video highlighting a mentor and student for my nonprofit
Give me 10 ways to reach new donors through digital marketing for my nonprofit
Give me 10 ideas for fun posts for my youth mentorship nonprofit's facebook page
What are the essential ingredients of an effective email newsletter for my nonprofit?
Give me 10 content ideas for digital marketing for my youth mentorship nonprofit

And this is just using ChatGPT in terms of your digital marketing. The possibilities are endless when it comes to developing tools that could be helpful for your staff, volunteers, and program participants. See this amazing example here. I’m sure you could come up with even more prompts that would do some great things for your organization.