AI Readiness and Adoption in the Nonprofit Sector in 2024

In March 2024, GivingTuesday’s Generosity AI Working Group launched the AI Readiness Survey to better understand the current capacity for and utilisation of artificial intelligence (AI) and other new emerging technologies within the social sector. This research is essential to ensuring nonprofit organisations are not left behind in the rapid landscape of AI development. Questions were asked to gather insight on how comfortable organisations are with AI, how people working in the sector currently use and envision utilizing AI in the future, and what barriers may prevent nonprofits from adopting AI technologies.

A foundational piece of the research was to better define what “AI readiness” means by measuring who is using it, and how, and then looking at other organisation characteristics that would be associated with readily using AI. Why? So that GivingTuesday can develop some shared understanding and language to support a more coordinated and collaborative approach to how AI tools are being built, disseminated, discussed, and safeguarded.

The aim is for this research to not just help nonprofits utilize AI, but to use it well. 

Key takeaways:

• Organisational capacity is not a good predictor of AI readiness. Instead, the best predictor of AI readiness was the size when an organisation hires its first technical or Monitoring Evaluation, Research, and Learning (MERL) person, which tends to be at around 15 staff. In short, GivingTuesday define organisational capacity as the ability to absorb funds and manage large projects. (Read about this definition in more detail in Organizational capacity and AI readiness). We measured both organisational capacity and a variety of specific technical milestones more directly related to AI readiness, and the two were not very related.
• Adoption: Using the survey responses, GivingTuesday clustered organisations into three groups based on their relationship to AI: AI consumers, AI skeptics, and Late AI Adopters. These clusters will be helpful to anyone who wants to understand how the adoption journey necessarily differs for different types of organisations. Smaller organisations with 15 staff or less identified the “lack of knowledge and training about AI” as their number one barrier to adoption.
• Skepticism remains high: 68% of people have already tried AI in their work, yet skepticism about AI’s data-protection and bias remains high, even among those using it. Levels of caution about AI differ around the world. The Global South seems to be less concerned with privacy and model bias than the Global North. And those with a more technical background tend to be more wary of AI risks than other organisational personnel in general.
• Tool opportunities: Looking at the gap between what people are doing and what they say they’d like to do, the biggest unmet AI need is a tool for automatically organising data.

You can read the full report here: AI Readiness and Adoption in the Nonprofit Sector in 2024