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Clear review processes, appropriate training and an environmental conscience are key to the responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) in fundraising, says a new guide created by EFA member Swissfundraising.
Swissfundraising says that the guidelines are designed to enable both innovation and responsibility, ensuring fundraisers can “effectively utilise the potential of AI for fundraising without neglecting ethical, legal, or environmental aspects”.
The guide’s opening section on ethics reminds readers that AI should “serve as a tool to support people” but that important decisions must “always remain the responsibility of humans”.
The guide goes on to urges charities to “establish clear guidelines” to ensure that AI is used in an inclusive manner, and to empower staff to recognise hallucinations and bias, and to develop strategies to reduce them.
It also advises that all content created by AI “should be reviewed for accuracy and compliance with the principles of fairness and diversity” before being used internally or externally. Staff training and a “clearly-defined review process” are key to making this happen, it says.
Legal and green issues
In addition, the guide urges fundraisers to be mindful of copyright and data protection rules, both in terms of materials uploaded to AI models, and the content produced by them, and tells the sector to remember the environmental impact of AI and prioritise tools which are energy-efficient or powered by renewable energy. The guide says:
“The benefits of using AI should always be weighed against the resource consumption.”
While the five-page guideline document is relatively high-level, Swissfundraising points out that charities can choose to adopt other, more detailed frameworks to guide in their use of AI.
The working group which created the guidelines included two members of the Swissfundraising board – Christine Bill and Oliver Graz – as well as its director Roger Tinner.
Picture by ThisIsEngineering via Pexels
