Supporting a cause that strives to find a cure for illness, builds technology to make living easier, or provides services to those in need, is a noble mission. Whether offering monetary support or time, donors and volunteers often have a lot of questions about the goals, services, and resource allocation of the causes they choose to align with. AI is stepping in to aide companies in these areas and more.
Communication is Key
In order for a customer to feel comfortable making a donation, it’s not uncommon to want confirmation that they’re selecting a good cause. Websites aren’t always the easiest to navigate and sometimes there can be a lot of information for a customer to digest (sometimes too much), and it can make it difficult to find what they’re looking for. Perhaps, they want to donate to an organization based internationally or in a different country and the website isn’t available in their preferred language. A simple solution for cause marketers facing these challenges is implementing the use of chatbots.
Chatbots have become commonplace on websites and users often turn to them as the initial touchpoint to get their questions answered. Chatbots boast a host of benefits including:
- 24/7 availability
- Cost effective
- Communication in multiple languages
- Consistent information delivered in a timely manner
Being able to help answer customer questions 24 hours-a-day in multiple languages allows more people to understand what a specific charity is about and evaluate if the cause is a good fit for a monetary or time donation from the individual.
A lot of charities also have volunteers assist in customer service. With a well-trained chatbot, fewer volunteers or employees are needed for customer service making them available to assist in other areas. This also saves organizations money on paid customer service support. With the use of ethically sourced quality training data to prepare chatbots for any scenario, your organization provides consistent answers free of bias to all customer inquiries.
The More Research the Better
Gathering data can be time consuming and, especially for philanthropic organizations, resources can be limited. With AI, data can be collected and analyzed with greater speed and accuracy. If synthetic data is leveraged, additional datasets can be computer generated allowing for more analysis to be done, so the charity can accomplish their mission. This greatly benefits charities working on medical research as having more data brings them closer to finding a treatment or cure.
Another benefit is that multiple scenarios of a potential solution can be tested. For charities focused on health, this could be testing which version of some new medicine would be most effective. The machine learning model that was trained with the data can predict which versions have a high success rate, so when the medicine goes to testing the first samples tested are the ones the model picked. With the high accuracy that AI provides, the likelihood of finding the correct medicine early on is much more likely than if the charity had to test all versions of the medicine and based their order off of the limited data they gathered without AI assistance.
While it seems like implementing AI would only help charities, 73% of organisations reported having low to very low skills in AI, which is preventing them from implementing it. Reaching out to companies that specialize in AI and machine learning is a great place to start to ascertain everything they need to bring AI to their company.
Steptember
This month, Appen has partnered with Steptember to support life-changing research for cerebral palsy. At the end of Steptember, Appen will match all money raised by employees.
Cerebral palsy is a common physical disability that lasts the lifetime of the person affected. While there are some treatment options to help improve daily life functions, currently there is no cure. Steptember’s goal is to raise funds to help find solutions for nonverbal people with cerebral palsy (25% of all people with this are nonverbal). Another area of focus is finding new non-opioid treatment options for people dealing with chronic pain.
If you want to learn more about cerebral palsy, the Steptember organization, and how you can help, visit their website.
