Essential AI Tools for Charities
Artificial Intelligence is no longer just a buzzword—it’s a powerful, accessible set of tools that can help charities and purpose-driven organisations to work smarter.
AI has the potential to save time, reduce costs, and unlock new capacity—especially for small teams with limited resources. This guide curates some of the most useful and trusted AI tools available today, specifically chosen for their relevance to the non-profit sector.
Let’s dive in.
Fundraising & Donor Engagement
DonorSearch AI provides predictive analytics for donor identification
How it helps: Uses AI to analyse giving capacity, past behaviour, and other signals to surface high-value prospects and optimise donor outreach.
Use it for:
Prospect research
Donor segmentation
Personalised donor stewardship
Appeal AI is a content generator for nonprofit fundraising
How it helps: Automatically generates fundraising emails, social media posts, donation appeals, and web copy—designed specifically for mission-driven language.
Use it for:
Fundraising emails
Social media campaigns
Donation landing pages
Dataro is an AI-powered fundraising intelligence platform
How it helps: Predicts donor behaviour to improve retention, optimise appeals, and reduce churn—integrates with CRM systems.
Use it for:
Targeted appeals
Donor churn prediction
Monthly giving optimisation
Grantboost is an AI grant writing co-pilot
How it helps: Generates first drafts of grant proposals based on your organisation’s mission, past applications, and funder guidelines.
Use it for:
Grant applications
Reporting narratives
Customising proposals to funders
Grantable is an AI-powered grant writing assistant
How it helps: Learns from your previous applications to generate new content, adapt tone, and speed up the process of writing competitive grants.
Use it for:
Generating new proposals
Editing and refining language
Streamlining repetitive grant tasks
An all-in-one grant discovery and management platform
How it helps: Finds funding opportunities, tracks deadlines, and helps create winning proposals using AI-powered matching and insights.
Use it for:
Identifying grant funders
Compliance tracking
Grant reporting
Content & Communications
Koala.sh is an AI SEO blog writing tool
How it helps: Creates long-form, search-optimised blog content to grow your organic reach—no writing experience needed. Koala.sh is a personal favourite of the Impact Squared team.
Use it for:
Awareness blogs
SEO content
Donor education articles
Grammarly is an AI writing assistant
How it helps: Enhances clarity, grammar, tone, and conciseness in written materials—great for staff with varied writing skills.
Use it for:
Professionalising proposals & reports
Editing newsletters
Ensuring consistent tone
Canva Magic Studio is an AI-enhanced visual design platform
How it helps: Creates social media posts, posters, event materials, and presentations with AI-generated visuals, text, and layout suggestions.
Use it for:
Social graphics
Event flyers
Impact reports
Synthesia is an AI video creation tool with avatars and voiceovers
How it helps: Makes it easy to produce professional-looking videos for campaigns, updates, or training—without cameras or editors.
Use it for:
Donor thank-you videos
Staff training
Program explainers
OwlyWriter AI content generator for social media
How it helps: Suggests post ideas, writes captions, and repurposes content for different platforms.
Use it for:
Scheduling content
Writing tweets and posts
Audience engagement
Operations & Productivity
ClickUp is an AI-enabled task and project management platform
How it helps: Centralises workflows, deadlines, and team collaboration with built-in AI suggestions and automations.
Use it for:
Campaign planning
Board meeting prep
Internal collaboration
Notion AI is a collaborative workspace with integrated AI
How it helps: Writes documents, notes, and plans; summarises meetings; and organises knowledge with easy AI-powered search.
Use it for:
Staff handbooks
Team knowledge hubs
Grant planning notes
Otter.ai is an AI-powered transcription and summarisation tool
How it helps: Records and transcribes meetings, interviews, and events in real-time.
Use it for:
Board meeting minutes
Donor calls
Stakeholder interviews
Buffer is a social media scheduling and writing tool
How it helps: Suggests post times, repurposes content, and creates platform-specific variations.
Use it for:
Campaign scheduling
Cross-platform content
Maximising reach
Fireflies.ai is a meeting assistant for recording, transcribing, and summarising conversations
How it helps: Automatically captures and organises meetings, calls, and discussions across platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams. Especially helpful for charities needing accurate records of donor meetings, team planning sessions, or interviews—without manual note-taking.
Use it for:
Board and team meeting notes
Donor or partner call summaries
Stakeholder interviews and transcriptions
NotebookLM is an AI-powered research and note-taking assistant
How it helps: NotebookLM lets you upload documents (e.g. reports, strategies, grant guidelines), then ask questions and get summaries based only on your uploaded content. It’s like having a personalised research assistant trained on your materials—ideal for small teams juggling complex information.
Use it for:
Understanding long reports or funding guidelines
Drafting content from internal documents
Summarising meeting notes or evaluations
Just for fun: Here’s how we used NotebookLM to create a deep dive into Impact Squared
App Development & Automation
Bubble is a no-code app builder
How it helps: Lets you build custom donation forms, impact dashboards, volunteer portals, or mobile tools—without needing developers.
Use it for:
Impact apps
Event platforms
Volunteer sign-up tools
Replit is an online coding platform with built-in AI coding assistant
How it helps: Empowers tech-savvy teams to build automation tools or custom apps with AI help—great for innovation and digital prototyping.
Use it for:
Internal scripts
Custom chatbots
Experimenting with AI tools
Volunteer & Community Engagement
StratusLIVE is an AI-powered volunteer management system
How it helps: Matches volunteer opportunities to skills and preferences using AI for better engagement and retention.
Use it for:
Volunteer portals
Skills-based matching
Engagement tracking
VolunteerMatch is a volunteer opportunity marketplace
How it helps: Uses intelligent matching algorithms to pair volunteers with local nonprofit needs.
Use it for:
Recruiting volunteers
Promoting events
Building volunteer networks
Service Delivery & Humanitarian
Tarjimly AI is a language interpretation app for refugees and non profits
How it helps: Uses AI and a volunteer network to deliver live translations in low-resource languages—especially useful in humanitarian contexts.
Use it for:
Client services
Health or legal support
Field-based multilingual comms
Data, Insights & Decisions
Google Cloud Smart Analytics is a suite of cloud-based tools
How it helps: Helps non-profits store, analyse, and visualise program, donor, or operational data using powerful AI and dashboards.
Use it for:
Impact tracking
Fundraising performance
Program monitoring
Tableau is a data visualisation and BI platform
How it helps: Translates data into dashboards and easy-to-understand visual stories—great for sharing impact with boards or funders.
Use it for:
KPI dashboards
Donor reporting
Grant outcomes tracking
Don’t miss their non-profit offer
Sisense is an advanced analytics platform
How it helps: Customisable tools for deeper insights into donor behaviour, program data, or volunteer retention.
Use it for:
Predictive analysis
Strategic planning
Advanced reporting
Core Generative AI Tools
Chat GPT is a conversational AI assistant and writing tool
How it helps: Supports non-profits with content creation, summarising reports, brainstorming ideas, writing funding proposals, automating internal comms, and improving productivity.
Use it for:
Drafting grant proposals and appeal letters
Writing social posts, emails, reports
Brainstorming programs or campaign ideas
Claude is a conversational AI assistant—similar to ChatGPT
How it helps: Excellent at generating thoughtful, emotionally intelligent writing—especially suitable for public-facing comms, ethical policy writing, and nuanced storytelling.
Use it for:
Policy and ethics documents
Impact stories
Donor communications
Gemini is Google’s conversational AI tool integrated into Google Workspace
How it helps: Streamlines productivity across Docs, Sheets, Gmail and more—great for planning, summarising, analysing, and enhancing collaboration.
Use it for:
Summarising reports
Email drafts
Researching funding prospects
The tools listed in this guide are provided for informational purposes only. Impact Squared does not endorse, guarantee, or accept liability for the performance, security, or outcomes associated with the use of any third-party AI services mentioned.
Charities and not-for-profit organisations should exercise caution when using AI tools, particularly where personal, sensitive, or confidential data is involved. It is essential to review each tool’s privacy policy, terms of use, and data handling practices before adoption. Use of these tools is entirely at your own risk.
Always consult your data protection officer or legal advisor to ensure compliance with relevant data protection regulations, including the UK GDPR.
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