AI for Non Profits Network: Weekly Briefing 07/07 - special issue

In The Briefing this week:

• 📝 Special edition: The Segment of One - a dispatch from a room full of charity finance leaders

• ⭐ Interesting News and Funding Calls - two deadlines inside two weeks

• 🌐 From Across the Network

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📝 The Segment of One

A dispatch from this morning’s Charity Finance Group roundtable.

I know the look a room gives when the “AI person” is introduced. Shoulders tense. Here we go - more hype about a technology that will fix everything and cost nothing.

So let me tell you the most useful thing said all day. It wasn’t mine, and it wasn’t about technology at all.

It was this: AI is a strategic question, not a technology one. The organizations getting it wrong bought a clever tool and went looking for a problem to point it at. The ones getting it right started with a problem worth solving and a number they wanted to move.

Which is a relief, honestly, because it means you don’t need to understand the technology to make a good decision about it. You need to understand your own organization.

Here’s how I’ve come to think about where AI actually earns its place in a charity. Three buckets.

1. Give your people their time back

The least glamorous bucket, and probably the most valuable. One of the charities we work with runs a grant for people going through medical treatment. Every application went out to a third-party eligibility checker, at real cost, hundreds of times a month.

We replaced it with a smart form that works out eligibility as the applicant goes, and nudges people who stall - you might still qualify; go check your insurance and come back. It paid for itself within weeks of going live. More to the point, it gave staff their time back for the work only humans should be doing.

There’s a hopeful footnote here, and it’s the one we led with in last week’s issue: Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey found that the organizations furthest along with AI are raising their spend on people at the same time — labor’s share of budget rose from 21.9% to 24.5% year over year, and a shortage of skilled people, not technology, was the most-cited barrier. (The usual caveat: that’s corporate marketing data, not nonprofit data — but the pattern is what travels.) This isn’t the redundancy story we were all braced for. It’s a capacity story.

2. Stop segmenting. Start talking to one person.

Here’s the idea I can’t stop thinking about. For decades we’ve segmented donors - bucketed them by age, gift size, zip code - because that was the best we could do. We couldn’t talk to everyone individually, so we talked to groups.

That constraint is gone. AI lets you have a genuinely relevant, one-to-one conversation at the scale of two thousand donors, or two hundred thousand. I’ve started calling it the segment of one.

Concretely: instead of blasting the same monthly email to the whole list, organizations can surface wildfire updates to the supporter who gave to wildfires, and something else to the supporter who cares about something else. Same newsletter. Different, relevant content. One social-impact charity we work with saw a meaningful double-digit uplift in post-event giving simply by following up with a message tuned to what each attendee actually engaged with - instead of a generic “thanks for coming.”

But let me be honest: this is not a silver bullet. We are all drowning in email, and the answer is emphatically not to send more. The whole point of the segment of one is relevance, not frequency. Done badly, personalization is just noise with your name on it. We’re keen to explore this concept more with non-profit orgs, so drop us an email on hello@aifornonprofitsnetwork.org to partner up.

3. Turn what you already do into something new

The bucket that surprises people. When one org made 30 years of audience specific resources genuinely accessible through AI, they didn’t just help their audience - they ended up holding one of the richest pictures of what that audience actually need. That opened partnership and revenue conversations with other partners nationwide. A value exchange that didn’t exist the year before.

What I’d actually tell you to do

Not this: write a sweeping AI strategy the size of a phone book.

This: pick one painful, measurable process, something with a clear cost and a clear number. Run a small, low-risk experiment. See if the metric moves. If it does, do it again somewhere else.

Two things to hold onto while you do. First, it’s almost always a data problem before it’s an AI problem - most organizations don’t lack tools, they lack usable data, and that’s the real work. Second, do it with consent. The segment of one runs entirely on data people knowingly gave you. Creepy is using data someone didn’t know you had. Relevant is using what they told you. Stay firmly on the right side of that line and you keep the one thing a charity can’t afford to lose: trust.

The charities pulling ahead right now aren’t the ones spending the most, or the ones with the biggest tech teams. They’re the ones who picked one thing and started.

So - what’s the one process you’d hand to an AI tomorrow if you could? Hit reply and tell me. I read them all.

— Jak

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3) ⭐ Interesting News and Funding Calls

• OpenAI Foundation — 2026 People-First AI Fund closes July 15 at 11:59 PM PT — now under two weeks out. $50M in unrestricted grants for US 501(c)(3) standalones with $500K–$10M budgets, priority on the $1–8M band. If you’re a fit and haven’t started, this is the week - let us know, we can help!

• Free forum — “Work Smarter: How Nonprofits Are Innovating with AI,” Tuesday, July 21, 2 p.m. EDT — two weeks out. Nonprofit and foundation staff on how they vet tools, weigh environmental costs, and keep the work human-centered. All registrants get the recording and transcript. Register free.

4) 🌐 From Across the Network

Have an event, case study, gathering or interesting insight you would like to share with the network? Drop us a note by replying to this email.

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