Just over three years ago, before the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, no one was using artificial intelligence daily. Talking about it? Yes. Mulling where it might go? Certainly. But no one – literally, no one – was talking about using AI to write their grant reports, or to draft donor emails, or to create fundraising campaigns. All of this was but an apple in a tech giant’s eye.
But as hundreds of professionals in the fundraising space gathered at the recent Canadian Association of Gift Planners conference in Winnipeg in April, keynote speaker Nathan Chappell, chief AI officer at Virtuous, asked the room who uses AI in their work. By his estimate, 97% of attendees put their hands up. That tracks with recent research from the 2026 Nonprofit AI Adoption Report, he said. “We found out that 92% are using AI,” he said of the global survey of close to 350 organizations in the charitable and non-profit space. “But 80% are using it individually on an ad hoc basis.”
That reality – rapid adoption, but little strategy or policy – is true in Canadian non-profits, too. “While most nonprofits experiment with AI, few have developed internal policies to guide its use,” reads a January report from Imagine Canada, which found that only 10% of Canadian non-profits have formal AI policies. Not only that: “64% of nonprofits using AI have no policies and aren’t developing any.” And that, experts say, creates risk. Risk for organizations’ data security, but also for their reputations with donors.
“The current extensive charity use of AI without visible, effective governance, clear human control, and honest communication creates a risk of our own making,” an April report from the Charity Excellence Framework in the United Kingdom concludes. That risk has real consequences when it comes to trust – and charities and non-profits can only exist with trust. The Charity Excellence Framework warns that the lack of transparency is “creating a growing risk to public trust unless governance and transparency catch up.”...