I don’t think I can avoid this topic any longer. And I admit I have been deliberately avoiding it! Probably because I feel that I just don’t know enough about it. I was chatting with a colleague recently, though, who has written about it and she admits that she doesn’t really know it all that well either. The fact is that none of us really know Artificial Intelligence all that well, because it changes so drastically so quickly. However, it’s here and AI is impacting volunteer engagement whether we’re ready for it or not.
The key, I believe, is to control what parts of engagement it affects. But that’s easier said than done. It’s easy to say that we should embrace AI to save us administration work, but that we should keep the relationship building tasks human.
The difficulty lies in where to draw the line.
Is responding to a random question from our website considered admin work or relationship building? What if the question is about volunteering specifically? What if it’s from a volunteer? At what stage does it change from admin to relationship? When is it okay to use a chat bot to answer the question, as more and more of the larger organisations are doing?
Here’s another example. You need to send out an email to volunteers. Is it okay to have AI write that email? Or only if it’s going out to multiple people? If it’s only going out to one or two, should it be written by a person? Or is it the type of email that dictates whether AI can be used? If it’s a standard shift reminder it’s okay, but not if it’s a heads up that they still haven’t submitted their hours? No easy answers.
Right now, I suspect, most organisations are dealing with this issue on a piecemeal basis.
There don’t seem to be standard “best practices” in place for how AI is impacting volunteer engagement. Nor do I think there can be, at least until it – and people’s opinions of it – stops changing so rapidly. What might be best practice today could leave you in the dust next week.
I think probably the best practice that you should lean most heavily into – probably the only one that never changes – is to talk with the volunteers themselves. Start a general conversation and get a consensus on when they think it’s important to hear from a human. With the understanding that you may need to have that conversation again next quarter. And the quarter after that.
And the answer you get will be different depending on the volunteers and on your organisation. In an article I wrote early last year, Best Practices in Volunteerism Aren’t, I talk about how “best practices” aren’t universal. How what is brilliant for one organisation may be useless in another. Best practices for a large national charity will look very different than best practices for a small, volunteer-run local organisation. And some of what were best practices ten or fifteen years ago, aren’t best practices now.
And that leads us back to how AI is impacting volunteer engagement.
Mostly, I think, it’s stressing us out. Or maybe that’s just me! We see that there can be significant time savings, and we are always strapped for time. But we’ve all felt a little bit teed off by the struggle to get a chatbot to understand what it is we really need. Though maybe we should be getting used to that after fighting with phone trees for the last few decades. “What button do I press to talk to a human!?!”
I have no advice for you.
Other than don’t avoid it because, let’s face it, you can’t. But don’t just dive right in, either. Take the time to learn about where it can help your particular volunteer program, and where it can hurt. Because used indiscriminately it can hurt. Learning is a superpower.
There’s a brilliant newsletter I receive (thanks to a recommendation on one of Rob Jackson’s blogs) called Box of Amazing from one of the few guys who really seems to get this stuff. Rahim Hirji studies and speaks on holding onto the human in a world of AI. He’s not saying don’t use it, just use it wisely, and he has suggestions for that. And the writing is brilliant. Typical for Brits who don’t have AI do their writing for them!
AI is impacting volunteer engagement in more and more ways every day, partly as the technology develops, but mostly because of our growing acceptance of it. We need to adopt it, but we don’t need to be on the “bleeding edge” of it, either. Talk with volunteers and other stakeholders and put a lot of intentionality in the parts of it you embrace. Use AI, but stay human. And I know that it can be hard to see where to draw the line. But, who knows, that might be different tomorrow!
