Speaking to Charity Leaders at Bayes Business School's Centre for Charity Effectiveness

We were in London this week at Bayes Business School’s Centre for Charity Effectiveness, where our founder Mohammed Khalil spoke to the MSc in Charity Marketing and Fundraising.

A room full of charity leaders

As the country’s leading postgraduate course in the field, the audience was made up of mostly charity CEOs and COOs, heads of fundraising, heads of operations and others, largely from small and medium charities. Every person there was a charity leader in their own right, so the questions were sharp and grounded in the day-to-day realities of running an organisation.

What we covered

Our session focused on three areas where data and AI are already changing how charities work.

Personalising donor communications at scale

We looked at how AI lets us reflect each donor’s individual journey and impact in the communications they receive, rather than falling back on a handful of broad segments. The heart of it is reframing the message to be about the donor and not the charity, so that supporters feel seen as people rather than treated as a source of income.

Segmenting donors for campaigns

We worked through how to segment a donor base effectively for a campaign, moving beyond crude splits to groupings that actually reflect behaviour and giving patterns. Getting segmentation right is what makes the difference between a campaign that lands and one that gets ignored.

Real-world uses of AI in the charitable sector

Rather than dwelling on the hype, we dug into practical examples of AI being put to work in charities today, and had a frank discussion about which approaches are delivering results and which are still more promise than substance.

Thank you

Thank you to the Centre for Charity Effectiveness team for the invitation, and to the cohort for such a thoughtful, engaged discussion. It is always a good sign when the questions keep coming, and this room had plenty of them.

Want to explore what personalisation, segmentation and AI could do for your charity? Get in touch to start a conversation.