Last updated November 5, 2026.
ChatGPT kicked off the generative AI boom with its public launch in 2022. But what is it, and how can it potentially help you and your nonprofit?
What Is ChatGPT?Powered by generative artificial intelligence, ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) that can respond to questions and commands with a stunning degree of complexity and humanlike responses, drawing information from large data sources as well as from its interactions with users themselves. In some ways, it feels like a hyperintelligent version of those chatbots that would pop up and help you with your hotel reservations online.
You can use ChatGPT to save time, generate insights, and boost day-to-day productivity at your organization. We'll go over some "prompting" tips you can use, as well as some ways that ChatGPT can help nonprofits' everyday needs. We'll also cover a few limitations to be aware of when using this technology.
Read more: How to Create a Generative AI Use Policy
How Can I Use ChatGPT at My Nonprofit?
Operations
Try using ChatGPT to sidestep some of the more monotonous tasks at your organization, leaving you to simply fine-tune the raw material it provides. You could ask it to generate a report based on impact numbers, create a timeline for your next project, or draft a standard memo on office policies.
Fundraising
ChatGPT can be used to help you generate copy for various stages of the fundraising process, including social media posts, grant proposals, email campaigns, and blog posts. Simply feed it the source material it needs, including the type of copy you want, the name of your organization, and any information it might not easily glean from the Internet.
ChatGPT will also remember and learn from the earlier parts of your conversation. You can provide it with as much context as you feel is necessary to get an accurate and complete response. You can also give feedback by using the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons or by giving corrections in subsequent prompts.
Beyond creating copy for your fundraising materials, you can use ChatGPT to make suggestions and provide ideas across your strategy creation. You could ask it to suggest donation tiers, identify grants you're eligible for, or even come up with a few ideas for your next fundraising event.
Read more: Should You Use AI in Your Grantseeking?
Volunteer Management
The logistics, recruitment process, and scheduling involved in volunteer management can be overwhelming, especially if your organization relies on volunteers for its day-to-day needs. You can use ChatGPT to write recruitment materials, role descriptions, and contracts, as well as schedule templates, training guides, and onboarding materials.
How Can I Write Better Prompts for ChatGPT?
To get the most out of ChatGPT and other LLM-powered chatbots, you'll go through some trial and error in order to develop the best prompts. Prompts will generally fit into these categories:
- Sentences or questions
- Code snippets or commands
- Any combination of text or code
- Images and other files
Although you can use ChatGPT to write code, we won't be focusing on that in this post. That said, here are a few best practices to get useful, relevant responses from ChatGPT.
Be Detailed and Specific
The GPT-6 and 6.1 models let you use up to 128,000 tokens in a conversation. The Token Tally words-to-tokens converter estimates that to be about 96,000 words, so there's lots of room for details in your prompts.
If you're asking ChatGPT for social media caption ideas, for example, tell it which platform you're using and give as much detail as you can about the purpose of the post, any images you'll be including, and the campaign the post will be a part of. This will help you to get ideas that are as closely aligned as possible with your needs, saving more time in the process of selecting and honing your responses. If it's helpful, you can copy and paste source material from other places.
Remember, ChatGPT doesn't have the nuanced industry knowledge you gain from working in your mission area each day. You should give the model any contextual information it needs to fulfill your request. Who are the people your organization works with? What background information about your organization, project, or sector does the model need in order to provide an informed response?
This contextual information often takes the form of markdown files and provides additional information that help the AI model give you the outputs that you want. For example, if you're asking for it to write a piece of copy for your website, you can provide it with a copy of your style guidelines for voice and tone. That way, the content it generates is more in line with what you're looking for.
It can also help to provide examples of what you're looking for in order to help the model present responses in the style, voice, or structure you want.
Provide Perspective or Character
You may have seen fun examples where people ask ChatGPT to respond to a prompt in the style of an excitable teenager or a film character. You can also employ this method, known as "get in character," to help the model generate a response with a certain tone or perspective.
Maybe you're enlisting ChatGPT's help to draft a structure for a grant presentation. You might begin your prompt with "you are the executive director for X organization." From here, describe the key points that the presentation should cover in as much detail as possible.
Take a Conversational Approach
If you want to fine-tune ChatGPT's responses, you can use a conversational "chain of thought" or "few shot" approach to do so. The model will "remember" previous parts of your conversation, so you don't need to include all of the information in one prompt.
So, let's say you want ChatGPT to give you a plan for a grant proposal. To use a "chain of thought" or "few shot" approach, you'll start by providing the model with all of the context it needs, then asking it to give you five bullet points that provide the outline of a grant proposal. This allows you to make changes to the bullet points before you ask the model to flesh out each of those points with a summary of the content that should be included in each. By prompting in this way, you'll improve accuracy and create an end product that is closer to completion.
Ask for Formatted Responses
As well as responding to you in a conversational manner, ChatGPT can provide your answers in a table. This is as simple as adding "present your answer in a table" to the end of your prompt, but you can also try being as specific as possible, determining the information you want in each row or column. For example, you can use ChatGPT to draft rosters for an event to ensure that key roles are always filled by a volunteer. Provide the model with the roles you need filled at each time, and the availability of your volunteers, and ask it to present the timetable in tabular format with a column for each role.
You can also try out other formats, such as a bulleted or numbered list, in order to make the model's responses more digestible and easy to use.
What Limitations Should I Know About?
Remember that ChatGPT is not itself an "expert," nor will it necessarily deliver correct answers to your questions. ChatGPT can give plausible-sounding but incorrect responses, as well as biased or inappropriate ones. It may sometimes guess at what you are asking, leading to vague or insufficient answers.
Experts and other observers have also questioned how and whether generative AI is affecting human cognition.
Read more: Should You Really Use AI to Write That First Draft? (And What to Do Instead)
Data Privacy
LLMs like ChatGPT are not necessarily designed to handle sensitive data. There is no encryption, and the OpenAI team has access to your chat logs, including any personal or sensitive information you input. Your chat logs are used to improve the language model, and OpenAI has data usage policies indicating that data will only be used to monitor for misuse and will be deleted after 30 days, unless you opt in to share it for training purposes.
However, the lack of encryption and huge repository of user conversations make ChatGPT a likely target for cyberattacks. You'll also need to provide your full name and email address to use the tool, so bear in mind that this information becomes more vulnerable to cyberattack by virtue of its presence in the OpenAI database.
In order to mitigate data privacy concerns when using ChatGPT, refrain from including any personally identifiable data in your conversations with the model. Keep your prompts generic where possible and avoid sharing any location or contact information relating to yourself, your organization, or any beneficiaries, partners, staff, or volunteers.
Legal and Regulatory Compliance
Since ChatGPT draws information from the Internet, there have been some concerns about plagiarism when using it to create social media captions, blog posts, and other published content. Everything ChatGPT provides has been drawn from the Internet, without regard for copyright regulations. It also won't cite any sources.
OpenAI has made an effort to improve the model so that it doesn't generate verbatim copies of text found online, and it encourages users to attribute information properly if using it in published context. However, there is still a relatively high risk that language taken directly from ChatGPT could be very close to someone else's work.
If you want to be sure that you won't inadvertently plagiarize, restrict your use of ChatGPT to idea generation rather than creating finished copy. This way, you ensure that everything you publish is your own work, while using ChatGPT to save you time in the process.
If you do choose to generate copy using ChatGPT — even if you edit it afterwards — consider using a plagiarism checker such as Grammarly to ensure that you aren't inadvertently stealing work from others.
Biases and Inaccuracies
ChatGPT is trained to give humanlike responses, not necessarily accurate ones. Its training includes publicly accessible data, as well as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), both of which are vulnerable to biases.
LLMs lack the media literacy that humans have. For an LLM, a comment on a random Reddit thread may carry as much weight as a fact-checked news article. Answers may be biased, misleading, or outright wrong. For this reason, ChatGPT should never be treated as a source of truth or facts, and you should always check the accuracy of any answer that it provides.
ChatGPT's training data may not include information about recent events. It may still try to answer questions relating to current events, even if the answer is not in its dataset, so you need to watch for hallucinations.
It is important to fact-check everything you share using multiple reliable information sources and to give the model prompts that do not require fact-based answers. You can also apply your own critical thinking to the answers the model gives. As always, it's recommended that you use the model as a source of ideas and not as a proxy for a copywriter, researcher, or editor.
Give It a Try Today
As is true for any tool, learning to use ChatGPT will take some time. But once you do learn, it can be a brilliant time-saving solution to help you complete basic and not-so-basic tasks at your nonprofit. By experimenting with prompts that suit your nonprofit's needs, you can boost productivity and creativity while maintaining more energy to put into pursuing your organization's mission.
Top photo: Shutterstock
