In an era where artificial intelligence (AI) is permeating every sector, journalism fundraising is no exception. Far from being a replacement for people, AI serves as a powerful co-pilot or assistant for local news organizations, helping to optimize fundraising efforts, save time and build capacity. This guide, drawing on insights from the “AI for Journalism Fundraising” webinar, provides practical tips and best practices for leveraging AI to support your crucial journalism mission.

The “AI for Journalism Funding” webinar was originally offered as part of The Lab Link, a program that offers educational and networking opportunities for alumni of the LMA Lab for Journalism Funding.

Why AI for fundraising?

AI is not just a trend; it’s a disruptive force that can revolutionize how newsrooms operate, especially concerning capacity, which is often a major challenge. Think of AI as your “super grad student” or personal assistant. It can help you find and process vast amounts of data, automate routine tasks and ultimately free up your team to focus on higher-value activities and raise more revenue. The core philosophy is “you plus AI,” ensuring that human touches remain last in every process, with all outputs subject to human review.

The art of the prompt: Crafting effective AI conversations

The foundation of successful AI utilization lies in effective prompting. Apryl Pilolli, technology director for the Knight LMA Bloom Lab, offers several key tips for crafting prompts that yield valuable results:

  • Bring AI in early and often: Integrate AI from the very beginning of any project, treating it like an internal employee you are teaching.
  • Pay for the tools: While free versions exist, paying for AI models (like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude) is highly recommended. This typically offers better control over your data and prevents it from being used to train the AI model, ensuring privacy and security.
  • Select the right model: Different models within these tools (e.g., ChatGPT-4, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Claude Opus/Sonnet) are optimized for different tasks. Choose the one that best suits your project’s complexity and needs for advanced reasoning or creativity.
  • Give detailed instructions and resources: Provide AI with as much context as possible. This can include PDF documents, photos of text, website links or any other relevant resources. The more data you provide, the smarter and more accurate the AI’s response will be. Use “project files” or “gems” to group data for ongoing, contextual conversations, especially for long-term projects like grant lifecycles.
  • Set up custom instructions: In tools like ChatGPT, you can set “custom instructions” to inform the AI about your organization, preferred writing styles (e.g., AP style), or specific grammatical preferences (like the Oxford comma). This personalizes the AI’s output from the start.
  • Cite sources and provide thinking: Always ask the AI to cite its sources and explain its reasoning. This helps verify the reliability of the information and provides insight into the AI’s thought process.
  • One step at a time: For complex tasks, break down your requests into smaller, sequential steps. This allows you to check for alignment and accuracy at each stage before moving to the next.
  • Challenge it: Don’t hesitate to ask AI to “fact-check its work” or “double-check your data.” Treat it like a junior reporter who needs their work verified. This ensures greater accuracy and refinement of results.

Practical AI Applications Across the Grant Cycle

AI can assist at every stage of the fundraising process, from identifying opportunities to reporting impact.

1. Finding funding opportunities

AI can rapidly identify potential funders that align with your journalistic mission.

  • Initial search: Start with a broad query, such as “Which philanthropic organizations in the U.S. are focused on the issue of climate change?”
  • Refinement and filtering: Progressively refine your search by asking for organizations that also fund journalism, or specifically climate change journalism, and ask for the results to be displayed in a table for clarity.
  • Accessing application information: Request direct links to funders’ application processes and examples of their recent grants to understand their priorities and past support.
  • Localization: For local news organizations, narrow your search to funders in specific regions, such as “who’s funding journalism where I am (e.g., in the Southeast)?”.
  • Pro tip: Schedule recurring searches: In ChatGPT, you can schedule these searches to run periodically (e.g., monthly or weekly). The AI will send you findings, including only the updates, ensuring you stay informed about new opportunities without constant manual checks.

2. Creating and editing grants

AI significantly streamlines the grant writing process, helping to draft and refine proposals.

  • From handwritten notes to draft: If you prefer handwritten notes, simply take a photo and upload it. AI can then generate a draft proposal with placeholders, providing structure from even initial notes and thoughts. This also works with audio notes.
  • Advanced grant crafting with NotebookLM: For more complex applications, tools like Google’s NotebookLM allow you to upload multiple source documents such as grant criteria, scoring rubrics, your organization’s mission and your project pitch.
    • Controlled inputs: This feature is crucial as it allows you to define the source material for the AI, reducing “hallucinations” and ensuring privacy.
    • Eligibility check: Ask the AI to compare your organization’s profile and proposal against the grant’s eligibility and scoring criteria. It can quickly assess your match and highlight areas for improvement.
    • Proposal refinement: Have the AI compare your draft against the funder’s scoring rubric and suggest specific edits to better align your pitch with their evaluation metrics. This can drastically cut down the time spent on manual refinement; for instance, a 10-hour application process could be reduced to 90 minutes.
    • Iterative improvement: You can continuously add new documents, such as peer feedback, to the AI’s knowledge base to further sharpen your proposal through multiple rounds.

3. Tracking and Management

AI can help manage the post-award phase, ensuring compliance and efficient operations.

  • Organize grant data: Leverage AI to compile all grant requirements, deadlines, contact information and amounts into a structured table, which can then be exported to your preferred tracking tool.
  • Accountability and reminders: Instruct the AI to set reminders (e.g., every 6 weeks) to check on progress and highlight uncompleted tasks, making it an active accountability partner.
  • Custom templates and institutional memory: Draft cover letters and update narratives using AI. You can store fundraiser-specific templates and your organization’s historical context (mission, activities) so the AI doesn’t need to be repeatedly briefed.
  • Financial tracking example: AI can organize complex financial data, such as multiple invoices from various vendors, into a clear table with details like date, payment, vendor, amount and payee, greatly assisting with budget and finance management for grant programs.
  • Pro tip: Designing microsites for reports: For advanced impact reporting, tools like LovableAI can create single-landing-page microsites. By providing simple prompts (e.g., “create a site using the colors from this URL, with rounded rectangles and quote marks”), AI can design and build a professional, animated impact report site in minutes, pulling out key data and visuals. Claude is noted for its creativity in such design projects.

4. Optimizing small donor campaigns

AI is a “powerful micro assistant” for recurring small donor campaigns, like Giving Tuesday.

  • Copy refinement: Start with existing campaign copy and ask AI to suggest edits based on “proven effective principles of email marketing and calls to action.” The AI can incorporate best practices like personalization, urgency, clarity of impact and strong calls to action.
  • Urgency and follow-up: Craft prompts to adjust language for specific deadlines (e.g., “add more urgency with a today deadline”) or to create “second chance” messages for the day after a campaign, often including suggested email subject lines.
  • Platform-specific messaging: Optimize messages for various platforms like SMS or social media (LinkedIn, Twitter/X, etc.).
  • Campaign schedule design: Ask AI to design a detailed daily schedule for your campaign, outlining tasks, channels and even suggesting roles for team members.
  • Performance analysis: You can prompt AI to analyze data from past campaigns (e.g., last year’s Giving Tuesday) to extract lessons and optimize future donation requests, including suggesting ideal donation price points.

Ethical use of AI: Transparency and human oversight

While AI offers immense benefits, ethical considerations are paramount.

  • Transparency and disclosure: Be transparent with your donors and audience about when AI has been used, for example, to summarize the reach of your reporting.
  • Data safeguards: Implement safeguards to prevent proprietary or sensitive data from being shared with or trained by AI models. Paying for AI tools often includes options to prevent your data from being used for model training.
  • Internal guidelines: Establish clear internal AI guidelines for your news organization. Resources like Poynter’s AI ethics handbook can assist in developing these policies, outlining what data should never be put into AI systems and what uses are prohibited.
  • Human touches last: Reiterate that AI is a co-pilot, not a replacement. Nothing produced by AI should go out without thorough human review. This ensures that the content remains aligned with your organization’s values and maintains audience trust.
  • AI as a critic: A powerful way to ensure personalization and avoid generic outputs is to draft your content first, then ask AI to critique your work, identify weaknesses and suggest improvements. This iterative process allows AI to sharpen your voice rather than replace it.

By embracing AI as a smart assistant and adhering to ethical best practices, local news organizations can significantly enhance their journalism fundraising efforts, creating more capacity and securing more resources to serve their communities. The key is to start experimenting, treating AI as a conversation partner you can direct, interrogate and challenge to achieve your goals.

Editor’s note: AI was used in transcribing this webinar and in drafting an initial summary of takeaways edited by the author. AI was also used in the creation of the image seen at the top of this story.