As nonprofit professionals, we often wear many hats, having to fill the roles of copywriter, editor, marketer, and more. As a result, you’ve probably found yourself needing to write informative and engaging emails to connect with your community with limited time and manpower. If this sounds familiar, then we’ve got some good news.
With Open AI’s ChatGPT, nonprofits can generate high-quality emails in a fraction of the time it would usually take to write them. ChatGPT is as valuable a tool as they come, so let’s take a look at how you can leverage the power of AI to optimize your nonprofit email communication.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an advanced AI language model that processes vast amounts of information to generate responses to questions and statements entered by the user. This model was developed by Open AI and is one of the few language models to pass the Turing Test. This means that for all intents and purposes, the responses you get from ChatGPT will be almost indistinguishable from a human’s responses.
ChatGPT can create natural-sounding responses to virtually any prompt due to its reliance on deep-learning. In other words, when you enter a prompt, ChatGPT scours vast amounts of text data online (such as books, websites, articles, etc.) and learns not only about the content of that data but also how the words and phrases in it have been structured. It then takes these learnings and produces a response to your prompt in natural language.
If you’re still curious about how ChatGPT works, we hosted a webinar that goes into greater detail about ChatGPT and its various uses for nonprofits.
Because it produces human-sounding responses quickly, ChatGPT can be a huge asset for nonprofits looking to streamline email communication. Let’s take a look at how you can leverage this tool for your organization.
Why Use ChatGPT for Email Communication
Here are some reasons we think ChatGPT can be a huge help for nonprofits as they create an implement an effective email strategy:
- Saves Time: ChatGPT can draft an email with specific parameters (such as word count, tone, structure, intended recipient, etc.) in seconds whereas the same email may take much longer for a human to draft. You still have to review and edit what ChatGPT has created, but it will save you loads of time on the initial draft.
- Increases Open Rates: Everyone knows that writing effective subject lines is essential to increase email open rates. For a human, learning the art of writing subject lines might take years of trial and error. But ChatGPT’s deep learning techniques allow it to create optimized subject lines for any email.
- Helps with Donor Engagement: ChatGPT can help increase donor engagement for two reasons. Firstly, it has the capacity to write emails that are specifically designed to engage your community, incorporating best practices picked up from its deep learning. ChatGPT can also help you engage your community by allowing you to put out consistent emails now that you have an efficient way to draft them.
- Sparks Ideas to Get You Started: If you’re not sure what to say to your community in an email, ChatGPT can help with that as well. You can ask the program to generate a list of email ideas and then refine the list based on any number of factors, such as audience, theme, tone and more.
As you can see, ChatGPT is a terrific tool for nonprofit email communication. But it’s not as simple as ChatGPT doing all the work for you. In order to leverage its power effectively, you’ll need to know how to use it to generate the content you want.
How to Use ChatGPT For Email Communications
To get started, you can access ChatGPT through Open AI’s website. You’ll have to set up an account, but it’s totally free for the time being.
ChatGPT can’t generate effective emails on its own. It works by responding to prompts–in the form of questions or statements–input by the user. Not all prompts are created equal though. There are a few best practices that you should know to help you guide ChatGPT into creating the content that you want.
Have the End Result In Mind
When writing a prompt, think about exactly what you want ChatGPT to generate. The more specific you can be, the better. For example, “write a 100-word fundraising appeal email for high-value corporate donors” is a much better prompt than “write a fundraising appeal.”
Detail Tone, Style, Word Count, and Structure
One of the benefits of ChatGPT is that it can efficiently follow specific directives in your prompt that may be difficult for a human to achieve, as demonstrated here:
Use Follow Up Prompts
ChatGPT becomes more effective at responding to your prompts the more that you interact with it. Chances are, it won’t provide the perfect response to your prompt on the first try. Follow up with additional prompts to refine the content until you end up with exactly what you want. We’ll show an example of this in the next section.
Use a Human For Review
Even though ChatGPT can create natural-sounding emails, you should still review everything that it generates before sending it out to your community. You may need to correct a couple mistakes or just add a human touch to the language.
For more best practices and examples, take a look at our instructional guide for prompting ChatGPT.
Ways to Use ChatGPT for Email Communications
When it comes to ChatGPT assisting nonprofits with email communication, the possibilities are endless. We’ve put together this list of five common email use cases to scratch the surface on illustrating some of these possibilities.
1. Content or Outline
When asking ChatGPT to generate an outline, it helps to direct the structure. In this example, we asked it to use bullet points to create the outline. Now, if we are good with the outline, we can run with it ourselves or prompt ChatGPT to use it to create an email.
Here, we’ve used a follow-up prompt to direct both the word count and the tone of the email. Remember that the more specific you can be in your prompting, the less editing you will have to do after ChatGPT responds.
2. Content Repurposer
Let’s say that you have content on your website, social media, or newsletter that you would like to repurpose into an email for your supporters. ChatGPT can efficiently and quickly take this content and work it into an email. You can even specify whether you would like it to summarize, paraphrase, or directly quote the content. One thing to note is that ChatGPT does not currently support links, but you can copy and paste the content into your prompt.
3. Subject Lines
Writing subject lines that inspire your audience to open your emails can be a challenge. Luckily, ChatGPT can help you come up with optimal subject lines for any email.
ChatGPT can provide a list of potential subject lines to give you options depending on what communication style your community prefers. From this list, you can then direct ChatGPT to select one by specifying that communication style.
4. Email Communication Calendar
The frequency of your emails can be just as important as the content. Keeping a consistent schedule of emails will ensure that your community stays engaged with your organization. The best way to stay on top of this schedule is with a dedicated email communication calendar. Especially when you are promoting an event or campaign, ChatGPT can suggest when you should be sending out emails, and what each one should be about.
5. Change Tones
It’s essential that you know what communication style/tone your community prefers. Here are some different tones for you to consider when prompting ChatGPT to draft an email:
- Formal
- Conversational
- Professional
- Persuasive
- Humorous
As demonstrated here, we can have ChatGPT rewrite the email it drafted in the above example with a different tone.
Kinds of Emails to Use ChatGPT For
ChatGPT can draft an email for any purpose. Here are a handful of common use cases that will probably be familiar to you as a nonprofit professional.
General Fundraising Appeal
Donor Thank You
Volunteer Appeal
Peer-to-Peer Communication
Peer-to-peer fundraising has emerged as one of the most effective campaign strategies for nonprofits today. To learn how you can leverage the power of ChatGPT to run a peer-to-peer campaign, check out this article.
Ethics of ChatGPT Usage
As you can see from these examples, ChatGPT is a powerful tool. But as everyone knows, with great power comes great responsibility.
When using ChatGPT, it’s important to consider the ethical implications of your interactions with the AI language model. It can assist you in writing emails, but it should never replace you. Donors want to feel like they are interacting with people, not robots. So remember to always review the content you receive from ChatGPT and rework it so that it has the personal touch that your donors deserve.
Another reason why you should always have a person review emails generated by ChatGPT is that the language can reflect bias or include inappropriate language that your donors will not want to see. This is a natural consequence of ChatGPT’s deep learning model, so it’s important to note this and review all content to remove this potentially damaging language from your messaging.
Measuring Success and Improving with ChatGPT
ChatGPT isn’t just a great tool for drafting content. It can also provide high-quality analysis for a range of purposes.
You can use ChatGPT to measure the success of your emails. This includes tracking metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and donations received. By asking ChatGPT to assist with analysis, you can improve your metrics across the board.
When ChatGPT drafts an email, it takes into account mountains of data from across the web, including best practices and tons of examples of nonprofit emails. As you use it to help you draft emails, you are sure to pick up insights that will help you write effective emails in the future.
Start Writing Emails with ChatGPT Today!
Now that you know how ChatGPT can assist you with email communication, it’s time to apply what you’ve learned by getting started with the program. Remember that writing prompts takes some getting used to, so we recommend playing around with ChatGPT and trying different prompts until it feels comfortable. It truly is mindblowing what this AI tool can generate; have fun exploring it!
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