Generative AI: Opportunities for charities

Published: January 2025

Generative AI tools can help users complete everyday tasks more efficiently, freeing up valuable time to focus on work that requires human expertise and input. These tools also present opportunities to enhance engagement with stakeholders and communities – for medical research charities this includes the patients and the public, and supporters. While generative AI tools are still relatively new, the field is developing rapidly, revealing new use cases. This briefing note is a summary of current potential generative AI uses by charities, but it is by no means an exhaustive list.

Possible everyday uses of generative AI include drafting emails, creating summaries of meetings and documents, taking meeting minutes, generating agendas, brainstorming ideas, refining text to improve the flow, spelling and grammar, and suggesting the structure and sub-headings for a report on a specified topic.

Generative AI tools can create videos, images, music and even podcasts based on a text description, which can then be used in reports, presentations and other organisational communications. They can also be used to generate content for marketing and social media, such as first drafts of posts, blogs and articles.

Generative AI-powered chatbots can be trained on bespoke data sets to provide information on a specific topic, and can break down complex information such medical research results into language that is accessible to the general public. This could increase the capacity of charity helplines, enabling them to support more individuals or answering regular queries to free up staff time for more complex cases. Generative AI tools also have the potential to assist with drafting patient literature, research study information sheets and lay summaries for research.

Generative AI can be used to generate personalised communications for specific groups. This could be used with donors to provide stats and examples that may particularly resonate with them and increase engagement. It can also be used to turn case studies into content such as a video or social media post promoting a cause or showcasing impact to share with supporters.

Generative AI can be used to assist processes such as drafting job descriptions, generating ideas for interview questions and in some cases, candidate screening following application provided UK GDPR is adhered to.

Generative AI can rapidly process and analyse large amounts of information, helping users identify trends and patterns in datasets. This could be applied to tasks such as supporter management. It can also give suggestions of code that could perform tasks outlined in natural language by the user.

Further information and resources