
The benefits of Microsoft Copilot for charities and non-profits
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Enhancing Productivity: As Copilot can automate routine tasks and streamline workflows, it allows staff to be more productive. Giving them time to focus on more critical activities. Take the Fundraising team for example: with Copilot able to do tasks such as summarizing emails and writing documents, it frees up Fundraising to focus on the things that actually generate income for the charity. Such as building relationships, developing fundraising campaigns, and planning events.
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Improving Collaboration: Integrated with Microsoft Teams - and the rest of the Microsoft 365 suite - Copilot encourages seamless communication and collaboration among team members. With capabilities that allow people to schedule meetings, set reminders, summarise discussions, and work on Pages together, Copilot can have some fantastic benefits for employee collaboration. Especially useful for charities that are remote, or made up of dispersed teams.
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Analysing Data: Copilot is able to take large datasets and analyse them quickly, generating actionable insights. For charities, this means better understanding of trends within fundraising, tracking different outcomes from events, or spotting patterns from marketing activities. Gaining this information also allows charities to make better, data-driven decisions.
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Saving on Costs: Finally, by automating tasks and improving efficiency, Copilot helps reduce costs. This is particularly beneficial for non-profits operating on tight budgets, allowing them to allocate more resources to their core mission. With over 50% of charities admitting to worrying about surviving the cost of living crisis, tools like AI are crucial in cutting costs where possible.
Use cases for Microsoft Copilot in charities
Having explored some of the many benefits that Copilot can deliver to charities and non-profits, let's take a look at some of the many ways the tool can be used to help.
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Planning Fundraising Campaigns: Copilot can assist in creating compelling fundraising materials and campaigns, from generating fundraising ideas to analysing existing data from donors, and writing fundraising campaign plans.
Prompt example ➡️ "I am planning an upcoming Fundraising Campaign for my charity. Analyse data from the web to tell me the best fundraising strategies on a small budget." -
Creating and Generating Content: Your Marketing team can use Copilot to save vital time, through activities such as writing blog posts, collating information for newsletters, or generating ideas for social media content.
Prompt example ➡️ "I am a Marketing Manager at an animal charity, could you give me an idea for a blog post linked to summer?" -
Summarising Meetings and Emails: Copilot can summarise meetings for you, helping to keep people organised and informed. It can also summarise emails, which is very handy especially for long email threads.
Prompt example ➡️ In Teams, you can ask Copilot to "summarise this meeting," and in Outlook "summarise this email." -
Developing Training Programmes: Copilot can create training materials and plan training programmes, both for staff and volunteers. With charities and not-for-profit organisations needing to make the most of what they have, getting Copilot's help on this could provide valuable savings in both time and money.
Prompt example ➡️ "I am trying to improve how our staff use Microsoft PowerPoint, could you suggest a training programme that would help boost confidence using this software. Include various different methods to cater to all learning styles." -
Creating Impactful Presentations: In just a few sentences, Copilot can generate impactful presentations - and even populate the content for you. Especially useful for Leaders who have important presentations to deliver, but struggle to find the time to put together PowerPoint slides.
Prompt example ➡️ "I am the Finance Manager, and have to give our CEO an update on donations and income over the past month. Generate me a presentation including slides on Marketing Activity, Donations, Fundraising Activity, and a Numbers Summary."
How to boost adoption of Microsoft Copilot within charities and non-profit organisations
For charities to fully leverage the benefits of Copilot, it is essential that it is properly adopted by staff. Here are some strategies that can help to boost adoption of Microsoft Copilot within charity organisations:
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Understand Where You Are Today: Before embarking on any change, it's important to understand where you are today. To ensure the widespread of adoption of Microsoft Copilot, it's beneficial to gain a deeper grasp of how ready your people are to use these tools; are they already exploring AI without having an official organisation login? Are they interested in innovative new technologies that could save them time? Or, are they comfortable with how they're working without any real desire to change? All of these answers will help you ensure you land Copilot successfully.
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Offer Training And Support Programmes: Without the necessary digital skills and confidence in using tools like Copilot, they won't be adopted properly. You can mitigate this by ensuring you provide a comprehensive training and support programme. Crucially, one that caters to multiple learning styles! From self-guided learning resources to workshops and webinars, and even 1:1 support.
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Communicate the Benefits: "Communication is key" is something that we hear across many different contexts, but it's particularly important in the role of AI adoption. Some people are scared by AI, with a fear that it is going to either replace them, or become sentient and take over the world... By communicating the benefits and ensuring people that it is not being rolled out to replace them, but to aid them, you'll see far more positive feelings towards it, and therefore better returns on your investment
Microsoft Copilot within charities and non-profit organisations - Final thoughts
To sum up, Microsoft Copilot is a powerful tool that is already being utilised by thousands or organisations around the world to automate workflows, streamline processes, and generate content. As more Charities and non-profits look for innovative ways to stay ahead and innovate, they are turning to AI tools like Microsoft Copilot.
While there are some incredible benefits to be reaped and inspiring use cases for staff, it is crucial that Charitable organisations are investing properly in adoption. Without this, they will struggle to realise the full, transformative potential of Microsoft Copilot.
Get your Charity Copilot Ready!
Copilot allows you to automate routine tasks, streamline workflows, and empower your team to focus on what truly matters. But to really make the most of it, you need to ensure readiness - and land it properly. With our in-house AI expertise and Change Management experience, we can work with you to not only assess readiness, but to improve AI skills and ensure widespread adoption too. Get in touch to start your journey today.