#GivingTuesday … love it or hate it, it’s right around the corner. As the big day approaches, nonprofit leaders should be looking for ways to freshen their approaches to garner more interest and donations. With this last crazy year of AI developments, it’s a good time to look at what might be worth trying out.
StrefaTECH’s upcoming articles will feature Giving Tuesday preparations to illustrate various uses of AI. For those of you in the nonprofit world, I hope there are some gems that can be helpful getting more out of Giving Tuesday. For everyone else, I hope that you find some good AI ideas and put Giving Tuesday on your radar for a great opportunity to support the causes you find most meaningful. It’s the Tuesday after Thanksgiving each year; this year, it’s Tuesday, November 28.
In today's article, we’re going to generate a social media content calendar. It’s a return to some basics of getting the most out of chatbots, one of the themes in the responses to the StrefaTECH survey.
Speaking of the survey — if you haven’t taken it, please do. Just click here!
The Approach
We’re going to take this 5-step approach to using an AI chatbot to generate a digital outreach/social media calendar. It’s followed by an example for a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit organization, the Corporate Equity & Inclusion Roundtable (CEIR).
Outline the objective.
Tell the chatbot about the organization.
State the major themes you want to highlight. These might be elements of your mission, milestones/events, and/or campaign-related (e.g., “Success Stories Saturday” or “Thankful Thursday”)1
Describe the outlets you want to include and any relevant characteristics of your audience.
Make the request for the calendar!
As with most AI chatbot interactions, the more detail you provide, the more tailored its suggestions will be!
An Example
To illustrate, we’ll generate a content calendar for CEIR following the five steps. You can use this approach with any of the AI chatbots (ChatGPT, Bing, Bard, Claude, etc.).
Want to try this for your own Giving Tuesday (or other) campaign? Follow the 5-step recipe with the content that tells AI what you need. This extensive example is for CEIR, to give you an idea of some of the longer prompts that can be effective working with AI chatbots.
This conversation is going to relate to the Corporate Equity & Inclusion Roundtable (CEIR). The goal is to create a social media content calendar for November 6 through Giving Tuesday (November 28). I'm going to give you background information in a series of inputs. Don't start doing anything until I say "GO". OK?
Why CEIR exists: The concept of the Corporate Equity & Inclusion Roundtable is to say to every part of our region – we want an ongoing commitment, not a one-time commitment but an ongoing commitment embracing what we call the Revised Rooney Rule. It says that for every job, from entry-level to the C-suite, an African-American, Hispanic, someone of color will be considered. That doesn't mean that all of a sudden, all the jobs are taken by people of color. It means that people of color are now in the mix.
We want commitments to the Hybrid Rooney Rule, which similarly states that before every contract is let, an African-American, Hispanic, someone up color will be considered.
Our philosophy is very simple: if every entity in the region takes on embracing the Revised Rooney Rule and the Hybrid Rooney Rule, over a period of years we will build wealth for people of color. If you're not working and then you begin to get a check every two weeks, that's wealth. If you have a company or create a company and the company is expanded, that's building wealth.In this social media campaign, we want to generate buzz about Giving Tuesday, including educating the audience about what Giving Tuesday is. We also want to highlight the upcoming CEIR annual conference, which is on Tuesday, November 21. It is the single main event that CEIR sponsors each year, so should be a focus of many of our posts.
In addition to featuring the annual CEIR conference, we want to highlight that in January, we will be launching a "Black Pittsburgh Satisfaction and Retention Survey." Here's a brief description of the survey: The purpose of this initiative is to collect data and insights on the attitudes of the Black working population in/from the Pittsburgh Region so that we can deepen the understanding of the region’s underrepresented population by learning why some Black/African Americans stay in the region and why others decide to leave. This should be mentioned briefly in our outreach, but not featured.
Also, the annual conference theme is "A Playbook for Success" and will highlight the CEIR Playbook, which contains strategies for achieving the goals our organization outlines. This should be highlighted in the posts that feature the conference.
The social media calendar should list topics to be featured in these outlets: email, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The audience is people who support social justice. We want to connect with our current supporters/followers but also reach others who share interest in our mission, so include hashtags in the posts that will help us to accomplish this.
We want to strike a balance between keeping us on the radar of followers and avoiding overwhelming/annoying theme with posts. Consider this in spacing the posts
Here are your instructions: Act as an expert in using social media to reach supporters of social justice nonprofit organizations. Generate a table with rows listing the dates and columns for the four target outlets. In the table, give a brief description of the post theme After the table, generate a more detailed description of each post theme Also provide recommendations for how to be most successful in this campaign. And explain your rationale for the schedule - how does it address the balance I described.
Now GO :-)
Observations on Using AI Chatbots
Let’s return to the StrefaTECH article on 10 Mistakes NOT To Make With AI and highlight a few notable ones illustrated here.
#3. Stopping after one prompt
This is a long dialogue, and actually could continue much further. It’s very helpful to get in the habit of having a back-and-forth conversation, rather than trying to formulate everything in a single prompt. The approach of telling the chatbot to wait until you say GO can be helpful, though I’ve had mixed results and periodically have to stop its generation and remind it that I haven’t said GO yet!
#6. A fixed mindset / not being open to experimentation
It’s worth trying a few approaches to get what you want. Even in preparing this article, I tried Claude, Bard, and ChatGPT; reordered the prompts; and added information as I recognized what could be helpful to getting what I want.
#7. Lack of persistence in learning how to work with the tools
The more you use these tools, the better you’ll become at using them to be helpful! I wish I could offer some great shortcuts, but beyond some advice and examples, it really does seem to be a “skill” that develops with practice, practice, and more practice.
#8. Not using GenAI as a thought partner
This exercise could have been limited to telling the chatbot what was wanted. Instead, it also asks for advice. Do this as a habit! If you’re not sure what to ask for, have AI give you recommendations for what to ask it!
#10. Not having fun and being open to learning along with the advancements
My “conversations” have become much more natural as I’ve spent more time at this. Even in this example, telling it to wait until I say GO, then chiding it when it started generating the calendar before I was done with my instructions, felt natural to me now but would have been bizarre a few months ago. Have some fun!
And speaking of fun, Jim Wrubel of Orchestra.ai publishes a weekly set of AI Outtakes each Monday. Very, very fun!
Nonprofit pals … good luck with your #GivingTuesday planning and the race to the end of the year. If you have ideas for how AI might help you, please send me a note and I’ll try to give you a leg up!
Just a thought … you can brainstorm these in a pre-planning chatbot conversation, asking for suggestions for alliterative themes for your posting schedule.