Giving Compass' Take:

• AI can help nonprofits increase the efficiency at which they respond to problems. Crisis Text Line is an example of how AI technology turn community feedback into useful data. 

• What are the potential challenges with AI in the social sector? 

• Read about Google's new initiative: AI for Social Good. 

How can you help someone in crisis feel better? It requires deeply human intelligence and communications skills, and above all, listening. It is also one of a growing number of situations where new ways of listening—supported by artificial intelligence—can help.

Using text messages exchanged through Crisis Text Line, researchers from Stanford University led by Jure Leskovec used natural language processing, a form of artificial intelligence, to identify counseling strategies that were most helpful to people struggling with issues like eating disorders, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. Their research found, for example, that being adaptable and creative in a conversation with a person in crisis is key, as is shifting the perspective to focus on other people and on the future.

As the philanthropic sector addresses complex, entrenched problems, new techniques for data analysis are increasingly useful for listening to beneficiaries and responding to their needs. Many of these techniques fall under the umbrella of artificial intelligence—they seek to find patterns across many data points, to learn from complex sources like human language, and to find meaning amid haystacks of information.

Already, nonprofit organizations are using AI approaches to turn multiple sources of community feedback into comparable data points, to solicit information about people’s interactions with police via chatbots, and to prioritize calls for rescue efforts on social media after natural disasters.

Philanthropy’s emerging “feedback movement” is about improving nonprofits’ delivery of critical services—and it addresses a broader level of change as well.

When it comes to dealing with people in crisis, greater efficiency can be a matter of life or death. By embedding feedback, data collection, and machine learning in their process, Crisis Text Line continually adjusts to meet the goals of serving people more efficiently and effectively.

Read the full article about AI for nonprofits by Elizabeth Good Christopherson at Nonprofit Quarterly