Using AI to tell your nonprofit story 

When I was a kid, my Make-A-Wish was granted, and I got to go to Hawaii. I could tell you many, many things about that trip. The exact shade of the water. The cinnamon sugar and chocolate shell treat they made us. I can still kinda do the hula I learned at a luau, and I have pictures of me with the world’s only captive wholphin. Apparently, I talked about it a lot because my husband mentioned it in his vows.

Here’s the thing about that story, though. It’s awesome, but I’m not sure it’s ever helped Make-A-Wish Oklahoma raise money to grant more kids’ wishes.

Personal stories make people care and, eventually, give, but only if you use them right. Nonprofits that lean into storytelling see donor retention climb to around 45 percent, and emails built around a real story get roughly 26 percent higher click-through rates than emails without one.

You don’t need to have lived through something as dramatic as a Make-A-Wish trip to get those results. You don’t need to be a naturally gifted writer. And you definitely don’t need AI to invent an emotional moment that never happened, because a fabricated story falls apart the second someone asks a follow-up question.

What you need is a system that helps you find the real, specific details in your organization’s actual work that matter, and then get out of the way so they can land.

Why nonprofits struggle to tell their own story

It usually comes down to three things:

Telling your story inconsistently

First, nonprofits aren’t consistent. One volunteer writes the newsletter voice one way, a board member drafts the annual report a totally different way, and the website was written by whoever was available three years ago. That’s a widespread problem, not just yours.

A recent survey of nonprofit communicators found that most organizations have a storytelling calendar, but far fewer actually have a strategy behind it. A calendar tells you when to post. A strategy tells you what you’re actually trying to say, consistently, every time.

Being afraid to brag

Second, and this one is bigger than people admit, nonprofits don’t want to brag. There’s a real, understandable instinct to keep the focus on the mission and off the organization itself.

But here’s your permission slip: brag, not about yourself, about your impact. Research on nonprofit storytelling shows people are 55 percent more likely to volunteer for an organization when they can actually see the impact of the work described to them. Donors and volunteers cannot get behind work they don’t know is happening, and quietly doing good work in a corner helps fewer people than loudly doing good work in front of the right audience.

Expecting AI to just get it

Third, most nonprofits haven’t actually trained AI on anything, which is a strange gap considering how many are already using it. The vast majority of nonprofits, around 92 percent, report using AI tools in some capacity. But most of that use is generic: someone asks ChatGPT or Claude to write a caption cold, gets back something forgettable, and concludes that AI doesn’t work for their organization.

It’s not that AI can’t help. It’s that it’s never been told who you are, what you do, or how you sound. Ask a stranger to write about your organization with zero context, and you’ll get exactly what you’d expect: nothing.

That last piece is what makes the first two so much easier to fix, because it’s not really about writing better. It’s about not being systematized.

Start with a brand messaging guide 

Before AI can help you tell your story better, you need to actually define what that story is. This is where a brand messaging guide comes in: a single document that lays out who you serve, what makes your organization different, the tone you want to communicate, and the specific language you use and avoid when talking about your work.

You can build one yourself using AI as a thinking partner rather than a ghostwriter. Tell it to act as a brand strategist, give it your website and social media as a starting point, and ask it to search for other examples of what you’ve written publicly. Then have it interview you, one question at a time, until you land on language that actually sounds like your organization, rather than a generic nonprofit template. The interview part matters more than people expect. It’s the difference between AI guessing at your voice and AI actually learning it.

We build these for clients as full brand messaging guides, and full disclosure, we use AI to help build ours, too. The tool isn’t the shortcut. The thinking is.

Creating AI context documents

Once you have a messaging guide, the next step is turning it into something AI can reference every time you ask it for help, instead of you re-explaining your voice in every single conversation. Most AI tools now let you upload documents that persist across conversations, so you’re not pasting your mission statement into the chat every time you need a caption written.

Take your finished messaging guide and ask AI to convert it into a context document, essentially a condensed reference sheet covering your voice, your audience, your key programs, and the specific phrases you do and don’t use. Upload that once, and every piece of content you generate afterward starts from the same foundation instead of starting from scratch.

Having a system for all marketing makes the human touch easier

Here’s the part that surprises people. Building a system like this doesn’t make your marketing sound less human. It makes the human parts easier to get to.

When AI already knows your voice, your programs, and your tone, you’re not spending your limited time re-explaining basics every time you need a social post or a grant description. You’re spending it on the parts that actually need a real person, the volunteer story someone told you last week, the specific detail that made a board member tear up, the exact moment that makes a donor feel like their gift did something real. The system handles the scaffolding. You handle the story.

That’s actually the answer to my Hawaii problem. My trip is a great story, but on its own, it’s just my story. If Make-A-Wish Oklahoma wanted to use it to raise money, they wouldn’t just repeat the highlights I’d tell at a party. They’d connect it to something specific about their mission: the exact cost of granting one wish, the wait time a family is facing right now, the volunteer who drove three hours to make a moment happen. My story becomes fundraising the second it’s attached to a specific ask and a specific impact, not before.

How you can implement this 

Start small. Pick one document, your website copy, your last newsletter, your case for support, and run it through the brand messaging guide exercise above. You don’t need every piece of your marketing sorted before you begin. You need one clear reference point.

Once you have that, build the context document and use it the next time you need to write anything, a social caption, a thank-you email, or a program update. See if it sounds more like you than what you would have written cold. Adjust the context document as you go. It’s not a one-time project. It’s a living reference that gets more useful the more you use it.

And when you sit down to tell a story, whether it’s a client’s, a volunteer’s, or your own, don’t stop at the moment that made you cry or laugh or want to talk about it for twenty years. Ask what it’s actually doing for the organization. A great story and a great fundraising story aren’t always the same thing, but they can be, if you connect them on purpose.