Report finds AI adoption-impact gap

- The gap between adoption and impact stems from a lack of mature practices; while individual staff use AI for efficiency gains like drafting content, only a fraction of organizations have embedded AI into broader, cross-team workflows with consistent measurement and governance. - Key barriers preventing nonprofits from achieving significant impact with AI include tight budgets, a lack of in-house technical expertise, and poor data quality. Many organizations also lack formal AI policies, with only 10-24% having governance frameworks in place. - The most common applications of AI in nonprofits are for content creation, such as drafting donor emails and social media posts (62%), and marketing activities (60%). Far fewer are using it for more advanced functions like data analysis (42%) or internal automation (24%). - The benchmark study was based on a survey of 346 nonprofit organizations conducted in December 2025, with representation from fundraising, executive leadership, operations, and marketing roles. - Many nonprofits struggle to measure the return on investment of AI initiatives, as the value is often seen in mission-related outcomes and operational efficiencies rather than purely financial metrics. - While 81% of nonprofit professionals use AI individually, there is often a lack of shared workflows or organizational strategy, treating it more as a personal productivity tool than a core organizational capability. - The most popular generative AI tools among nonprofits are ChatGPT (57%), followed by Microsoft Copilot (23%) and Google Gemini (14%). - Organizations that successfully integrate AI into their fundraising strategies have reported donation increases of 20-30% through more personalized outreach and improved donor targeting.