Courses |

Artificial intelligence

Practical AI for philanthropy professionals

Philanthropic professionals often spend too much time on repetitive tasks while sitting on rich, untapped data. In this course, you’ll learn beginner-friendly ways on how your philanthropic organization can use AI to make you move faster and think smarter.

You’ll map core AI capabilities to real grant tasks, and get prompt patterns that produce structured, reviewable outputs. You’ll learn how to connect those patterns to your data and context to avoid generic output, instead having responses tailored to your funder context. Finally, you’ll learn a guardrails-first approach to responsible AI adoption, so you know where AI fits, what to try first, and how to keep people and equity at the center.

You’ll leave with durable mental models, easy-to-replicate templates and practical checklists to set you up to become a safe, and efficient AI power user.

Learning objectives

AI capabilities and prompting

Identify core AI capabilities, match them to grantmaking tasks, and apply prompt patterns that produce structured, reviewable outputs.

Context-tailored AI outputs

Connect AI to your own data and organizational context to replace generic outputs with those that understand your unique funder context.

Safe AI usage

Understand guardrails for responsible AI adoption, including limits, evaluation, privacy, and equity considerations.

Curriculum outline

AI for philanthropy professionals basics

• Grantmaking tasks for AI
• Prompt patterns
• Live demo: Grantee dataset analysis

Data and context

• Data’s relationship with AI
• Customizing AI outputs to your organization’s context
• Live demo: simple CustomGPT

Guardrails and responsible deployment

• AI limitations
• Why AI safety is critical in philanthropy
• Best practices for safe AI usage

AI policies

• Why have an AI policy
• AI policy components
• Get started with your own AI policy

Anticipated time to complete

NTEN courses typically require about 60 minutes of video content to complete, while optional content varies by course.