Courses |

Artificial intelligence

Use AI for smarter impact evaluation

You want to understand whether your funding is creating sustained change without needing a statistics team or hours lost to spreadsheets. This course shows you how to safely put AI to work as a sense‑making assistant across your evaluation workflow: organizing inputs, extracting themes, and drafting clear takeaways all while placing safety and ethics at the forefront. You’ll see where AI adds value (and where it doesn’t), how to protect privacy and equity, and how to avoid common pitfalls like overclaiming from small samples. This online course is designed for philanthropists, program officers, and foundation staff who are new to AI or use it lightly.

You will first understand where exactly AI fits into impact evaluation. Then, you’ll do an activity where you’ll translate an open-ended goal into rubric to standardize evaluation. You will then apply that rubric to a large, fictional grantee survey response dataset to help identify trends and surface the most promising responses. You’ll close with an examination of how to use this data safely and ethically to ensure that AI is helping your staff and not creating risk. You’ll leave with a downloadable toolkit: a rubric template, sample dataset, scoring sheet with auto‑aggregates, and a prompt pack so you can replicate the workflow on your own programs.

Learning objectives

AI evaluation workflow

Learn how to design a simple process that uses AI to organize qualitative data while keeping safety and ethics top of mind.

Rubric development

Create a scoring rubric based with observable criteria that you can apply consistently to track and compare open-ended impact responses to generalized impact goals.

Transparent synthesis

Apply your rubric to sample data, summarize findings with counts and representative quotes, and understand what limitations exist and how to safely address them.

Curriculum outline

• Where AI fits in impact evaluation
• Co-developing with AI: Converting goals to frameworks
• Harmonizing with AI: Standardizing inputs for fair measurement
• Analyzing with AI: Understanding trends and using responsibly

Anticipated time to complete

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