Addressing the promise and peril of AI for nonprofit management through a data feminist pedagogy

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) has opened up possibilities for nonprofit management, and practitioners are taking notice. A recent study revealed that nearly 90% of nonprofit organizations are interested in using AI (MacDonald, Citation2023). Another study indicated that more than half of the nonprofits surveyed use AI to support finance, human resources, communications, and mission-related (i.e., working with clients, program implementation, and grantmaking) functions (Herschander, Citation2024). Indeed, many of us likely know student-practitioners and nonprofit colleagues who leverage AI to help write donor thank-you notes, newsletters, grant proposals, and press releases and who work for nonprofits that incorporate chatbots to answer questions from website users or provide internal information to nonprofit employees on demand. Some may even use AI to help with donor prospecting, assessing candidates for employment, or screening beneficiaries for services (see Kanter et al., Citation2023). In an age of heightened competition for funding and volunteers and acute pressures to deliver performance improvements, there are strong incentives to draw on AI to support strategic and potentially innovative responses to ongoing challenges (Gooyabadi et al., Citation2024; see also Hackler & Saxton, Citation2007).