Beyond the Hype: How Canadian Associations Can Thoughtfully Adopt AI

There’s plenty of hype surrounding the advances in artificial intelligence and what that can mean for business leaders, but how do these advances apply to associations and non-profit organizations? What are the risks in the adoption of Generative AI technology? Why have these types of organizations been slower to adopt AI technology, and if they were to start to immerse it into their processes then where should they start? These are all complex questions that vary depending on the nature of your organization, its digital maturity and its goals.  

Align Technology with Your Mission, Not Just Trends 

Having AI structured around your goals is key to the conversation. The goals of a for profit non-governmental business are more easily understood as profit margins whereas associations and non-profits provide value through membership, and community. Despite all organizations needing to be financially viable to operate they need to go about things in differently ways because they are not the same. This difference in approach does not make use of AI technology exclusive to one type of business over another, but what it does call for is a different application of it.  

One common risk that we hear associations talk about is the concern that AI technology will remove humanness from their organizations. This may seem valid but depends on how you choose to use the technology. You can absolutely lose your human touch by replacing your member relations team with a generic and often irritating Chatbot but on the other side of the coin you can use a sophisticated AI learning Chatbot to remove an unnecessarily frustrating touchpoint for members. The same can be said by analyzing data to present personalized information for members over a static presentation of general less-targeted information. The tools are just tools, so it is all in how they are applied.  

A Practical Roadmap to Implementation 

Understanding organizational goals and how AI can fit into them is only part of the process of AI adoption. Another aspect of it is mapping out a realistic plan for how you are going to move towards the technology. This process involves looking at current tools or tasks you currently use and examining AI options that are available. It is important to do some research on the tools in terms of your strategy because that will guide the answers. Take for example the need for privacy. This requirement alone restricts any open AI solutions like CHAT GPT. Often new policies will need to be created to ensure the entire organization is aware and adhering to the guardrails necessary when adopting AI tools.  

To help get you started we’ve outlined five great tools for any association evaluating generative AI.

5 Smart Starting Points for Adopting AI Technology: 

1. AI Meeting Minutes

Do you use video conferencing tools like Zoom or Microsoft Teams? There is a plethora of AI notetaking tools built that can be added to videos to capture, describe, and distill the key points of meetings. Some tools like Read.AI will even play you a trailer of your meeting, break it into chapters, provide reports and even rate the emotionality of participants throughout the call. Gathering this information and reviewing reports can be a great way to improve meetings or learn from them to better communicate in them. 

AI Technologies to consider: Fathom, Zoom AI, Otter.ai, Gemini, Read.ai 

2. AI-Assisted Research 

Have you ever been in a situation where you need to analyze and summarize reports, read articles or notes? Tackling this task can be time consuming and lead to some details being lost. An AI tool like Google NotebookLM was built for this exact purpose. With this tool you can upload sources (PDF, txt, Markdown, Audio), add links to websites, Google Drive, Youtube as well as pasted text. By combining these sources, you can synthesize a variety of materials and direct the tool to summarize everything for you. Once it has summarized everything you can start asking it for information about the material it has summarized. Some typical uses of this technology are marketing plans, course reading, research notes, meeting transcripts, sales documents etc. Another added benefit to this technology is that it is private. Meaning that unlike Chat GPT this solution is not using your data to improve itself.  

Google NotebookLM (private) 

ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot – general content support, data analysis, drafting support (not private) 

3. AI-Powered Feedback

Surveys and forms built with SurveyMonkey’s AI tools are taking things to a new level. They have an AI builder as well as an AI Analyze feature. The tools they provide also have AI built into them and depending on what the purpose of your survey or form is they will suggest questions, question formats as well as effective sequencing and autofill answers. You can generate everything by using simple prompts. This combined with their advanced synthesis of responses and intelligent reporting make these tools extremely effective if you are sending out a member survey and do not want to spend hours going through responses or drawing conclusions.  

4. AI Chatbots: Smarter Member Support 

AI Chatbots are starting to gain popularity with associations to help manage members and public inquiries on websites. They range quite a bit in how they are implemented as well as in how much they cost but they can be especially useful in saving time and resources without compromising the human experience. The bottom line with these services is the goals of the users and whether they can get people the information they are looking for, because there is a high-risk element to using these systems if they do not work as expected.  

One example of an AI Chatbot that is particularly expansive is BettyBot. BettyBot is much more than a simple decision tree Chatbot. While you can set up complicated (or simple) decision tree with logic within BettyBot what really sets it apart is that it can act as a bridge between your Association Management Software and website content by acting as a chat system that allows users to intelligently navigate website content. BettyBot can be trained on specific repositories of information, such as journals, educational materials, or any other proprietary content your association holds. When users ask questions related to that material, it can provide direct links to the relevant content. This feature ensures that members can easily access the information they need, enhancing their overall experience and engagement with your association’s resources. In addition to this it can be added seamlessly on your website in a variety of ways (including through an API) and can be connected to your login system so it can display information based on the users logged in status. 

5. AI Graphics and images 

No list of AI tools for associations or non-profits would be complete without the inclusion of graphics or image generators. Canva can be used to streamline content creation with AI-tools that include a brand kit that will ensure that your brand is consistent as well as templates and AI-generated graphics.  

In Summary 

This list of AI tools is far from extensive, but you can see how each tool can be used in different ways for different purposes. The tool is just a tool and what makes it great will always be the people who are using it. We hope that if you are on the fence about AI adoption this article has helped provide some insight into the way to think about the technology as well as how to get started.