Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models - Is there a space for us?

As a team at the Scottish Tech Army, we have always wanted to promote the ecosystem of the third sector, and not provide services or support where our partners are doing great work.    I am sure you have all seen lots of information about Artificial Intelligence (AI) – at events, on social media, there are new knowledge hubs popping up weekly with large pools of resources, thought leadership pieces, videos providing introduction and guidance.  For example, as a charity you can register with Charity Excellence and access a knowledge base and curated list of prompts for various non-profit operations, including fundraising, marketing and recruitment. SCVO now provide guidance notes and talks about the use of AI.  So where does that leave us?

The STA has always offered a more ‘hand on’ approach to technology, working with charities to achieve their technical goals.  As the Artificial Intelligence conversations have gathered pace moving from conspiracy theory to governance - could a more practical offering emerge?  Could we be making more of AI ourselves?

However, You can’t build anything without the right people.  But, as luck would have it through a connection with a previous STA ambassador Marcella Boyle - Andy Steele joined our volunteer community and was really keen to see where he could offer his AI experience.  Andy Steele is currently trying out retirement for size, a new stage in life after a career spanning banking technology and data services at HSBC and Barclays, and product development at Unilever and Scottish Power.  Andy's professional journey has been marked by a longstanding fascination with artificial intelligence. In the 1990s, he was conducting AI research during the "second AI winter" when public interest and funding all but dried up. Now, he's greatly enjoying the current renaissance of interest and the sweet revenge of the AI geeks!  

Michael von Euw our Head of Applications had also started to explore the use of the various AI platforms to support the growth of the STA.  You can see a hit squad forming.  Seeing Andy and our very own Michael Von Euw take the team through the various AI platforms was great fun, moving from creating designs to common questions.  This discovery session – with our normal guidance that “no question is a silly question” was a really useful exercise, it helped us to explore the range of opportunities for charities and ourselves.  The key question remained - is there anything we could or should be doing to help the charities asking us for help?  So, did we find that acorn?

Many of the charities we work with are just starting a digital journey and since the pandemic, an increasing number are reviewing how and where they are using technology to deliver their services.   Most of my conversations with charities when we meet, include a moment where the charity talks through the challenges in the funding landscape.   So we settled on a testing couple of scenarios to support charities find funding pots and then drafting applications and as with all our work, our goal was not only to support the charity with this exercise but also to improve their confidence and awareness of the various AI models.

So a few months later we have now piloted the application of AI / Large Language Models(LLM) with 5 charity partners of STA.  Over a 45 min zoom call we have been able to give each client a quick overview, sign post the wealth of resources and run through a few practical exercises.

The feedback from charities has been very positive - and the results seemed genuinely useful (not hallucinations!)   We have found a number of small charities already have personal experience with the LLMs and have been starting to explore how they could help them with day to day activities.  The “Wow” moments on the calls are the use of structured long prompts and trying different platforms but most importantly the charities benefited most from just gaining confidence they can do this themselves. 

There are many challenges for us to answer and we are aware of feedback from funders like “we know you’re using ChatGPT to write applications”. We are working to develop appropriate guidance notes as the tools provide structure and do not work without the information from the charity themselves anyway. 

We feel there is definitely an opportunity for STA here. If you would like to join a pilot team or book a session on AI and Large Language models for your charity - please get in touch with joanna@scottishtecharmy.org