We're not going to pretend we think AI is a straightforwardly good thing for charity communications and marketing teams. But plenty of organisations have made the decision to use it, and made it thoughtfully. This piece is for them.

In our minds, AI is a production tool, not an editorial one. It can help you get a first draft onto a page and it can even generate structural options. It can speed up the parts of content work that are mostly long and mechanical. That's a legitimate use case, and we'd be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

What it can't do is decide what story to tell.

It doesn't know what your organisation believes that others don't, or why that matters and who it matters to, or whether this is the right moment to say a particular thing to your particular audience. It doesn't understand the relationship between your organisation's comms and the people on the receiving end of them. Those key judgements belong to someone who knows your organisation from the inside, and handing them over to AI, even partially, is where things can start to go wrong.

So if you're going to use AI in your workflow, be deliberate about where the line sits. The problem we see most often isn't that organisations are using it badly. It's that the line hasn't been drawn at all, and the tool ends up doing more than anyone consciously ever decided it should.

An example of the difference between human made and AI generated copy.

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Using an AI prompt for the same content

The other thing worth being honest about is volume. One of the things AI makes genuinely easy is producing more. We'd push back on treating that as a straightforward win. If your communications are already stretched and inconsistent, more of them faster compounds the problem. The people who matter to your work aren't asking for more. They're asking for something that is worth their time and attention.

Brand voice work is only as useful as the people drawing on it. Most tone of voice documents get written, signed off, and quietly forgotten. That's been true long before AI arrived. What changes is the speed: a language model working from a dusty set of adjectives will average your voice down faster than a new team member would, because it has no feel for what the words are actually supposed to mean to your org and your beneficiaries.

What actually helps is specific guidance. Not those adjectives but examples. Real extracts from your best communications, with a note on what makes them work. The kinds of sentences you'd write and the kinds you wouldn't. That level of specificity is hard to maintain, which is exactly why someone needs to own it actively rather than assume the document is doing the job.

And someone needs to read the output. Not just skim it or proofread it. Actually read it, with the question: does this sound like us, really? Is there anything here that's technically fine but tonally it feels just well, wrong? That's a different skill from editing, and it requires someone who knows the organisation well enough to notice the gap. Without that step, you're not really in control of your communications. You're just approving them.

The last thing we'd say, and this matters more in the charity sector than in most: be careful about where AI is being used and be honest about it with yourselves, at least. A fundraising appeal. A letter from your chief executive to major donors. An update to the people you support directly. These are contexts where the reader brings an expectation of human, and where quietly undermining that has true and very real consequences. Trust is not a soft metric for charities. It's close to being just about everything.

We're not going to pretend there's a clean set of rules that makes this straightforward. There isn't and naturally that is different for everyone. But the organisations we've seen use these tools without losing something important are the ones treating it as a question that stays open and continues to be challenged, rather than just one they answered at the point of sign-up.

Not sure AI belongs in your comms at all? That's a reasonable position and we're always happy to talk through either direction, no agenda.

Now you've decided to use AI, here's how to use it responsibly in your comms