Forty-three examples of NFPs and charities using artificial intelligence

Charities, not-for-profits and for-purpose organisations of all kinds are using AI in a huge variety of ways. Some are building chatbots to disseminate trusted information, or to better connect people to support. Others are using it to personalise education, improve health and aged care services, or streamline fundraising and administration. AI is also powering research, monitoring and advocacy by helping organisations analyse data at scale. In a growing number of cases, NFPs are experimenting with “agentic AI”, allowing AI “agents” to act on their behalf.

Here are 43 great examples we’ve found.

Australian organisations employing AI

• The Alcohol and Drug Foundation’s drug info bot, Dib, is described as a “friendly, knowledgeable bot providing non-judgmental, trustworthy information about alcohol and other drugs”. The bot answers questions by searching the foundation’s own website for relevant documents, such as official policies and updates, and then relaying the information to users in simple language. This method, called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), ensures the bot bases its responses on the foundation’s trusted materials rather than inventing answers.
• Similarly, WomBot, a chatbot used by Wombat Housing (see video below), based in Melbourne, employs strict guardrails on the information it uses to help young people at risk of homelessness.

• Justice Connect has been lauded for an AI project that identifies people's legal issues and connects them to the right support. Developed over several years, the tool uses a natural language processing algorithm, allowing help-seekers to ask questions about their legal dilemmas in their own words, and it aims to help users avoid the “referral roundabout”.
• The Back on Track Foundation is using AI to support the education of children who are recovering from cancer. CEO Kylie Dalton explains in this podcast.
• Neon Carrot has piloted an AI bot trained on documents from the Australian Government’s Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission that lets aged care workers input queries and instantly receive contextually appropriate, easy-to-understand responses – complete with references to the original documents. It also uses the RAG process.
• The Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) continues to explore the use of AI to streamline operations, conduct financial analysis, and power chatbots to locate information. It has conducted a trial of using Microsoft’s Copilot to summarise and draft documents, and help with analysis. It is also using a Microsoft Azure automatic reader to “extract financial transactions from PDF documents”. Our report.
• The Red Cross Lifeblood service is working with tech firm DiUS to use AI to assist staff in dealing with long, complex documents such as research papers, manuals and financial reports. The AI assistant scans materials to generate short, plain-language summaries with links to the original sources, enabling staff to understand issues easily while maintaining accuracy.
• Eastern Palliative Care’s AI-assisted biography service uses technology to help transcribe and write about the life stories of home care clients, with the AI transcriber attempting to match clients’ voice and tone. The service has produced 1700 histories since 2009, with some of the early manually handled stories taking as long as four months to produce. The new system has significantly slashed production time.

• Kindship, a National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) plan management service, created "Barb”, an AI-powered app, to guide users through the scheme. Kindship says Barb is to the NDIS as Siri is to Apple, and claims to be able to show users how to budget for extra support “in 30 seconds”. It also helps users with selecting service providers and therapy and provides advice around the clock. The startup business was set up by four mums raising children with disabilities, and won the support of the National AI Centre (NAIC) after winning an AI Sprint in 2024. The $499 subscription fee is covered by plan management funding, which all NDIS participants are eligible for.
• Neo Care is another product that got a special mention in the NAIC Sprint program. It uses an audio monitoring system to detect falls by listening for “events of concern” such as breaking glass, troubled breathing or even excessively long showers. Early assessments have shown mixed results.
• Dadfit, a fast-growing Melbourne fitness and community organisation offering free programs for dads, worked with Infoxchange experts to help its rapid expansion. With the help of ChatGPT, the organisation is able to send personalised text messages, newsletters and other reminders to members, and it plans to use AI for promotion and recruitment. It uses a combination of Google Forms, Zapier, ClickSend, HubSpot and WhatsApp.
• The charity FreddyMatch is an online volunteer recruitment and management system that uses AI to connect people to opportunities based on skills, interests, location and availability. It has worked with more than 600 organisations, including other charities, councils and community groups. It claims a 90 per cent match success rate.

• The Gradient Institute is a not-for-profit founded by the National AI Centre and the University of Sydney to support the ethical use of AI systems. The organisation has developed a suite of tools and resources aimed at NFPs, and it recently published a report warning about the risks to organisations of using multiple AI agents at once.
• BaptistCare is using Microsoft 365 Copilot to save time and streamline information as it assists 24,000 clients across aged care, retirement homes, in-home assistance and community housing. A variety of tools and AI assistants are used for notetaking, composing emails and summarising dense reports. It has also rolled out a customised chatbot to help workers keep tabs on cybersecurity policies and other tech topics. The organisation hosted a “Taco-thon” to encourage staff to find AI solutions to IT problems, recruitment needs, and incident reporting needs, and to pair residents with the same interests or hobbies via AI, as a first step towards encouraing social interactions. More about this case study.
• LawRight, a legal services charity, and law firm Minter Ellison have together piloted the Credit Guardian AI tool to analyse bank statements and loan agreements to help pro bono lawyers assess responsible lending.
• The Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation (ALNF) hosts the Living First Language platform, preserving First Nations languages via the use of automatic processing of incoming content to enable users to interact with sounds, letters and symbols.

• Clean Up Australia’s volunteer data capture project employs AI image analysis to assess thousands of supplied photos. Figures collected from more than one million volunteers each year are compiled for annual reports which count and categorise the litter, with the resulting reports used to influence decision makers in government and business.
• UNICEF and Greenpeace are among the many Australian charities employing machine learning to refine direct mail targeting, to boost donations and engagement, and to slash the size of mailouts. Both have used the fundraising platform Dataro, with UNICEF having used the system to boost revenue by 26 per cent and reduce mailouts by 15,000. Greenpeace used a predictive tool to retain more than 500 donors it might otherwise have lost to “churning” or leaving, retaining $235,000 in income. Those methods are being used by fundraisers worldwide.

• Kara Tech is an AI-generated sign language system that can be used by those with severe hearing loss. The project is hosted by Red Cross’s Humanitech arm and involves emergency service agencies and deafness support agencies across Australia. The technology looks set to be adapted to work with sign languages worldwide.
• Wildlife.AI, a charity operating in New Zealand since 2018, aims to conserve wildlife with the help of artificial intelligence. Its Wildlife Watcher tool is a smart camera trap that uses machine learning to identify species.
• Open Corridor is an environmental services organisation based in Perth, but with a global outlook on “democratising sustainability intelligence”.
• Cool.org employs machine learning to generate lesson plans based on known curriculums. A chatbot welcomes visitors and guides them through the available services, which include AI literacy information for teachers.
• The Smith Family – with its focus on the power of education – is employing artificial intelligence, predictive analytics and machine learning to target kids at risk of dropping out of school. The organisation is a strong advocate for digital inclusion amid the rollout.

The Earth Species project aims to decode animal communication.

Artificial intelligence powering NFPs globally

• In a sign of the future, US-based charity Sage Future has tested “agentic” AI – which can make its own choices – as a fundraising tool. Sage used four AI models, including ChatGPT and two models developed by Anthropic, to select a charity to fundraise for and attempt to drum up interest. The effort raised $257, which was donated by spectators who knew about the test and were curious about how the models would perform – it failed to draw donations from the general public. That said, the models worked together in a group chat, sent emails, jointly edited Google docs, researched charities and funds needed, created an X account to promote their efforts, and hosted an online poll to choose the most appealing profile picture.

• US-based humanitarian agency Mercy Corps – which assists people in 40 countries that are suffering from poverty, disaster, conflict, and climate impacts – has equipped field staff with a Methods Matcher tool to provide data that can help them anticipate coming emergencies. It is currently developing an agentic AI tool for automated data analysis and real-time reporting.
• Citizens Advice in the UK developed an internal-facing AI assistant, Caddy, to help customer service workers across 250 charities in England and Wales to provide quality advice to millions of users each year. The system relies on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), thereby employing only reliable information, which is also cross-checked by humans. The trial slashed phone waiting times in half.

• Undercover, an initiative of Women Helping Women Asia, is an app that reacts when certain profanities are heard, automatically recording what happens and sending emergency alerts as needed, depending on an AI assessment. It understands English and Cantonese and is currently available in Hong Kong. YouTube
• Acquaint is an AI-powered volunteer-driven cultural exchange tool.
• HIAS (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) employs machine learning to increase the success of refugee settlement in Ecuador, Peru and Panama by matching language and job opportunities. It has boosted employment success by 40%.
• Learning Equality used AI to align tens of thousands of educational resources with Uganda’s curriculum, speeding up cataloguing and improving student access to tailored learning.
• Joy Education, a US tech not-for-profit, provides a “virtual reading clinic” to assist people with language-based disabilities.
• WattTime and Climate TRACE use artificial intelligence and satellite data to track global emissions, helping shift energy use toward cleaner sources and potentially cutting billions of tonnes of CO₂.
• Climate Policy Radar applies artificial intelligence to organise, translate and classify climate laws and policies worldwide, giving policymakers and researchers open access to structured and comparable information.
• Intelehealth’s Ayu is an AI-powered telemedicine platform in India that connects rural health workers and patients to remote doctors, improving access to quality care where medical resources are scarce.
• HERA Digital Health, based in the United States, provides refugees with personalised health-care guidance in emergencies. One of its latest tools is integrated with WhatsApp to allow users to register for services in the interface, track pregnancy and vaccinations, find providers and ask questions about healthcare.
• Jacaranda Health’s PROMPTS, powered by UlizaLlama, is an SMS-based AI assistant that guides mothers in Sub-Saharan Africa to antenatal care, triages urgent cases, and strengthens links with health systems.
• Reboot Rx uses artificial intelligence to scan biomedical research and repurpose generic drugs for cancer treatment, dramatically speeding discovery while lowering costs and increasing access to affordable therapies.
• Rocket Learning delivers early education content through WhatsApp in India, using AI to track children’s progress, flag at-risk learners, and improve developmental outcomes.
• PlayLab, a US not-for-profit, aims to “transform education” with its mission to enable educators and students to use AI, but also to shape it, with a range of tools tailored for different users.
• The UNHCR in Jordan is testing the use of AI tools to respond to help requests, with online and audio queries automatically transcribed, translated and organised for assessment.
• PoBot by Migrasia is a Hong Kong–based chatbot that provides legal, financial and health advice to migrants in multiple languages.
• Khan Academy’s Khanmigo, in the US, is an AI tutor and teaching assistant that coaches students through problem-solving and helps teachers create lesson plans, quizzes and classroom materials more efficiently.
• In the US, the California Policy Lab is using AI predictive modelling to identify people at high risk of homelessness, enabling targeted prevention.
• Breastcancer.org uses machine learning to personalise patient education, so it can deliver more relevant and effective health information.
• Polaris, which operates the US National Human Trafficking Hotline, uses AI-powered voice bots to triage non-urgent calls, freeing staff to focus on urgent survivor support and extending the hotline’s reach.
• Earth Species Project – a US-based NFP – aims to “decode animal communication” with advanced AI.

Got a great story to tell about your AI tool? Email us: media@ourcommunity.com.au

More information

Community Directors Intelligence: The AI edition

Community Directors artificial intelligence tools and resources

Infoxchange AI case studies | Agentic AI explained

Stanford Social Innovation Review: AI-powered nonprofits

Fast Forward’s global tech nonprofit directory

National AI Centre directory