Can ChatGPT Build a Marketing Strategy for a Community Foundation?

For those of us in the marketing and communications field, Generative AI (GenAI) is transforming the way we communicate, strategize and connect with audiences.

Many of us who work for nonprofits are just scratching the surface of the possibilities with this new technology and the new tools that seemingly hit the market each day. Often, I find myself trying to stretch the limits of the most popular GenAI tool – ChatGPT.

While large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have many well-documented shortcomings, I want to share how helpful ChatGPT could be in the initial phases of building a marketing campaign strategy for a business.

In this case, I’m using a fictional community foundation.

Why? Because it’s a complex nonprofit model many are not familiar with (again, stretching the limits).

Community foundations are place-based nonprofit organizations that act as philanthropic hubs for immediately surrounding communities. More than 900 community foundations across the U.S. connect donors to local nonprofits and initiatives that address need – mostly within a defined geographic area.

Donor-advised funds (DAFs) are the primary charitable vehicle for community foundation donors. In short, DAFs are charitable giving accounts that are invested for growth and used for grantmaking at a donor’s discretion.

With that limited knowledge and some high-level audience insights, I wanted to see what ChatGPT could create for me (and other community foundation communicators and marketers).

So, I started prompting… and prompting… and re-prompting ChatGPT until I reached a point of satisfaction (and dare I say admiration) at the responses ChatGPT provided.

Rather than detail each prompt and rewrite, I’m sharing where I landed with my first five prompts (I added many more to dive in deeper!).

I hope other community foundation professionals can benefit from this knowledge sharing. Enjoy!

(For the record: All of the above was written by me, a human.)

My 10-Step Approach

I approached prompting ChatGPT like I would normally approach building a marketing campaign, beginning with the following:

1. Attain a solid understanding of the business model and core product offering (in this case, community foundations and DAFs)
2. Collect demographics of the target audience
3. Hone in on a goal aligned to a standard marketing funnel (i.e. awareness, conversion, retention, etc.)
4. Target marketing channels based on the audience insights, goal and budget
5. Allocate budget to paid media channels accordingly
6. Assign applicable key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with high-level goal
7. Define a SMART goal to measure overall campaign success
8. Uncover additional audience insights
9. Perform a competitor analysis
10. Research industry trends that may impact audience behavior

Below are my five prompts that tackle most of the work numbered above.

Prompt #1

Intent:

• Begin prompt with an “Act as” or similar statement to have ChatGPT take on the persona I want (i.e. You’re a Chief Marketing Officer with 20 years of experience)
• Enter a task or responsibility for the bot
• Provide details about my organization and core product offering
• Input parameters and details to strengthen the response
• Include audience insights for targeting
• Specify how I want the information formatted in the response (Please present your outline in a table format…)