Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming many industries, and advocacy, campaigns, & organizing are no exception. Over the last year, we’ve focused on helping non-profit organizations and campaigns experiment with generative AI to enhance their work and further their missions while maintaining a clear understanding of the ethics and risks inherent to the technologies and specific to our communities
For our initial learnings read our blog post: Unleashing AI’s Potential in Campaigns and Organizing: Lessons from the Front Lines
What we’re doing at CIL:
CIL runs cohorts of non-profit organizations who receive coaching, training, and 1:1 consulting to identify how AI can support their work. Currently we’re working with 21 social justice, movement, and direct service 501c3s and already finding new opportunities for each one. If you’re interested in this type of support for you or your grantees, let us know!
Releasing case studies from our programs on topics like Organizational AI policy development, unstructured data analysis to improve public comment collection, AI for social media content creation, and using AI for translation. You can find all our AI Case Studies here.
Releasing resources for campaigns and organizing in partnership with organizations like AI Impact Lab, Higher Ground Labs’ Progressive AI Lab, and Zinc Labs
We have developed a beta version of an AI Prompts and Workflows Library specifically tailored for campaigns and organizing. We will be building this out further and are looking for partners to keep building it out. Have something you’ve used AI for you’d recommend to others? Submit it to the database here!
We also offer one-time 1:1 coaching sessions to talk through potential ways for orgs to leverage AI. These are usually arranged by a funder for their grantees, and we’re always interested in expanding these opportunities.
In January, we co-hosted an in-person AI Summit for Campaigns and Organizing with Zinc Labs and Higher Ground Labs— you can find the presentations here — and we’re planning more in-person opportunities now, to be announced soon.
Information about our 2023-2024 Cohort
Case studies from the 2023-2024 Program:
Analyzing Canvassing Conversations with Fair Count in Mississippi
Content Generation and Translation in Less Common Languages with noÁr
Organizations in the 23-24 cohort included:
National organizations doing GOTV and voter education in Mississippi, Virginia, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Kentucky
A state legislative candidate in Virginia
State level organizations supporting local candidates in Texas and Virginia
State-based hybrid organizations running voter contact programs in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia
501c3 groups doing messaging and voter contact on both state and national levels
These organizations are utilizing AI tools and LLMs for a variety of purposes, but common usages that our program is focusing on include:
Social media and content creation
Message development and sentiment analysis
Knowledge and information management
Chatbots, phone banking, and other types of voter contact
Engineering & coding, data clean-up and management
Through the program CIL is providing access to trainings, 1:1 coaching, access to tools, and a research agenda to explore gaps and opportunities within generative AI for political organizing and advocacy.