AI Terms Every Charity Needs to Know (No Jargon!)

A practical guide explaining artificial intelligence terminology specifically for nonprofit organizsations, charities, and NGOs

July 4, 2025

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There’s a lot of hype around AI – but most charities just want to know what it is, what it does, and how it could help them.And how can it make a real difference for the people we help?

So I’ve put together a plain-English glossary of the most relevant terms, plus real examples of how each one can help your work and save your time.👇

MOST USEFUL AI TERMS  FOR CHARITIES

🔹 LLM (Large Language Model)

These are the brains behind tools like ChatGPT and Claude. They’re trained to understand and generate human language.

📌 Use it to: summarise reports, draft blog posts and, write funding applications faster.

🔹 Prompt Engineering

The art of asking better questions. The way you phrase a prompt massively changes the answer you get.

📌 Use it to: write clearer prompts when using AI to generate ideas, create comms, or review complex info.

🔹 Fine-tuning

Training a general AI on your charity’s own data so it responds in your voice and knows your domain.

📌 Use it to: create an internal chatbot that knows your tone of voice, or supports your community with accurate info.

🔹 RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)

Lets AI search your documents in real-time to answer questions, instead of guessing from memory.

📌 Use it to: power a search tool or chatbot that answers from your safeguarding policies, programme content, or CRM.

🔹 GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)

Like SEO, but for AI. It’s about writing content in ways that AI tools can understand and surface correctly when people ask questions.

📌 Use it to: increase how often your work is cited by AI tools - and make sure they get your message right.

🔹 Hallucinations

When AI makes something up. It’s not lying - it just doesn’t have the right info and is still too eager to please! Avoid risk by using RAG, providing better sources or building in review workflows.

🔹 Model

The core system that processes your input and generates a response. Different tools run on different models.

📌 Important to choose the best tool for your use case (e.g. ChatGPT 4o for common tasks, o3 for more strategic thinking).

🔹 MCP (Model Context Protocol)

A new standard that allows AI tools to securely plug into calendars, CRMs, and email tools.

📌 Use it to: build future tools that update your systems or take actions automatically without complex integrations.

NICE TO KNOW (LESS COMMON DAY-TO-DAY)

🔹 Inference

This is the “thinking moment” – when the AI reads your input and generates a reply. These are important to consider when trying to build AI in a cost-efficient manner.

🔹 Training / Pre-training

The initial process where AI reads billions of words (e.g. from books and websites) to learn language patterns.

📌 Only relevant if you’re commissioning a custom model from scratch - rare for a lot of charities right now.

🔹 Supervised Learning

The AI learns by being shown examples with correct answers (e.g. emails marked spam or not).

📌 Use it to: build tools that can automatically sort or tag data, like incoming messages or service requests.

🔹 RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback)

AI is improved based on what people rate as good or bad answers.

📌 Use it to: build feedback loops to improve your custom AI tools

🔹 Transformer

A technical breakthrough that made modern AI possible by helping models understand context better.

🔹 Unsupervised Learning

The AI finds patterns in data without being told what’s right.

📌 Use it to: cluster similar supporter behaviour or analyse survey text responses.

🔹 Post-training

Extra steps after initial training (like fine-tuning or RLHF) that make a model more helpful or safe.

📌 Useful to know when comparing off-the-shelf vs custom models - or asking a vendor how their tool was trained.

AI can absolutely help charities do more, with less – but only if you understand what you’re using and why. We’re building, testing, and explaining AI tools with organisations across the sector. If you’re curious, we’d love to talk.

Let’s Make an Impact Together

We’re here to collaborate on projects that drive change.

Book a discovery meeting and share your digital challenge.Speak to a UX expert for practical insightsDiscuss partnerships to deliver effective digital solutions.

Book a discovery call
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