Levelling up: AI skills for charity communicators

What if charity comms and marketing teams fully embraced AI? What would change today and in future? From streamlining workflows, to reshaping how we connect with audiences, Matt explores practical, grounded ways AI can plug into your team’s operations without stripping out the human touch. Whether you’re testing the waters or treading carefully, you’ll walk away with sharp ideas, useful entry points, and a clearer sense of where AI fits and where it doesn’t.

This talk ends with a Q&A session, facilitated by our stage host.

The way people find information online is fundamentally changing. The era of traditional SEO is evolving into a new landscape where AI-powered search engines and conversational interfaces are paramount, placing a greater importance on best practices. This talk is a practical guide to preparing your website and content for the search of today (and tomorrow). Sepas demystifies what AI search means for your charity, your content strategy, and your web design and technical implementation. You’ll leave with actionable insights to future-proof your digital presence and ensure your content remains discoverable, valuable, and authoritative.

This talk ends with a Q&A session, facilitated by our stage host.

Are you looking to develop guardrails to support your marketing and communications teams to use AI safely and efficiently? In this session, Adam outlines how his charity developed a policy from scratch. He shares how comms played an integral role during this process, including being the first team to implement the policy ahead of the rest of the organisation. You’ll get ideas for how you can develop your own policy and ongoing processes of review, as well as tips for getting buy-in at all levels. Adam also offers advice for how to make the case for prioritising the development of your policy.

This talk ends with a Q&A session, facilitated by our stage host.

What’s holding you back from using AI? Sometimes the pace of change can be difficult to keep up with and it’s hard to know where to start. In this talk, David explores how we can bring down the barriers to getting started with AI, by cultivating a mindset of experimentation and problem solving. He gives you a practical process and template for creating your experiments and recent examples of how charities are using AI in innovative new ways to save time and boost impact.

Would you like to become better at using AI to support your copywriting? Whether you’re drafting social media posts, emails or press releases, AI can be a powerful creative partner. But knowing how to speak the language and write clear and detailed prompts is key to getting high quality copy. Whether you’re an experienced copywriter, or just starting out, this practical session, shares how to create prompts that will tailor outputs to your audiences, channels and objectives. There’s also opportunities to have a go at writing your own prompts.

This talk ends with a Q&A session, facilitated by our stage host.

In this talk, Rob delivers practical steps, using examples from real campaigns, on how to leverage AI as your PR buddy. He shares how you can onboard your own AI PR assistant, helping you to extend your capacity for the fun stuff. There will be plenty of practical tips for both lone PRs, as well as ways to support PR teams. He shows how you can use your PR skills to perfect prompts and make AI work to complement, not compensate. There’s also advice for how to stay faithful to the principles of trust, accuracy and transparency when using AI in your PR work.

This talk ends with a Q&A session, facilitated by our stage host.

From creating audience personas and segmentations to analysing campaign data, AI can help you understand your audiences better, enabling you to create more effective communications. Using a people plus AI collaborative approach, Frank demonstrates practical steps through a live use case, provide a reusable workflow template, and share essential safety practices for analysing your data responsibly.

This talk ends with a Q&A session, facilitated by our stage host.

Charities process a lot of information, from transcripts and survey results to social listening and user feedback. Spotting important patterns and themes and presenting them in ways that our audiences find compelling, can be time consuming, this is where AI can help. In her talk, Nidhi shares some of the different tools available and how they can be used to analyse, visualise, and summarise different kinds of information.

This talk ends with a Q&A session, facilitated by our stage host.

With the rising use of generative AI in content creation, it’s getting harder for charities to stand out, and for supporters to tell what’s genuine. AI is here to stay, and whilst that’s broadly a good thing, it also raises important questions about authenticity and trust. In this session, we explore what can make AI-generated content feel inauthentic, and how you can keep humanity and trust at the heart of your communications. Join this session for practical tips and considerations for how to make your generative AI content impactful, authentic and trusted.

This talk ends with a Q&A session, facilitated by our stage host.

How do you move beyond disconnected AI experiments to designing AI-supported workflows that can transform your work – and that of your team? This session explores how you can use AI in a more systematic way, orchestrating powerful but flexible systems that take full advantage of the capabilities and extra capacity AI offers. We’ll look at how to get started, what skills you need to develop, and how you can preserve human creativity and oversight as you do it. 

This talk ends with a Q&A session, facilitated by our stage host.

We know AI reflects the biases of the data it learns from but what practical steps can communicators take to ensure their AI outputs are inclusive and accessible? Using her work from charities such as RNIB and Dementia UK, Quarina unpacks the pitfalls and limitations of AI as well as the ways in which it can support accessibility and inclusion. She offers quick checks and tools to embed inclusion into your AI workflows as well as an AI inclusive content checklist for your next campaign.

This talk ends with a Q&A session, facilitated by our stage host.

Our keynote listener Gemma takes you through the main themes of the day, along with a short reflective exercise, to help you consolidate learnings and set intentions for your next steps