Course overview

This practical and engaging course is designed specifically for fundraising leaders navigating the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence. Learn how AI is being used in donor engagement, campaign planning, and supporter services, and build the confidence to assess and govern AI tools responsibly. Through real-life examples, governance templates, and a clear, non-technical framework, participants will gain the ability to ensure their use of AI is ethical, privacy-compliant and aligned with donor trust principles

Discover how to confidently and ethically use AI in your fundraising work. This hands-on course gives you real-life tools to evaluate AI tools, safeguard donor trust and develop a governance model that fits your organisation. Learn how to unlock the power of AI—safely.

Course aim

The course aims to give fundraising professionals the knowledge and tools to confidently evaluate, implement and oversee AI tools in their operations. By demystifying AI and grounding it in Australian best practice frameworks, participants will leave with a practical checklist, risk assessment model and implementation plan that can be used immediately to enhance donor trust, data safety and organisational impact.

What you’ll learn

• Identify the different types of AI used in fundraising (embedded AI, generative AI, predictive AI)
• Evaluate potential use cases and their associated risks and benefits
• Apply ethical and legal frameworks including privacy and bias mitigation principles
• Use a simplified AI risk assessment tool to make go/no-go decisions
• Create an implementation plan for AI adoption or oversight in their organisation
• Define key governance roles, policy needs and post-deployment monitoring strategies

Targeted skills

1. AI use case evaluation
2. Risk and ethical decision-making
3. Governance planning
4. Privacy awareness in data-driven tools
5. Responsible adoption of digital technologies
6. Social Media Marketing

Participant level

Entry - Intermediate

Who is this course for?

Fundraising directors, marketing managers, advancement managers, and senior fundraising staff working in charities and non-profits who are exploring or already using AI tools in donor engagement, campaign optimisation or supporter communications.

Prerequisite knowledge

Participants should have basic familiarity with fundraising operations and digital tools (e.g. CRM, campaign software). Prior exposure to AI (such as using ChatGPT or CRM-based AI features) is helpful but not required.

This session won’t explore

• This course will not teach participants how to build AI systems or cover technical topics such as model development, coding or engineering.
• It does not provide legal advice.

Delivery

2 x 4hr sessions via Zoom

Meet the facilitator

Guidelines for enrolment

1. 1. Make sure you have a login for the FIA Learning Hub. Click "Sign In" or "Forgot Password" if needed.
   2. You can enrol a staff member if they already have a login.
   3. If you require assistance, please email training@fia.org.au.
      

CFRE

Full participation in Data-Privacy for Fundraisers is applicable for up to 2.5 continuing education points in Category 1. B – Education of the CFRE International application for initial certification and/or recertification.

FIA Code

FIA Code of Conduct Integration

• Section 2.0 Compliance: Covers privacy, data governance and compliance with AI ethics principles
• Section 3.0 Ethical Conduct: Focuses on fairness, transparency and accountability in the use of AI
• Section 4.0 Conduct Towards Donors: Emphasises protection of donor rights, consent and data use boundaries
• Section 5.0 Conduct Towards Beneficiaries: Addresses equitable service delivery using AI tools
• Section 6.0 Supplier Relationships: Includes criteria for ethical vendor and tool selection

Course overview

There are two reasons why practising ethics in fundraising might turn out to be harder than you think it is. First, because so often ethics is reduced to simply complying with the code, even though the ethics of any profession can never simply be reduced to a few provisions in a code of practice. And second, because there have been few ideas and frameworks developed specifically to help fundraisers resolve the ethical dilemmas they’ll encounter in their jobs.

This interactive course will introduce delegates to the theories, ‘lenses’ and frameworks developed at Rogare – The Fundraising Think Tank, and practise using these to resolve real-life ethical dilemmas in fundraising. In doing so, it will demonstrate how an understanding of professional ethics can enhance compliance with the code of practice.

We’ll then move on to consider further ethical issues, including:

• Appropriate ways to ‘frame’ beneficiaries in fundraising materials
• Ethical use of AI
• Ethics of refusing donations.

This course will enhance fundraisers’ ethical literacy by introducing you to the tools, ideas, and frameworks you'll need to resolve the ethical dilemmas you’ll encounter in your professional practice, dilemmas that for the most part can’t be sorted simply be referring to a code of practice. It will also give you the confidence to justify your ethical decisions to stakeholders who might be critical of them; and to help fundraisers articulate the best ethical advocacy of fundraising practices and the fundraising profession.

What you'll learn

• Gain a basic knowledge and understanding of ethical theory to better contextualise ethical issues in fundraising
• Understand what an ethical dilemma in fundraising is and identify and describe such ethical dilemmas
• Identify and describe different normative ‘lenses’ of fundraising ethics and understand how to apply these in professional practice
• Apply these ethical lenses to actual ethical dilemmas in fundraising using a bespoke decision-making framework
• Make better ethical justifications for the actions they choose to take, or choose not to take, to the media, board, donors and other stakeholders
• Understand the relationship between ethics and codes of practice, and how to apply this knowledge to make ethical decisions; and to critique codes of practice from an ethical perspective.

Targeted skills

• Ethical literacy
• Critical thinking and reasoning
• Advocacy

Who is this course for?

This course is for anyone, in any role, at any stage of their career, who wants to improve their understanding of the ethics of fundraising and enhance their ethical literacy.

Delivery

2 x 3hr sessions via Zoom.

This session won’t explore

This session won’t be a ‘surgery’ for fundraisers to bring their ethical problems and expect to get a solution.

This is a space that welcomes thoughtful and constructive discussion about fundraising practices, with a focus on learning and improvement, rather than personal complaints.

While the course will touch on the issues of power and privilege and the ideas promoted by the Community-Centric Fundraising movement, this will not be a major focus (not because they are not important, but because we can’t cover everything).

Participant level

Intermediate, Advanced

Prerequisite knowledge

Students should have a foundational competence and understanding of fundraising practices and processes. In other words, they should know how to do their jobs competently.

No prior knowledge of ethics is required.

Meet the facilitator

Read Ian MacQuillin's bio (PDF).

Guidelines for enrollment

Make sure you have a login for the FIA Learning Hub. Click "Sign In" or "Forgot Password" if needed.

You can enrol a staff member if they already have a login.

If you require assistance, please email training@fia.org.au.

CFRE

Full participation in Fundraising ethics – going beyond the code to resolve ethical dilemmas and why doing that might be harder than you think is applicable for up to 2.25 continuing education points in Category 1. B – Education of the CFRE International application for initial certification and/or recertification.

FIA Code

This course relates to the following aspects of the FIA Code of Conduct:

Ethical conduct (3.0). The enhanced ethical literacy this course will bring will allow students to better critically reflect on the stipulations contained in this section, and then how to justify the decisions they make. For example, how “open” (s3.6) should a fundraiser be about how funds are raised, especially in the use of AI?

Conduct towards donors (4.0). The course looks in detail at the ethics of the relationships that fundraisers build with donors and what duties fundraisers have to donors; but it also explores problems and challenges these ethics throw up.
The course will also consider the ethics of refusing donations, and so will also enhance the understanding an application of the code’s sections (4.8 and 4.9) relating to this issue.

Conduct towards beneficiaries (5.0). The course will specifically cover the ethics of beneficiary framing.

Conduct in supplier relationships (6.0). Enhancing fundraisers’ ethical literacy through this course will empower and enable them to have better expectations of the ethical requirements of suppliers and how to hold them accountable for those ethical requirements.

Course Overview

The fundraising profession is under constant scrutiny from our supporters, the media, and the general public to act ethically. Yet the reality is that fundraising involves inherent ethical tension driven by the need to act in the interest of diverse stakeholders (especially donors, beneficiaries, and the nonprofits we work for). In this workshop, we will discuss the ethical landscape of fundraising work and learn how other professionals navigate it. We will explore different professional codes of conduct and organisation-level ethical approaches, and learn about the latest research findings on what donors consider ethical and how fundraisers navigate ethical tensions. Finally, we will workshop sensible approaches to ethical fundraising practice. Participants will gain a richer understanding of the ethical dimensions of fundraising work, learn from examples of ethical best practices, and come away with frameworks for making more ethical decisions in their work.

To understand the key ethical considerations relevant to fundraising and gain knowledge to help you navigate fundraising ethics more confidently.

What you'll learn

• Understand and discuss key ethical concerns in fundraising
• Develop ethical guidelines for your own fundraising, informed by industry best practices and latest research

Targeted skills

Critical thinking
Sectoral awareness
Ethical fundraising

Who is this course for?

This should be relevant to all fundraisers, and especially those raising money for human beneficiaries or dealing with donors who may have objectives beyond social/environmental impact.

Participant level

Prerequisite knowledge

Participants should ideally have worked in fundraising for 6+ months, to have some awareness of the ethical decision-making involved in fundraising.

Delivery

1 x 3hr session via Zoom.

This course won’t explore:

Ethics are not black or white. In fact, one of the challenges in fundraising is that what is seen to be most ethical depends on whose perspective is prioritised. Participants will not be given one size fits all solutions to ethical fundraising. Instead, they will be given knowledge and opportunities to discuss nuances in order to more confidently navigate ethical decisions in the future.

Meet the facilitator

Read Cassandra Chapman's bio. (PDF)

Guidelines for enrollment

Make sure you have a login for the FIA Learning Hub. Click "Sign In" or "Forgot Password" if needed.

You can enrol a staff member if they already have a login.

If you require assistance, please email training@fia.org.au.

CFRE

Full participation in Fundraising Ethics: Walking the Tightrope is applicable for up to 1.5 continuing education points in Category 1. B – Education of the CFRE International application for initial certification and/or recertification.

FIA Code

This course relates to the following aspects of the FIA Code of Conduct:

We will discuss elements of the FIA Code of Conduct, alongside other org- and national-level codes of conduct for fundraising ethics.