How You Can Use AI To Help Your Club In 2023

I know it is all anyone can talk about these days but for good reasons. AI or Artificial Intelligence is a hot-button topic at the moment. So, we thought we’d talk about What AI is and the best ways for you to use AI to help make the running of your club easier. 

It’s important to note that while AI can be very helpful, it’s also important not to overuse it. Clubs are all about community and connection, and relying too heavily on AI could potentially take away from that personal touch. Especially if you use AI writing tools for your website, emails or newsletters. Don’t get me wrong, they are amazingly helpful, and you should be using them, but they can sound a bit robotic and lack personality. That’s why Member Jungle employs me, a real human with a real human brain and a real caffeine addiction.

Don’t worry this isn’t going to be a doom and gloom article about the dangers of AI and how they might rise up and destroy us. I personally think we are doing a fantastic job on our own and we’ll certainly beat the robots to it. So let’s enjoy the ride and talk about the best ways to use AI to improve your club. 

What Is AI? 

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines AI as: “the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalise, or learn from past experience.”

When you think of AI, you likely think of Chat GPT, but the truth is that we have been using AI in our day-to-day lives for a long time and not just in chatbots. We tend to only refer to it as AI when it’s new and slightly unknown. Digital assistants like Siri or Alex are AI. Other examples are, autofill features on texts and emails, social media algorithms, facial recognition to unlock smartphones, Google and Apple Maps, Netflix recommend shows and, of course, the OG, granddaddy of AI chatbots. Clippy.

 

 

It may have been extremely rudimentary, but Clippy was certainly a prototype for today's Siris and Chat GPTs. There are too many current uses of AI to list them all here. Below are the five main kinds of AI in use today.

 

 

There are a lot of great ways you can use AI to help you in the running or your club so let’s break them down by what they can help you with. 

Using AI To Help Your Clubs Writing

One of the best uses of AI to help your club is using it to help you write for your club. AI can assist you in writing emails, newsletters, blogs and content on your website. The best products to use for this are Chat GPT, Google Bard and Grammarly, but there are alternatives out there that also have a lot to offer. Both of these have free and paid versions of their service, and you can get away with using one of both of them. 

Using a generative AI writing tool can help you when writing as it allows you to generate ideas, provide outlines of what you should write and, in some cases, actually write for you. Though as we’ve already discussed, I would hesitate to let it write for you too much. 

For example, I asked Grammarly GO to “write an email to a John Smith, a member of my kayaking club, politely informing them that they tip their boat too often and should invest in a better sense of balance”. Here is its response:

 

Besides my obviously joking recommendation, that is actually quite a good email, and it would only take a few quick changes to have it ready to send to clumsy old John. Again make sure you add your personal touch to any piece of writing that an AI tool wrote. Using AI writing tools as a base or outline for something you are writing is quite a good idea and can save you a lot of time. Ask the AI to write the email, edit it yourself so it doesn’t sound like the terminator wrote it, and then schedule that email to send with your membership management system. You are going to produce a better quality of written content in much less time.

Using AI To Help You Generate Idea For Your Club

AI can help with more than just writing emails and newsletters to your members. You can also use AI to help you generate ideas. This works by you asking the AI for information on something, searching through what it has learnt and then it gives you the answers. 

As an example I asked Chat GPT to “Summarise the top 5 things a kayak club can do to provide value to its members,” and it provided me with these answers. 

 

 

These are pretty good answers, and if I was looking for ideas or lost where to start on a club project, using Chat GPT in this way would be a big help. 

Another great way you can use AI to help you in the running is to use it to generate checklists of things you need to do to run an event. Now programs like Chat GPT may not give you regionally specific information, so make sure you double-check any list it gives you against legal requirements in your area. But doing this can be a great way to start building a great event checklist. Again, this can help you write a checklist, not write one for you; double-check its suggestions and make sure to add or change anything that it may have got wrong. I asked Chat GPT to write a checklist for a kayaking club event, and it gave me a very long and detailed checklist, which you can see part of below.

 

 

As you can see, this is a great starting point for building a club event checklist.

You need to be careful of using Chat GPT for facts. Partially because it has been fed no new information from the internet since 2021, so all its information is nearly two years old, and partially because it has a tendency to confidently lie when it doesn’t know the answers. Now Chat GPT is constantly being improved, and these problems are getting less frequent, but it is best to take what it says with a grain of salt. 

I’ve used Chat GPT as the example here because it is the big name at the moment, but everything I’ve used it for could also be done in Google Bard Or several other competitors.

Using AI To Help Make Sense Of Your Member Data

One way you may be already using AI ,in the form of smart data analytics, to help in the running of your club is when it comes to your member data. If you are using a membership management system like Member Jungle you will be used to seeing membership data reporting widgets like the ones below. 

 

 

These widgets are used to track your members and how those members interact with your club. These widgets are powered by an Analytical AI that analyses your membership data to provide you with current and accurate information about your club and your members. This can save you a lot of time manually sifting through data to find the necessary information. 

A better example is our Membership Engagement Widget, that uses rules (as set by you), to determine your most engaged members.

If you are not using a system that provides membership engagement and data widgets like these, you should strongly consider it. Suppose you are already using Member Jungle or another service that provides these. In that case, you should find out how they plan to continue evolving their service with AI. Member Jungle is working hard to utilise AI to make your club management experience easier and more streamlined. We are currently working on several improvements to our service using AI that we cannot wait to tell you about.In the meantime if you want to know more about how we are always improving our service  have a read of, Member Jungle Product Releases: What It Means For Your Club. 

Taking Meeting Minutes With AI 

As I already talked about in my article on taking better meeting minutes for your club you can now use AI to help you in taking meeting minutes for your club. This can be done in a couple of different ways Microsoft recently incorporated Chat GPT features into their premium version of Microsoft Teams, allowing the chatbot to generate real-time meeting minutes.

Of course for you to do this you will have to be using Microsoft Teams Premium to run your meetings. Before long we can expect Google Meet, Zoom and any other digital meeting service to bring out their own version of this. In the meantime there are still ways you can use AI to help you take meeting minutes. This involves recording the meeting, formatting the file and feeding it into Chat GPT. You can see a step by step how to guide here, Creating Meeting Minutes using OpenAI GPT-3 API.

Using AI Generated Images For Your Club

Image-generating AI is also very popular at the moment.With programs like Midjourney, Dall-E (by the markers of Chat GPT) and Craiyon being some of the big names.  These are programs that allow you to turn text into images via AI. This can be super useful for your club as it allows you to create stunning visuals and engaging content for social media, marketing materials, and event promotions. 

By using AI-powered image generation, you can quickly and easily create custom graphics, logos, and designs that are unique and eye-catching. This can help your club stand out from the competition and attract new members and attendees. Doing so could help you save time and resources that would have been spent on hiring a graphic designer or creating content manually.

Where To Start With Using AI For Your Club?

Hopefully this has given you a better understanding of the types of AI that are out there and some ways to use it for your club. What you should do now is sign up for some of these services and trial out free versions. Have a play with what they can do and see if you can find the best ways to utilise them in the running of your club. 

If you want to know how AI-generated art and images can be used to help your club, check out How AI Can Help Your Club or Association - AI-Generated Art. 

If you want to use AI to create videos for your club a whole lot easier, then give this one a peep How AI Can Help Your Club or Association - AI-Assisted Videos.