Australian Red Cross eyes AI as transformation focus shifts

The Australian Red Cross is gearing up to use more personalised messaging in efforts to boost funding as it wraps up foundational digital transformation work.

Across roughly a 12-month timeframe, the humanitarian aid and community services charity has been completing a full foundational digital transformation including developing end-to-end for finance, CRM, marketing automation, core HRIS, an enterprise risk platform and enterprise data platform. 

The final change is a single view of the organisation's "1400 staff, 25,000 volunteers and about 8000 members - how do we bring them all into one system, because we're using Excel and a whole bunch of things," CIO Brett Wilson told iTnews.

“Now we're going to have visibility, which is the first time forever have all of our Red Cross people in one platform," Wilson said.

This will enable a single view of its staff and volunteers and boost engagement. Wilson said 2024 will see the team deliver payroll and workforce planning. 

Future work will see the Red Cross introduce generative AI, including work to create a more personalised donor experience in efforts to boost fundraising.  

Unpacking the technology

Transformation works first began in November 2022.

Red Cross selected Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 for finance and operations, CRM, and marketing automation systems.

It also opted for Microsoft Purview to underpin its enterprise data platform. 

The finance portion was delivered within six months, followed by the enterprise data platform and "just recently" CRM and marketing automation.

“The key benefit of that is really, we're then able to leverage off what Microsoft have got, the Dataverse, which is basically their data layer that sits down the bottom, and then [Dynamics 365] can basically pull data from that Dataverse within the different systems as well.”

Wilson said the Red Cross partnered with KPMG “and a number of other partners” to help deliver the work.

“The way we position [the transformation] is like a foundational approach or a digital spine," Wilson said.

“We've created that spine. Now the plan is to actually start building on top of that. 

“We've got some really great foundations to say, alright, what can we do with this and then we can look at say Power Platform or we can look at leveraging off Boomi for a master data hub.”

System integration

Wilson said 2023 was about building out its basics and “giving us some great foundations to work on”.

“There was no real thought through architecture or anything else like that. It was all over the place. 

“Hence why the Boomi AI stuff is actually really exciting because I don't need a whole bunch of technical specialists to sit there and do this sort of stuff. We can actually have almost a BA [business analyst] sitting in there to give us some value and basically create all those connections as well.” 

Its use of Boomi AI will allow users to make natural language requests for systems, APIs or data models to integrate with one another.

This is expected to speed up time for development and also help better allocate funding and make better use of internal technical resources within the organisation.

Looking to AI

Wilson said one example of generative AI work expected for 2024 will see marketing automation used to “personalise the donor experience".

“This is where I think the technology piece and probably the AI piece comes into the plan as well because we can start segmenting using Copilot within marketing automation automatically, then sending out a customised EDM to a donor we noticed is donating $10 a month [and suggest making a higher donation] based on the data behind it. 

“But if we uplift [the suggested amount too much] you will actually probably reject it, then you'll probably come back and say you know what, I actually don't want to donate again on a regular giving perspective. 

“That's probably where the smarts are going to happen next year.”

He added: "If we know we're going to do this based on the last 25 transactions and we hook into another couple of subsets of data as well internally, we believe obviously we can uplift them from a low-value donor to a median value donor.”

The organisation is “in discussions at the moment” with Microsoft around the best implement use case for AI.

Noting a drop in donations over the past five years, Wilson said the Red Cross is looking to boost numbers via tailoring messing rather than “blanket EDMs”. 

“We can't have bunches of people sitting there trying to trawl through the data, so I think the Gen AI piece is really important because it enables us to do so much more with the resources we already have."

The organisation is also looking at implementing a "GenAI support bot” through Moveworks in early 2024.

Wilson said the longer-term view for Copilot is to see it generate presentations based on provided data, with finance and operation teams also able to prompt it to create a Power BI report. 

Wilson said the organisation's generative AI ambitions are “somewhere in the middle” of its transformation. 

He said the team is “at a point now where we've got some really good foundational data and it's fairly good quality data so we can rely on that data to make decisions.”

“Now if we overlay up the top, the Gen AI, it will inform us obviously based on that quality information we had.”

Transforming out of necessity

Wilson predicted a broader technology transformation in the not-for-profit sector.

“I think though that you are going to see a lot of charities having to transform out of necessity, I would say over the next sort of three to five years," he said.

"I think a lot of charities who don't go through that transformation process are really going to struggle to continue to operate obviously due to increase in costs and everything else.

“It's really around what is really going to make the most amount of difference as well.

“You will see probably more innovation coming out of some of these other areas and it's not going to be every charity. It's going to be a very small subset of charities and they will probably drive the industry along a little bit as well.”