Muslim Charity Wins Prestigious AI/ML Award at 2024 Insight in Fundraising Conference

Muslim Charity Wins Prestigious Award for AI-Powered Donor Engagement at Insight in Fundraising Conference 2024

A Breakthrough in AI-Driven Donor Engagement

The award category “Most Powerful Insight Using AI / ML” celebrates the outstanding use of AI or ML techniques to enhance processes or deliver fresh insights. Muslim Charity’s winning entry was its collaboration with Giving Analytics on a unique email marketing campaign. By leveraging advanced segmentation and AI integration, Muslim Charity sent out hyper-personalised emails to its donors, achieving a 4.1x increase in donations per email compared to traditional marketing approaches. In a competitive fundraising season like Ramadan, this personalised strategy enabled Muslim Charity to stand out from the crowd, with zero emails marked as spam - a remarkable feat.

A Testimony to Innovation

Speaking about this exceptional win, Maroof Pirzada, UK Director of Muslim Charity, said: “Winning this award is a fantastic achievement for Muslim Charity and highlights our willingness to explore innovative approaches and leverage emerging technologies. We are always looking for ways to improve how we engage with our supporters and maximise the impact of their contributions. This success reflects our ongoing efforts to use new tools in support of our charitable work, helping us continue reaching vulnerable communities in need around the world.”

Mohammed Khalil, Founder of Giving Analytics, also commented on the significance of this achievement: “This is truly ground-breaking for the charity sector. To our knowledge, this is the first time a charity has used hyper-personalised campaigns at such a scale, and we’re proud that our technology helped Muslim Charity generate such impressive results. Winning the award is a brilliant endorsement of our work together with Maroof and his team, who were bold enough to collaborate with us on such a groundbreaking project, at such an important time of year. Our project is concrete proof that we can cost-effectively send AI-generated, individualised emails at scale and achieve remarkable results - it's safe to say the days of the standard template email are numbered.”

Judges’ Praise
The judging panel commended Muslim Charity for its bold approach to AI integration, especially during the peak Muslim giving season. The judges remarked:
“The project was truly exciting to read, taking something that is often talked about and actually executing it. This is a brilliant use of AI, enhancing existing good practices and knowledge. They took a bold risk during peak giving season, especially in the delicate area of personalisation, where risk-taking is rare. The two-stage approach - first defining the call to action, then optimising execution was superb. Testing LLMs against each other was particularly impressive. We’ve never seen this level of personalisation before - it’s truly the holy grail.”

Insight in Fundraising Conference Awards

Muslim Charity's recognition at the Insight in Fundraising Conference is especially noteworthy given the competition from larger organisations and the high standards set by the judging panel. The conference saw awards in categories of:

Most innovative use of data or analysis to drive insight
Most powerful demonstration of strategic insight
Most powerful insight using AI / ML
Most powerful insight using BI dashboarding
Most powerful insight using data analysis
Most powerful insight using research
Rising star
Supplier of the year
Team of the year
Lifetime Achievement Award

Muslim Charity’s success is a clear demonstration of how emerging technologies like AI and Machine Learning can reshape the charity sector, enabling smaller organisations to punch above their weight and deliver meaningful impact on a global scale.