Guide

Fundraising AI glossary- clear, practical definitions…

Every important concept, why it matters, and exactly how nonprofits use it with Squark.

AI glossary illustration

Core Learning Paradigms

Supervised Learning

Models learn from labeled examples (inputs paired with correct outputs).

Why it matters: It’s the basis of propensity scoring, forecasting, and most production models.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Predict probability and amount of the next gift for targeted outreach.

Unsupervised Learning

Finds hidden structure in unlabeled data (clusters, patterns).

Why it matters: Drives donor segmentation and discovery of behaviors you didn’t label.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Cluster donors by recency–frequency–monetary behavior to tailor journeys.

Semi-Supervised Learning

Trains on a small labeled set plus a large unlabeled set.

Why it matters: Cuts labeling cost while boosting accuracy.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Label a few thousand donors for upgrade; leverage millions of unlabeled touches.

Reinforcement Learning

Learns actions by maximizing rewards over time.

Why it matters: Optimizes sequential decisions such as channel and timing.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Learn a best next-touch policy to maximize incremental gifts.

Self-Supervised Learning

Learns by predicting parts of the input (e.g., masked words).

Why it matters: Produces strong embeddings; powers LLMs and search.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Better donor-note summaries and retrieval via rich representations.

Online Learning

Updates models continuously as new data arrives.

Why it matters: Adapts to seasonality, drift, and changing donor mix.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Refresh scores weekly during peak seasons for up-to-date targeting.

Transfer Learning

Adapts a pretrained model to a new task with less data.

Why it matters: Cuts time and cost to reach production quality.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Fine‑tune a base language model on winning appeals and style guides.

Few-Shot Learning

Performs well with only a handful of labeled examples.

Why it matters: Useful when data is sparse or new programs launch.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Kick off a new campaign and still get useful predictions quickly.

Zero-Shot Learning

Handles tasks with no labeled examples using general knowledge.

Why it matters: Rapid capability without long data collection cycles.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Draft first‑time campaign copy constrained by brand rules.

Meta-Learning

‘Learning to learn’: fast adaptation across tasks/domains.

Why it matters: Accelerates tuning across programs, chapters, or affiliates.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Adapt models across affiliates with minimal rework.

Federated Learning

Trains across data silos without moving raw data.

Why it matters: Privacy and compliance while collaborating.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Cross‑affiliate modeling without sharing PII.

Active Learning

The model selects the most informative items to label.

Why it matters: Minimizes labeling cost for maximum accuracy gains.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Ask analysts to label only borderline donor records.

Predictive AI (Statistical & Predictive Modeling)

Classification

Predicts categories (yes/no or one among many).

Why it matters: Core for response targeting and routing decisions.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Predict ‘will donate in 90 days’ or choose best channel.

Binary Classification

Two-class (yes/no) prediction.

Why it matters: Simple, highly actionable modeling.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Identify monthly‑donor conversion candidates.

Multiclass Classification

Predicts one of many classes.

Why it matters: Routes donors to the best option.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Choose best channel (email/SMS/mail).

Multilabel Classification

Assigns multiple labels to a single record.

Why it matters: Reflects reality when supporters fit many themes.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Tag donors with multiple cause affinities.

Regression

Predicts a numeric value.

Why it matters: Sets budgets and expectations on dollars and counts.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Predict expected gift amount for ask ladders.

Time Series Forecasting

Predicts values over time.

Why it matters: Planning, cash‑flow, and inventory.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Weekly donation forecasts with intervals.

Anomaly Detection

Flags unusual behavior or outliers.

Why it matters: Protects data quality and fraud detection.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Detect suspicious spikes or refunds.

Clustering

Groups similar records without labels (e.g., K‑Means, Hierarchical, DBSCAN).

Why it matters: Data‑driven segmentation for better personalization.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Create behavior‑driven donor segments.

Dimensionality Reduction

Compresses features while retaining structure (PCA, t‑SNE, UMAP).

Why it matters: Speeds models and enables visualization.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Plot donor universe for executive reviews.

Survival Analysis

Models time until an event (time‑to‑X).

Why it matters: Enables timing decisions.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Estimate time to second gift or to lapse.

Propensity Modeling

Estimates likelihood of an action.

Why it matters: Prioritizes spend and attention.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Likelihood to upgrade, re‑activate, or become a sustainer.

Predictive Maintenance

Predicts failure before it happens.

Why it matters: Prevents downtime and hidden costs.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Anticipate mail‑ops or data pipeline failures.

Churn Prediction

Identifies who is likely to stop giving.

Why it matters: Retention ROI via early intervention.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Trigger save series for at‑risk sustainers.

Demand Forecasting

Anticipates future demand/volume.

Why it matters: Capacity and budgeting decisions.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Forecast premiums/print volumes.

Scoring Models

Assign scores (risk, value, priority) to records.

Why it matters: Simple decisioning at scale.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Credit‑like pledge‑fulfillment risk or mid‑level prioritization.

Generative AI (Creation & Synthesis)

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)

Two‑network system (generator vs. discriminator) for high‑fidelity synthesis.

Why it matters: Produces realistic images and tabular samples.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Synthetic data for creative testing or scarce segments.

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs)

Latent‑variable generative models that reconstruct and sample data.

Why it matters: Controlled variation for safe exploration.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Generate donor‑persona variants for testing.

Diffusion Models

Generate images by denoising noise (e.g., Stable Diffusion, Imagen, DALL·E).

Why it matters: State‑of‑the‑art creative quality.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Concept art variants for ads and landing pages.

Transformers

Attention‑based sequence models powering GPT, BERT, T5, LLaMA, Mistral.

Why it matters: Backbone of LLMs and modern gen‑AI.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Generate donor‑ready copy conditioned on segment.

Large Language Models (LLMs)

Foundation models trained on vast text corpora.

Why it matters: Summarize, generate, classify, and reason.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Draft appeals, landing pages, and social posts.

Multimodal Models

Models that process text + images (and sometimes audio/video) such as CLIP, Flamingo, Gemini.

Why it matters: Richer understanding and creative search.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Auto‑tag images and align visuals to copy.

Text-to-Text Generation

Generate text from text prompts or structured inputs.

Why it matters: Core capability for content creation.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Appeal drafts from a brief; compliant stewardship letters.

Text-to-Image Generation

Create images from text prompts.

Why it matters: Rapid visual ideation.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Mockups for campaign creative.

Text-to-Audio & Music Generation

Create audio/music from text prompts.

Why it matters: Scalable audio assets.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Personalized thank‑you audio or background music.

Text-to-Video Generation

Generate short videos from text prompts.

Why it matters: Compelling storytelling assets.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Program highlight clips for web or social.

Speech-to-Text / Text-to-Speech

Transcribe audio to text; synthesize voice from text.

Why it matters: Accessibility and productivity.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Transcribe donor calls; TTS for outbound messages.

Image-to-Image Translation

Modify images conditionally (style or content).

Why it matters: Creative variations on‑brand.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Adapt assets to channels without re‑shoots.

Style Transfer

Apply one image’s style to another.

Why it matters: Consistent visuals across assets.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Brand‑consistent look from diverse sources.

Algorithms & Techniques

Logistic Regression (GLM)

Linear classifier with a logistic link function.

Why it matters: Interpretable baseline with calibrated probabilities.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Simple response models for compliance‑friendly reviews.

Linear Regression (GLM)

Predicts continuous outcomes using a linear relationship.

Why it matters: Transparent forecasting and ask‑amount modeling.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Predict donation amount for ask ladders and budgets.

Decision Trees / Random Forests

Tree‑based models; forests are ensembles of randomized trees.

Why it matters: Strong, interpretable baselines for tabular data.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Rank households for phone outreach; explain splits.

Gradient Boosting

Sequential trees that correct residuals (XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost).

Why it matters: Top performance on tabular data with speed and accuracy.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Lift in response and amount models for mail.

Support Vector Machines (SVMs)

Margin‑maximizing classifiers/regressors.

Why it matters: Strong on small/medium datasets.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Classify content sentiment or intent.

Naïve Bayes

Probabilistic classifier with independence assumptions.

Why it matters: Fast, simple text baseline.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Classify donor emails by intent.

k‑Nearest Neighbors (kNN)

Predict by averaging nearest examples.

Why it matters: Simple, non‑parametric reference.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Quick content‑tag inference for small sets.

Neural Networks (MLP)

Multi‑layer perceptrons for mixed features.

Why it matters: Flexible function approximators.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Combine behavioral + textual features for uplift.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)

Apply convolutions for images and spatial data.

Why it matters: Vision powerhouse.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Classify creatives for brand fit and compliance.

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs)

Sequence models capturing temporal dependencies.

Why it matters: Model sequences beyond static aggregates.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Model sequences of donor actions over time.

Long Short‑Term Memory (LSTM)

RNNs with gates for long‑term dependencies.

Why it matters: Better long‑horizon sequence learning.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Donation time‑series modeling.

Gated Recurrent Units (GRU)

Efficient gated RNN variant.

Why it matters: Fewer parameters; strong sequence baselines.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Predict churn from engagement streams.

Attention Mechanisms

Weights focus on relevant tokens.

Why it matters: Improves long‑sequence learning and explainability.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Highlight key events in donor summaries.

Sequence‑to‑Sequence Models

Map input sequences to output sequences.

Why it matters: Translation, summarization, dialog.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Summarize donor calls into CRM notes.

Autoencoders

Learn compressed representations by reconstruction.

Why it matters: Denoising, anomaly detection, feature learning.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Spot anomalous donation patterns; pretrain features.

Model Optimization & Evaluation

Calibration (Platt, Isotonic, Conformal)

Make probabilities and intervals honest post‑training.

Why it matters: Improves decision integrity and budget allocation.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Calibrate propensities for mailing volumes and risk.

Conformal Prediction

Distribution‑free method to produce valid prediction intervals.

Why it matters: Risk‑aware decisions with guaranteed coverage.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Donation forecast intervals and risk bands.

Bias‑Variance Tradeoff

Balancing under/over‑fitting error sources.

Why it matters: Guides model/regularization choices.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Choose simpler models for small segments; richer for big ones.

Overfitting / Underfitting

Too complex vs. too simple relative to the data.

Why it matters: Both harm generalization and ROI.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Right‑size your model capacity for stable lift.

Cross‑Validation

Rotate validation across folds for robust estimates.

Why it matters: Prevents luck from one split.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: K‑fold CV for stable lift curves.

Hyperparameter Tuning

Search settings that govern model behavior.

Why it matters: Large impact on accuracy and stability.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Tune depth/learning rate/regularization systematically.

Gradient Descent (SGD, Adam, RMSProp)

Iterative optimization algorithms minimizing loss.

Why it matters: Enable training at scale.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Default to Adam/RMSProp for deep models; SGD for large linear.

Loss Functions

Objectives the model minimizes (MSE, Cross‑Entropy, Hinge, Contrastive, Perplexity).

Why it matters: Shape learning behavior and calibration.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Use Tweedie/MSE for dollar amounts; Cross‑Entropy for response.

Evaluation Metrics

Measures of predictive quality and ranking.

Why it matters: Pick metrics aligned to decisions.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Lift/PR‑AUC for targeting; RMSE/MAE for forecasts.

Accuracy / Precision / Recall / F1

Basic classification metrics.

Why it matters: Each highlights different errors and costs.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Balance them to select operating thresholds.

ROC‑AUC / PR‑AUC

Global ranking quality across thresholds; PR‑AUC focuses on positives.

Why it matters: Robust comparison on imbalanced data.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Compare models fairly before rollout.

R² / RMSE / MAE

Regression goodness‑of‑fit and error.

Why it matters: Quantifies forecast quality in natural units.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Evaluate weekly revenue forecasts.

Log‑Loss / Perplexity / BLEU / ROUGE

Probabilistic and generative evaluation scores.

Why it matters: Guide quality for text models.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Compare fine‑tuned LLMs and generated copy.

Data & Features

Feature Engineering

Create informative variables from raw data.

Why it matters: Often the biggest accuracy gains.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: RFM, engagement depth, channel recency.

Feature Selection

Keep only useful predictors.

Why it matters: Avoid overfitting and speed training.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Drop noisy/collinear fields before scoring.

Feature Scaling

Normalize or standardize magnitudes.

Why it matters: Stabilizes training for many algorithms.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Standardize numeric features for SVM/NN.

Embeddings

Dense vectors that capture meaning (Word2Vec, GloVe, FastText, Sentence Transformers).

Why it matters: Enable search, clustering, and RAG.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Retrieve relevant impact stories on demand.

Tokenization

Split text into model‑processable tokens.

Why it matters: Affects cost and quality of LLM usage.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Efficient chunking of donor notes and reports.

Vectorization

Represent text/items as numeric vectors.

Why it matters: Prerequisite for ML on text and search.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: TF‑IDF/BOW baselines; embeddings for semantics.

Data Augmentation

Create varied training samples synthetically.

Why it matters: Improves generalization when data is scarce.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Paraphrase small‑segment texts.

Synthetic Data Generation

Produce realistic data for privacy or scarcity.

Why it matters: Enables safe modeling and QA.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Create safe tabular samples for testing pipelines.

Data Labeling

Assign ground‑truth labels for supervised learning.

Why it matters: Quality labels determine outcomes.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Use clear instructions; spot‑check with active learning.

Model Deployment & Operations (MLOps)

Model Training

Build models from data with chosen objectives.

Why it matters: The start of the production lifecycle.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Reproducible scripts and tracked experiments.

Model Serving

Deliver predictions via batch or APIs.

Why it matters: Turns models into business value.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Batch for mail lists; real‑time for web personalization.

Model Monitoring

Track quality, latency, and drift after deployment.

Why it matters: Maintains trust and reliability.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Alert when lift or inputs shift beyond bounds.

Drift Detection (Data/Concept)

Detects input/relationship shifts over time.

Why it matters: Prompts retraining and review.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Trigger retrain when channel effectiveness changes.

CI/CD for ML

Automated build/test/deploy for ML systems.

Why it matters: Reliability and speed to production.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Nightly scoring pipelines and safe rollouts.

Experiment Tracking

Log runs, metrics, params, and artifacts.

Why it matters: Reproducibility and governance.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Trace which model scored a list.

Model Registry

Catalog/version approved models.

Why it matters: Supports governance and rollbacks.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Promote champion models to production.

Inference Pipelines

Orchestrated steps to prepare inputs and serve outputs.

Why it matters: Consistency and reuse.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Shared features and scoring steps across programs.

A/B Testing

Compare control vs. variant with significance.

Why it matters: Ground‑truth impact measurement.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Validate modeled lift before scaling.

Explainable AI (XAI)

Make decisions understandable.

Why it matters: Trust and oversight.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: SHAP for board reviews; quick LIME checks during QA.

Responsible AI / Ethical AI

Policies and controls for safe, fair systems.

Why it matters: Reduces risk and protects brand.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Guardrails, PII minimization, and audits.

Fairness, Accountability, Transparency

Three pillars of responsible AI practice.

Why it matters: Mitigate harm and comply with regulation.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Audit targeting parity and document decisions.

Generative AI — Special Topics

Prompt Engineering

Design inputs that steer LLM outputs.

Why it matters: Quality and control for generation.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Standard prompts for compliant appeal drafts.

Prompt Tuning

Learned soft prompts specialized to a task.

Why it matters: Cheaper than full fine‑tuning.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Create brand‑specific adapters per program.

Fine‑Tuning

Adapt a base model to your domain.

Why it matters: Improves accuracy and tone.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Train on past winning campaigns and guidelines.

Parameter‑Efficient FT (LoRA, PEFT)

Fine‑tune small parameter sets on top of a base model.

Why it matters: Low cost, fast iteration and deployment.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Per‑brand adapters without retraining the base.

RLHF

Reinforcement learning from human feedback.

Why it matters: Aligns models to human preferences and policy.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: On‑brand generation for stewardship and appeals.

Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG)

Retrieve trusted context before generating.

Why it matters: Grounds outputs in facts and keeps them fresh.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Pull donor history and current stats into copy.

Context Windows & Attention

The span a model can attend to plus the mechanism.

Why it matters: Limits usable history and coherence.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Use long‑context models for multi‑year donor histories.

Hallucination

Confident but incorrect generations.

Why it matters: Trust, compliance, and risk.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Block unfounded claims and require citations.

Temperature & Top‑k/Top‑p

Decoding controls that trade precision for diversity.

Why it matters: Balance creativity vs. accuracy.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Low temperature for stewardship; higher for ideation.

Chain‑of‑Thought Reasoning

Induce stepwise reasoning traces.

Why it matters: Improves complex problem solving.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Internal tools for complex allocation logic.

Agentic AI (LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGPT)

Tool‑using and orchestrated agents that plan/act.

Why it matters: Automation and reliability for end‑to‑end tasks.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Compose retrieval + copy + send with approvals.

Multimodal Fusion

Combine signals across text, image, audio, and tabular.

Why it matters: Richer understanding and relevance.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Text+image alignment in creative QA.

Knowledge Distillation

Train smaller models from larger teachers.

Why it matters: Efficiency with near‑teacher quality.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Deploy lightweight copy assistants.

Quantization / Pruning

Shrink models via lower precision and weight removal.

Why it matters: Lower latency and cost.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Serve LLMs cheaply for peak campaigns.

Infrastructure & Scaling

GPU / TPU Acceleration

Parallel processors that speed training and inference.

Why it matters: Critical for deep and generative workloads.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Serve LLMs under Giving‑Tuesday load.

Distributed Training

Train across multiple devices/nodes.

Why it matters: Scales models and reduces wall‑clock time.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Meet deadlines for new models before appeals.

Parallelization (Data / Model / Pipeline)

Split work across data shards, model parts, or staged pipelines.

Why it matters: Enables very large models and datasets.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Parallelize gradient boosting and deep training.

Vector Databases

Stores embeddings for fast similarity search (Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, Milvus).

Why it matters: Backbone for production RAG.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Retrieve donor knowledge instantly during generation.

Data Lakes & Warehouses

Scalable storage/analytics platforms (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift).

Why it matters: Central engine for analytics/ML.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Train/score directly in your warehouse.

ETL / ELT for ML Pipelines

Extract‑Transform‑Load (or load‑then‑transform) patterns.

Why it matters: Keeps data reliable and fresh.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Normalize CRM exports and campaign logs.

Caching & Latency Optimization

Reuse results to cut response time and cost.

Why it matters: Better UX and scale.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Cache common snippets and search results.

Inference at Scale (Batch vs. Real‑Time)

Choose mode by latency/volume needs.

Why it matters: Cost/performance trade‑offs.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Batch for mail; real‑time for web personalization.

Emerging Areas

Causal Inference

Estimate cause‑effect, not just correlation.

Why it matters: Improves policy and marketing decisions.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Quantify causal lift of welcome kits on LTV.

Neuro‑Symbolic AI

Combine learning with logical rules.

Why it matters: Greater reliability and reasoning.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Rule‑aware compliant generation with ML.

Self‑Improving Models

Systems that continuously refine themselves.

Why it matters: Better performance with less manual retraining.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Automated prompt/model updates under governance.

Synthetic Personas / Digital Twins

Generated archetypes and simulations.

Why it matters: Safe testing and planning.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Pre‑test appeals on persona panels; simulate journeys.

Foundation Models

Large pretrained models adaptable to many tasks.

Why it matters: Versatile, cost‑effective bases.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Adapt for fundraising copy and decisioning.

AI Governance & Auditability

Policies, controls, and logs for responsible AI.

Why it matters: Enterprise‑grade trust and compliance.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Audit trails for decisions and content.

AI Safety & Alignment

Keep models within intended behaviors.

Why it matters: Risk reduction and reputation.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Red‑team prompts; enforce guardrails.

Energy‑Efficient (Green) AI

Reduce compute/energy via efficient models.

Why it matters: Lower cost and footprint.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Smaller tuned models for daily operations.

Data‑Centric AI

Data Quality

Accuracy, completeness, and consistency of data.

Why it matters: Trustworthy models start with trustworthy data.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Deduplicate records, fix imbalance, detect outliers.

Synthetic Data (Beyond Augmentation)

GAN/LLM‑based tabular/text data for scarce or sensitive classes.

Why it matters: Enables safe modeling and QA where data is limited.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Create rare‑class examples (e.g., major‑gift positives) for testing.

Data Privacy & Security

Mechanisms to protect personal information (differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, secure aggregation).

Why it matters: Legal and ethical obligations.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Hash emails, minimize PII, use federated secure aggregation.

Data Governance

Lineage, versioning, and compliance frameworks (GDPR/CCPA, HIPAA).

Why it matters: Stability and audit‑readiness.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Lock export formats and honor data subject requests.

Advanced Predictive ML

Ensemble Learning

Combine multiple models (stacking, blending, bagging).

Why it matters: Higher accuracy and robustness.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Blend uplift and amount models for better net revenue.

Graph Machine Learning

Learning over nodes/edges (GNNs, knowledge‑graph embeddings).

Why it matters: Captures relationships.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Identify influencer hubs among volunteers or fundraisers.

Survival Models (Cox PH, AFT)

Time‑to‑event models with different assumptions.

Why it matters: Crucial where timing is key.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Time to lapse; upgrade timing for mid‑level.

Probabilistic Models

Bayesian inference, Gaussian Processes, HMMs/MRFs.

Why it matters: Uncertainty‑aware decisions.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Forecast gifts with credible intervals; model donor states.

Causal ML

Libraries and methods for causal effects (DoWhy, Causal Forests, Counterfactuals).

Why it matters: Target interventions that actually change behavior.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Mail only persuadables; quantify lift truly attributable to outreach.

Uplift / Incremental Response Modeling

Predicts causal lift at individual/segment level.

Why it matters: Spend only where it moves the needle.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Trim waste print/postage and raise net revenue.

Generative AI — Techniques & Architectures

NeRFs (Neural Radiance Fields)

Learn 3D scenes from 2D images.

Why it matters: Immersive storytelling assets.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Visualize project sites or installations for donors.

Diffusion Variants (DDPM, Latent, ControlNet, Image‑to‑3D)

Extensions that control, speed, or expand diffusion.

Why it matters: Finer control and new modalities.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Guide layouts (ControlNet) and produce 3D objects from imagery.

Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) Models

Routes tokens to specialized subnetworks.

Why it matters: Efficient scaling with specialization.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Specialists for major donors vs. sustainers.

Long‑Context Models

Architectures and memory tricks for long sequences (RNN‑T, memory‑aug transformers).

Why it matters: Use more history per decision.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Write appeals using years of interactions.

Agent Frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, Haystack, CrewAI)

Orchestrate retrieval, tools, and agents in pipelines.

Why it matters: Faster prototyping and reliability.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Compose RAG + generation + sending with approvals.

Tool‑Using LLMs (Function Calling, Structured Outputs)

Models that call APIs and emit JSON/XML schemas.

Why it matters: Moves from text to action.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Fetch segment lists, create assets, and push to ESP safely.

Evaluation — Generative & Human‑in‑the‑Loop

Text Metrics (BLEU, ROUGE, METEOR, BERTScore)

Automated quality measures for generated text.

Why it matters: Compare drafts quickly before human review.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Select best appeal drafts prior to QA.

Image Metrics (FID, Inception Score, CLIPScore)

Assess realism and alignment of generated images.

Why it matters: Quantify visual quality.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Select creative variants for ads/social.

Audio Metrics (MOS, PESQ, STOI)

Perceived and objective speech quality metrics.

Why it matters: Ensure clarity for TTS/voice messages.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Evaluate donor thank‑you audio quality.

Human‑in‑the‑Loop Evaluations

Human assessment for alignment, usefulness, and safety.

Why it matters: Final guard against subtle errors.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Review marquee appeals and policy‑sensitive content.

Infrastructure — Retrieval & Orchestration

Vector Search / RAG Indexing (IVF, HNSW, PQ, ScaNN)

Indexing strategies for fast, accurate similarity search.

Why it matters: Right structure = speed + recall.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Low‑latency retrieval of donor knowledge during generation.

Knowledge Bases (Graphs, Ontologies)

Structured domain knowledge used with or without RAG.

Why it matters: Improves grounding and consistency.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Enforce donor/program terminology across content.

Orchestration Tools (Ray, Dask, MLflow, Kubeflow, Airflow)

Parallelism, experiments, and pipelines for ML.

Why it matters: Scalable, reliable operations.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Run nightly scoring DAGs and track all models.

Model Compression (Distillation, Pruning, Quantization, Weight Sharing)

Techniques to shrink models for cheaper serving.

Why it matters: Lower latency and cost without losing too much quality.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Serve assistants economically at scale.

Responsible & Ethical AI

Fairness Metrics (Equal Opportunity, Demographic Parity, Disparate Impact)

Ways to quantify fairness across groups.

Why it matters: Detect and mitigate inequity.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Audit response models for parity before rollout.

Bias Mitigation (Pre/In/Post‑Processing)

Approaches to reduce bias at data, model, or output stages.

Why it matters: Improves equity and compliance.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Re‑weight training data; constrain models; post‑process scores.

Interpretability (SHAP, LIME, Integrated Gradients, Attention Viz)

Explain local/global model behavior.

Why it matters: Build trust and find issues.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Show why a household was targeted; highlight drivers.

AI Regulation (EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC)

Frameworks and standards for AI governance.

Why it matters: Procurement‑friendly, audit‑ready AI.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Map each use‑case to risk class and required controls.

Safety & Security (Red‑Team, Adversarial Robustness, Jailbreak Defenses)

Hardening models against misuse and attacks.

Why it matters: Protects brand and data.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Probe prompts, sanitize inputs, and enforce policies.

Frontier Research

Self‑Play / Emergent Agents (AlphaGo, AlphaZero, Multi‑Agent RL)

Agents improve by playing themselves; complex behaviors emerge.

Why it matters: Inspires sequential decision strategies.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Research for multi‑touch donor sequencing.

Autonomous Agents & Swarm Intelligence

Multiple agents coordinate toward goals.

Why it matters: Robust exploration and coordination.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Divide work across targeting, copy, QA agents.

Neurosymbolic AI (Hybrid Logic + Learning)

Combine neural models with symbolic reasoning.

Why it matters: Reliability plus reasoning.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Rule‑aware reasoning over donor policies.

Efficiency (Low‑Rank Adaptation, Sparse Attention, Green AI)

Techniques for efficient training/serving.

Why it matters: Reduce cost with minimal quality loss.

Nonprofit/Squark usage: Use LoRA and sparse attention to scale responsibly.

Put these concepts to work

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