Better.AI Data

Better.AI reads your own donors, gifts and events and answers questions about them. To do that, some of your information is processed by OpenAI, which acts as our service provider. This article explains exactly what is sent, when it is sent, and what is never sent at all.

Nothing is sent until something asks for it

There is no copy of your database at OpenAI, and no sync that runs in the background. Your records stay in your BetterUnite account. When you ask a question or press a button, we look up the records needed for that one request, send only those, and use the answer.

Turning Better.AI on does not send anything. It records that you have agreed to these terms. The first information leaves your account when you ask your first question.

What is sent, and when

WHEN YOU DO THIS	THIS IS WHAT GOES TO OPENAI
Ask a question in the Better.AI panel	Your question, and the records needed to answer it. If you ask about donors who lapsed last year, the names and giving figures for those donors are sent. If you ask how much you raised in March, a total is sent.
Generate a donor summary or cultivation plan	That one donor's contact details and giving history. One donor at a time, never your list.
Overnight recommendations	The figures behind a single finding, so that one sentence can be written about it. The finding itself is made by our own software before anything is sent.
Open How you compare	Nothing. These figures are calculated inside BetterUnite and involve no AI at all.
Open Event health	Nothing. Every signal is a measurement against your own past events, calculated inside BetterUnite.

The recommendations are worth understanding, because they surprise people. Better.AI does not read your database looking for interesting things. Our own software runs a fixed set of checks, in plain database queries, and finds the donors and events that meet them. Only then, and only for the findings worth showing you, are the figures sent so that a sentence can be written explaining them.

That is why a recommendation you disagree with can always be traced to a number rather than to a guess.

What is never sent

Card numbers, bank details and payment credentials. These are held by our payment processors and are not readable by Better.AI at all.
Passwords and login details.
Bulk exports of your database. There is no path that sends your donor list, your full giving history or your contact file as a whole.
Attachments and documents stored against your records.
Anything from another organization. Every request is limited to the account you are working in.

How long anything is kept

Chat conversations are kept at OpenAI. Your questions and their answers are held there as a conversation so that follow-up questions make sense. If you ask "how much did she give last year" after asking about a donor, the conversation is what allows "she" to mean anything.

Summaries, plans and recommendations are not. Each is a single request with no conversation attached. The result is stored in your BetterUnite account, where you can read it as often as you like, but it is not retained as an ongoing thread.

OpenAI processes this data on our instructions as our service provider. What OpenAI does with it on their side, including how long they hold it and what they may use it for, is governed by their own terms rather than by ours, and those terms can change. Read OpenAI's terms and policies for their current commitments.

How you compare, and other organizations' data

The benchmark figures compare your organization against others of a similar size. Those comparisons are calculated inside BetterUnite from organization-level totals. No donor information is involved on any side, and nothing about them is sent to OpenAI.

A comparison is only shown when the group behind it is large enough that no single organization can be identified from the result. Where a group is too small, we show you a note saying so rather than a number. That is also why your own figures contribute only as part of a total, never as something another organization can see.

Who can see Better.AI results inside your account

Better.AI follows the permissions you have already set. Somebody who cannot open a contact record cannot obtain that donor's summary by asking for it, and a question about records a user cannot reach returns nothing rather than an answer.

Turning it off

You can stop using Better.AI at any time, and you can ask us to switch it off for your account entirely. Once it is off, nothing further is sent. Summaries and recommendations already generated remain in your account as ordinary records until you delete them.

To turn it off, or to ask anything this article does not answer, contact support@betterunite.com.