AI Skills for Social Impact & Engagement Practitioners (L1 - Foundations) - February 2027

This foundational training course for social impact & engagement practitioners helps build confidence, AI literacy, and ethical grounding to responsibly and effectively use AI for common social impact functions including research, data analysis (qualitative and quantitative), stakeholder engagement, evaluation, SROI, and report preparation.

The course will be delivered online over Zoom. To participate in exercises, participants will need to have access to an AI LLM such as Chat GPT, CoPilot, Claude, etc (free versions should be sufficient).

Who it’s for

• Social impact professionals

• SIA practitioners

• Social performance personnel

• Gender, equity & social safeguard consultants

• Community & stakeholder engagement specialists

• Local government staff

• Projects or organisations in the infrastructure, energy & development sectors

Core learning topics:

Common AI terms & capabilities

• AI tools and use cases for social impact & stakeholder engagement functions

• The strengths/limits of LLMs

• Basics of prompt engineering and agentic AI

• Risks & ethical issues around AI & social impact

• Responsible practice elements such as AI data use policies, informed consent, and data sovereignty considerations

• Social impacts of AI data centres

What past participants say about Social Impax training courses:

• 5.00/5 star average Trainer rating.

• “Wonderful and very supportive for social impact practitioners"

• “I felt encouraged by the risk-conscious approach to AI application you outlined. It helped me as I'm shaping a more nuanced understanding of how I work with AI, where it offers the greatest benefits and where I need to be more cautious and ensure more robust approaches to risk management and human interface”

• “I loved this course it really helped me realise everyone is using AI and I need to get over my reluctance to work with it”

• “Thankful that it wasn't pitched at absolute beginners, but still could be useful to anyone regardless to their current level of AI usage. Loved the interactive parts…. Thought it was fantastic! Thanks so much!

Past course participants have also expressed they particularly valued the practitioner networking opportunity in our courses, especially the peer discussions and learning about how other social impact practitioners and organisations are applying AI in their own work.

Course Technical Level:

This is a L1 course.

Guidance to our course levels:

Level 1 (L1): Foundational AI

Level 2 (L2):  Application, prompt engineering

Level 3 (L3):  AI agents, orchestration, automation

ADD-ON OPTIONS

Participants also have opportunity to package discounted registration for an additional 2-hour skills workshop on Wednesday 10 February 2027 9:30am-11:30am. This training workshop will bring practical guidance - through exercises in a group lab setting -to help practitioners build the ability to apply AI to common social impact and stakeholder engagement functions, using prompt engineering of Large Language Models (LLMs).

This will include:

• developing a theory of change

• stakeholder mapping and analysis

• developing stakeholder engagement plans

• monitoring & evaluation frameworks

• data analysis (qualitative and quantitative), including of public comment datasets

• SROI/social valuation, and

• impact reporting.

Prompting guidance will be given for supporting social impact practice rigour and ethical considerations (including equity, inclusion, sovereignty, quality assurance and fairness).

Frameworks for critically assessing the quality of AI outputs will also be provided.

What this training is not:

This is not AI coding or software training — it’s practical guidance for practitioners who want to use AI confidently and understanding its application in the social impact practice context