Erin Crotty, VP Customer Success, boodleAI
The widespread adoption of ChatGPT means that AI is here to stay –– and this is good news, especially for nonprofits!
The future of fundraising is bright, and getting brighter. More and more people are giving, especially via online channels, and perhaps best of all, more people in every generational cohort are giving! There’s still challenges, of course, especially with boomers giving way to millennials and Gen Z as the primary giving cohorts, but they’re definitely overcome-able ... especially with this powerful technology we’re all starting to get our hands on.
Let’s get this out of the way first: AI is here to help.
Some people have felt a little leery about it, and that absolutely makes sense. It’s new, it’s not immediately clear how it works, and it’s associated with “big data”, which has a reputation for sketchiness.
The truth is, AI is just a tool. Like any tool, it can be used for good or bad. And I’m excited to be a part of a team at boodleAI that’s helping nonprofits use it to do so much good!
So let’s talk about it –– how can AI actually help out with your fundraising?
–– It makes prospecting so much more efficient
Traditional fundraising is based on a numbers game: you get your message in front of as many people as you can given your budget, and hope that enough of them convert so you can make your funding goal. But this is inefficient, and is a heavy lift in terms of resources.
Affinity-driven AI can make this process much better by helping you find the people who are already really into your cause and who have the capacity and interest in giving to it. That way you can reach out only to those people, and don’t even bother about trying to convert other people to your cause. To put it another way, AI turns all your prospects into low-hanging fruit, and tells you exactly how to reach out to them.
–– It gives you a writing starting point
We have ALL had fundraising writers block. I remember spending hours crafting fundraising letters as a front line fundraiser. Would this resonate? How is my letter different from others piling up in mailboxes? For a long time I kept a box of my favorite letters in a box for inspiration before I could sit down to write. (Truth be told, I might still have the box in storage).
The good news… tools like ChatGPT can help get you started with message and can even be asked to update tone, audience and author voice to give you a fantastic foundation to add your own nuances and organizational flavor.
–– It lets you do smarter outreach
Along those lines, AI can also help you make informed decisions about your outreach. You see, besides just giving you insights into people’s behaviors, affinity, and giving capacities, AI can also help you figure out exactly how they prefer to be contacted. For instance, you might be sending out mailers (we love our mailers in the nonprofit industry!) when your people actually respond much better to email. Knowing this can help you make smarter decisions about how you reach out to people, which will make your outreach more effective and also save you money!
It doesn’t stop there though: you can also use AI to get a sense of the kinds of messages donors on different tiers of your giving table need to hear, and even what kinds of messages are going to help steward them up the tiers of your giving table. You can even get really granular and use affinity-driven AI to help you identify who among your donor pool is likely to become a major gift donor, or even find “hidden gems” –– aka prospects who are ripe for major gifts –– who you would have otherwise never even considered!
–– It elevates your stewardship
One ongoing issue with stewardship is that of scale: there’s only so many people that a development director or a development team can get to know. And while it would be nice to be able to do wonderful, completely personalized stewardship for every single one of your donors, that’s just not feasible ... unless you’re using AI, of course.
AI helps you both scale and personalize your stewardship, letting you reach out to more people with a high degree of specificity and personalization, meeting them exactly where they’re at. It’s the closest thing you can get to actually knowing each and every donor as a personal friend –– ånd it helps bring your stewardship to the next level virtually overnight.
There’s so many ways to apply AI to fundraising that no post could cover them –– but at its core, AI is a way of letting you get to know your prospects and donors on a level that was never possible before. Whether you’re using it to elevate your stewardship, save your development director’s bandwidth by letting AI do the heavy lifting, or finding new audiences you’d never even considered before, it really is an essential tool for any modern fundraiser.
As you dip your toe into this brave new world, please keep your eyes open for something called “hallucinations” … what our Chief Data Officer refers to as the liar, liar, pants on fire response. As we develop our tools, we do something called “tuning”. Without any tuning, our system lied… a lot. Hallucinations are a VERY common issue with LLMs. Strong data providers are teaching products the difference between right and wrong. And like most toddlers, our LLM is currently only listening half of the time.
Bottom line – AI is here to stay and poking your toe in the pond will help you get familiar just a little bit more quickly. It’s kind of like driving in DC - once you do it a few times, the circles make a lot more sense. There has been tremendous innovation, particularly in the past 6 months. The best way to learn what you need and what will actually improve your work is to Google your needs and add AI to your search. It’s as simple as that!! I hope you will take some time to look at what the right tools might be for you.
