AI Fundraising for Nonprofits: Embracing the New Frontier
Embracing change and adapting to new trends is crucial for long-term fundraising success. Your nonprofit likely has experience improving how it fundraises, especially as the digital age has advanced. However, the technological frontier keeps advancing, and the most current trend in the nonprofit sector is fundraising artificial intelligence (AI).
AI fundraising offers many benefits, but it comes with a learning curve. Fortunately, in this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know to get started with this process, including:
- Fundraising Artificial Intelligence FAQ
- Top Ways to Tap Into AI Fundraising
- A Note on Using Fundraising AI Responsibly
- Steps for Choosing AI Fundraising Tools
- DonorSearch’s Industry-Leading Nonprofit AI Solutions
By embracing AI fundraising, your organization can prepare for a brighter future—which is quickly becoming the present, since 58% of nonprofits leverage AI in their communications and 68% use it for data analysis as of 2024. Let’s dive in!
Fundraising Artificial Intelligence FAQ
Making the most of AI fundraising for your organization will require some basic knowledge of what AI is, how it works, and how it applies to nonprofit work. Let’s go over some common questions about fundraising artificial intelligence to begin.
What is artificial intelligence?
Artificial intelligence refers to a computer’s ability to “think” like a human. AI tools can perform tasks like processing and analyzing data or generating content with a high level of accuracy and efficiency.
As you learn about AI, you’ll likely come across the term “machine learning.” This refers to the process an AI tool goes through to gain its intelligence and improve that intelligence over time. Machine learning involves processing a large amount of data through a mathematical model called an algorithm. For instance, the popular generative AI tool ChatGPT gained its knowledge by processing a large dataset of text from books, articles, and internet content.
Although AI tools are built to have human-like intelligence, they’re not sentient or autonomous tools, and they can’t replicate human emotion or bring personal experiences to their insights. This is why it’s vital to maintain oversight any time your nonprofit uses AI and collaborate with your tools rather than replacing human jobs with them.
What are the primary types of AI tools?
In the nonprofit space, you’ll most often come across two types of AI tools:
- Generative AI: These tools create written or visual content in response to prompts. ChatGPT is a well-known example of a generative AI tool, as is DALL-E, which generates images. Some nonprofit-specific solutions in this category include Momentum (similar to ChatGPT but trained on nonprofit sector data) and ProspectView Online 2 by DonorSearch (which creates individualized prospect reports).
- Predictive AI: Predictive AI tools process and analyze datasets to generate predictions or suggestions for the future. DonorSearch Ai is the most advanced machine learning tool available to nonprofits, and it evaluates prospect research data to identify the most promising major donor candidates for your organization. Other popular predictive AI tools include Tableau and Google Cloud Smart Analytics.
The best AI fundraising strategies incorporate both types of tools. Once you collect data and analyze it with predictive solutions, apply the results as you create informed, tailored content aided by generative AI tools.
What role does AI play in fundraising?
There are dozens of ways AI can help your nonprofit improve its fundraising strategy. Most critically, it allows you to:
- Save time and money by allowing you to work smarter, not harder, on your campaigns.
- Automate mundane tasks so you can focus on more involved activities that require human oversight.
- Personalize the supporter experience through segmentation and tailored outreach.
- Provide accurate and actionable insights to maximize fundraising effectiveness.
- Level up your marketing efforts via high-quality content that resonates with its target audience.
- Tap into exciting new donation methods while still improving your existing campaigns to maximize donor engagement.
- Measure your organization’s impact to help you monitor progress over time.
Think of fundraising AI tools as another member of your nonprofit’s team. The right platforms will increase your organization’s capacity to make a difference in your community by bringing new insights and capabilities to the table.
Top Ways to Tap Into AI Fundraising
Now that you understand the basics of AI fundraising, you’re probably wondering how exactly to use artificial intelligence at your nonprofit. Here are some of the top use cases to get you started.
1. Screen Your Donors and Research Prospects
An important aspect of fundraising is being confident in your donation asks. Understanding potential donors’ wealth and philanthropic backgrounds helps you raise money more efficiently, build relationships with key players in your community, and ultimately reach your major gift fundraising goals.
One of the best ways to use AI in fundraising is to enhance your prospect research processes. Once you identify potential donors with a strong giving capacity, philanthropic history, and affinity for your mission, an AI-powered predictive modeling tool (such as DonorSearch Ai) can prioritize your prospect list according to how likely each individual is to respond to outreach, make a first gift, and become a long-term supporter of your nonprofit.
With these data-driven insights on your side, you can take on donor cultivation and stewardship tasks with confidence, designing strategies that you know will resonate with individual prospects and focusing your efforts on the most probable potential donors.
2. Personalize Donor Communications and Donation Asks
Today’s donors expect a high level of personalization from the organizations they support. They want to feel seen and valued for their contributions, and they want the nonprofits they care about to meet them where they are.
With AI fundraising tools, you can quickly and easily personalize donor communications. For instance, you might use predictive AI tools to learn about your supporters’ communication preferences and the types of outreach they’re most likely to respond to. From there, you can segment supporters based on shared characteristics and use generative AI tools to help you create tailored messages for each segment.
Additionally, each donor wants to be asked to give in a way that appeals to them—including the appeal method, contribution amount, and gift designation. Using artificial intelligence to learn about individuals’ needs and expectations helps scale your efforts and make more successful donation requests.
3. Create Content to Promote Your Efforts
No matter how long you’ve been fundraising, you know that half the battle is spreading the word about your campaigns. This is another instance in which generative AI can be especially helpful, as it can develop all types of marketing materials, such as:
- Website page copy and blog post drafts
- Email and direct mail messages
- Social media graphics, captions, and posting schedules
- Presentation slides and agenda talking points for live meetings
- Professional-looking videos to use across all of these platforms
When using AI to create content, remember to always have a human member of your team revise the tool’s outputs. This will help ensure your messages stay on brand and contain personal touches that donors resonate with. You should also check that your AI tools prioritize accessibility through factors such as ensuring adequate color contrast, adding alternative text to images, and generating closed captions for videos (or edit these aspects yourself).
4. Evaluate and Optimize Your Fundraising Campaigns
Part of being an effective fundraiser is learning from past successes and challenges. Fundraising artificial intelligence can help you evaluate previous campaigns by examining:
- Campaign data, producing metrics that demonstrate key patterns and trends.
- Campaign budgets, helping you determine how to allocate future funds to achieve the greatest ROI.
- Supporter feedback, giving you insight into how your community perceived past campaigns and how they might react to future strategies.
- Donor journeys during past campaigns, letting you identify the most effective marketing channels and the best fundraising methods.
When you critically evaluate your past fundraising campaigns, you can see what has and hasn’t worked and make plans to boost your success in the future.
5. Offer Website Support Through Chatbots
Imagine someone decides to donate on your organization’s website outside your operating hours. They arrive on your donation page intending to give generously, but in the middle of the donation process, they have a question that halts their progress. With no one to get in touch with, they abandon your form, saying they’ll come back later (which may or may not actually happen).
You can avoid situations like this by adding an AI-powered chatbot to your website. These bots can answer common questions for website visitors and direct them to the resources or information they’re looking for. The great thing about a chatbot is that it’s there around the clock, ready to help your website visitors whenever they decide to visit your site.
6. Automatically Process Donations
Some AI tools can help your nonprofit process payments securely, capture important donor information, generate tax receipts, attribute donations to specific campaigns or programs, and even detect fraudulent activity.
By using AI to track donation flow, you can help your organization manage its finances effectively, use donations for their intended purposes, and free up time to focus on recognizing and stewarding donors, all while reducing the risk of human error.
7. Identify Grant Opportunities and Write Proposals
Grants are an important funding source for many nonprofits. However, it takes time to identify opportunities that match your organization’s needs and write a standout proposal for each grant that aligns with the funder’s requirements.
AI can speed up the process, helping you find grant opportunities along with their eligibility criteria and deadline information. Some tools can even help you draft your proposals and give you suggestions to make your organization stand out from the crowd.
8. Plan and Manage Fundraising Events
Fundraising events are a chance for your community to come together, participate in fun activities, make memories, and give generously. But pulling off a successful event is often easier said than done!
An AI tool built for events can help you streamline many parts of the planning process, from brainstorming to budgeting to marketing. These solutions can also help you gather and analyze attendee feedback after your event is over. This way, you’ll have insight into what participants liked and disliked about your event so you can adjust your strategy in the future.
9. Leverage Automation in Your Workflows.
A major selling point of AI is that it can save your team precious time and energy by automating the mundane tasks in your fundraising workflows, such as inputting data, managing your social media presence, or taking notes in meetings.
When you automate these “busy work” tasks, you have more time for fundraising work that matters most—identifying donors, developing relationships with them, requesting gifts, and retaining their support long-term.
A Note on Using Fundraising AI Responsibly
While nonprofits can use AI in many ways and the benefits abound, many people are still concerned about the impact it could have on society. For instance, there are still unanswered questions about how AI affects data security, whether it leads to unintentional discrimination, or if it could negatively impact the human workforce.
For your nonprofit to tap into the benefits of AI while maintaining trust with its community, you need to be aware of these concerns and commit to use fundraising AI responsibly at your organization. This idea comes from the Responsible AI Framework developed by the Fundraising.AI collaborative. Its tenets include:
- Privacy and security
- Data ethics
- Inclusiveness
- Accountability
- Transparency and explainability
- Continuous learning
- Collaboration
- Legal compliance
- Social impact
- Sustainability
Continuous learning is especially important as you dive into fundraising artificial intelligence. Stay on top of best practices and monitor updates in the AI regulatory landscape so you can make the most of your tools while doing right by your community.
Steps for Choosing AI Fundraising Tools
At this point, you’re likely ready to begin shopping for your own AI solutions. Follow these steps to ensure you invest in tools that will help you achieve the greatest ROI for your mission while meeting all of your organization’s needs:
- Determine your needs and budget. Before you start looking at different tools or providers, determine your organization’s goals for incorporating AI into its fundraising strategy. For instance, maybe you want to strengthen your major giving program or submit more grant proposals. You should also decide how much money you can invest in AI tools at this stage.
- Identify and evaluate your options. Next, review lists of top AI fundraising solutions or ask trusted nonprofit colleagues for their recommendations. Read up on each tool, its features, its pricing model, and user reviews. You should also look into the providers you’re considering to make sure their values align with your nonprofit’s.
- Commit to leverage AI responsibly. Before adopting any tools, consider creating an AI policy for your entire organization to follow, outlining how you’ll maximize benefits and minimize risks associated with fundraising AI. Then, share these guidelines with your community to promote transparency and trust.
- Implement your chosen AI tools. Once you’ve chosen one or more AI fundraising tools (remember that the most effective strategies combine generative and predictive AI), it’s time to get up and running! Work with your provider to understand the ins and outs of each feature and ask questions as needed so you can integrate your new platforms into your workflows without a hitch.
- Train your team to use your new solutions. Hold informational sessions for staff members on how to use your chosen tools, working with providers as needed. Emphasize that the goal of using AI in your fundraising strategy is to make your processes more streamlined and efficient so your team can focus on the uniquely human aspects of nonprofit work.
Purchasing fundraising artificial intelligence solutions isn’t just a one-time investment—it’s a fundamental shift in how your nonprofit works to raise money for its mission. Use the buying experience as an opportunity to position your organization to get the most out of its chosen tools and to leverage AI responsibly from the beginning.
DonorSearch’s Industry-Leading Nonprofit AI Solutions
At DonorSearch, we’ve built on our success as the leaders in nonprofit prospect research to provide top-of-the-line AI fundraising options for organizations across sectors. We want to help your nonprofit seamlessly and responsibly integrate AI into its prospecting and donor outreach processes to streamline time-consuming aspects and future-proof your efforts.
DonorSearch offers several nonprofit-specific solutions that leverage generative and/or predictive AI, including:
- DonorSearch Ai: A comprehensive machine learning solution that provides custom predictive modeling of prospect research data for more effective outreach prioritization and donor pipeline creation.
- Enhanced CORE: An entry-level version of DonorSearch Ai with point-and-click visualization and standardized predictive models to help you get started more easily.
- ProspectView Online 2: A generative AI-powered prospect reporting tool that summarizes the most important and actionable information on each potential donor you identify to guide cultivation.
- DSAi + Momentum: A fundraising content generation tool that helps you create tailored donor outreach materials based on DonorSearch Ai insights.
With accurate insights from DonorSearch’s predictive and generative AI tools on your side, your team can be confident in your outreach, relationship-building activities, and donation requests. But don’t just take our word for it—check out the following video to learn how the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Foundation used DonorSearch Ai to help secure critical major gifts from donors they had previously overlooked in their prospecting efforts:
Final Thoughts
Today’s nonprofits are exploring a new frontier—the world of fundraising AI. Use the information above to determine how to tap into these new technologies at your organization and make a bigger difference in your community. And if you’re still unsure about how to get started or have any questions along the way, don’t hesitate to reach out to the nonprofit AI experts at DonorSearch!
For more information on AI fundraising, check out these resources:
- AI for Nonprofits: Everything Your Org Needs to Know. Discover even more uses for AI at your nonprofit, in fundraising and other operations.
- Generative AI vs. Predictive AI: A Complete Nonprofit Guide. Dive deeper into the distinct benefits and use cases of the two major types of AI solutions.
- Fundraising Intelligence: Using AI to Enhance Philanthropy. Learn how to develop a framework for data analysis and application that integrates AI with your existing software.
