Harness Your Fundraising Power With AI

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Harnessing
the Power of AI

AI is a powerful tool for nonprofit organizations to utilize in fundraising. By leveraging both types of AI, Traditional AI and Modern AI, nonprofits can optimize their fundraising strategies and impact, enhance organizational efficiency, personalize communication, and build custom predictive models to acquire, segment, upgrade, and retain donors. As nonprofits consider implementing AI, it is important to:

Clarify goals and data capabilities.
Develop relevant infrastructure and skills.
Examine ethical considerations.

Start with a pilot project.
Monitor and share the ultimate impact.

With thoughtful consideration and application, AI has the potential to greatly advance nonprofit fundraising capacity and success.

Harnessing the Power of AI

In Prediction Machines, Ajay Agrawal and his colleagues suggest that AI has transformative potential for business strategies because predictions have become cheaper. They argue that leaders can gain a competitive advantage with AI: “Prediction machines enable managers to move beyond optimizing individual components to optimizing higher-level goals and thus make decisions closer to the objectives of the organization.”

While AI applications may seem daunting to fundraisers, they may already unknowingly use AI, as many common programs utilize AI discreetly or as a customer-facing feature. It is important to note that implementing AI will not replace individual workers but instead give fundraising teams more time to embrace new or different responsibilities that advance their organization’s mission. AI does not replace the vital personal connections with prospects and donors, and, in fact, with AI applications supporting other efforts, fundraisers should have more time to invest in these personal interactions. With the power of AI, nonprofit organizations can automate and optimize their fundraising practices to more effectively engage donors and make a more significant impact.

As Mustafa Suleyman describes in the book The Coming Wave, Gen AI represents the arrival of systems capable of performing tasks across numerous domains: “A more appropriate term for the technologies of the coming wave is ‘omni-use,’ a concept that grasps at the sheer levels of generality, the extreme versatility on display. Omni-use technologies like steam or electricity have wider societal effects and spillovers than narrower technologies. If AI is indeed the new electricity, then like electricity it will be an on-demand utility that permeates and powers almost every aspect of daily life, society, the economy: a general-purpose technology embedded everywhere.”

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