AI has found its way into every nonprofit fundraiser’s life whether we know it or not.
Nearly every technology platform and fundraising tool out there has implemented AI in some way. If they haven’t yet, they’re desperately trying to.
But many fundraisers still find themselves stuck.
How do I use AI for fundraising?
Is it even ethical?
What tools should I be using?
In chatting with many fundraisers considering using AI, there is a healthy level of fear. Fear of data security. Fear that all their messaging will become stale. Fear that every nonprofit will start to sound the same.
In a live LinkedIn conversation, Erik Tomalis and I discussed this exact topic.
You can watch the recording below, or keep reading to dive into this critical topic covering:
- The Current State of AI Adoption
- How Nonprofits are Adopting AI for Fundraising
- 2 Types of AI for Fundraising
- Simple Ways to Use AI for Fundraising Right Now
- Avid is the System to Equip You with AI for Fundraising
The Current State of AI Adoption
ChatGPT was released in November 2022, and AI evolution has exploded ever since.
The accessibility of AI tools has made it relatively easy for many for-profit companies to adopt AI into their workflows. According to McKinsey & Company, 78% of companies use AI in at least 1 business function.
This rapid adoption leads to many changes and challenges for leaders.
They report that many large companies are taking care to follow AI adoption best practices. A large for-profit business often has the resources to invest to understand these best practices, but most nonprofits don’t have this luxury of resources.
Many companies express difficulty hiring AI-related roles. This should be no surprise. AI is still brand new technology, and true experts are hard to come by.
The report also shares that most companies expect to be re-skilling their staff for the next 3 years to bring people up to speed on how to best utilize AI in their work.
These challenges are difficult for any leader.
When your nonprofit is already operating on limited resources, the challenges are even greater.
You can read McKinsey & Company’s full 2025 report on the state of AI here.
With all these challenges ahead, how do we practically start using ai for fundraising?
How Nonprofits are Adopting AI for Fundraising
Many nonprofits are actively discussing how to best use AI for fundraising, as well as many other aspects of their organization.
But practically implementing AI tools is a challenge.
Current Adoption of AI for Nonprofits
In a recent tech survey from the Chronicle of Philanthropy, they found that just 46% of nonprofits are actively using AI in their day-to-day operations.
That’s a far cry for the adoption rates of for-profit companies.
Even more of a surprise is how many nonprofits are planning to use AI in the future.
When the Chronicle of Philanthropy asked nonprofit leaders about their future AI plans, 77% said they expect to be active AI users in the next three to five years.
77% sounds like a large group. But framed another way, that means nearly 1 in 4 nonprofits don’t plan to adopt AI tools in the next 3 to 5 years.
At the rate that AI is evolving, a nonprofit who waits 5 years to adopt AI into their work is going to be left behind.
Why Are Nonprofits Hesitant to Adopt AI?
There are many reasons why a nonprofit may be hesitant to adopt AI, especially using AI for fundraising.
Many are worried about the security of their data and the privacy of their donors’ information.
Others have concerns about AI tools having inherent bias and losing the human connection in their messaging.
In my own conversations with nonprofit leaders, all these worries ring true. But they’re not necessarily deal-breakers when it comes to using AI tools.
In fact, I’ve heard many nonprofit leaders share that they want to use AI tools. They just don’t know how to get started.
This should be no surprise. A quick search for “AI” on G2, a website for software reviews, turns up 10,000 different AI solutions..
With the overwhelming number of options, it’s no wonder that adopting AI is such a challenge.
So where should a nonprofit begin? How can we start to use AI for fundraising?
2 Types of AI for Fundraising
There are many different types of AI tools.
G2 groups AI tools into 6 major categories:
- Conversational Intelligence
- Deep Learning
- Generative AI
- Data Science
- Machine Learning
- AI & Machine Learning Operationalization (MLOps)
When it comes to AI for fundraising, we recommend focusing on 2 of these types of AI tools: Machine Learning and Generative AI.
Machine Learning for Nonprofit Fundraising
Machine learning is a way of identifying patterns, relationships, or rules from data to perform tasks like classification, prediction, or optimization.
Practically for fundraisers, it’s a way to automate predictive modeling to tell us which donors we should focus on next in our fundraising efforts.
For example:
- Which donors are most likely to lapse?
- Which donors are most likely to give a larger donation?
- Which donors are most likely to respond to my next direct mail appeal?
The foundations of machine learning for nonprofit fundraising have been developing since the 1960s with the RFM model.
RFM stands for:
- Recency
- Frequency
- Monetary
Many direct mail fundraising models will use these 3 criteria to predict who is most likely to respond to an appeal.
Some of the earliest uses of the RFM model were by catalogers using a physical index card to track customer behavior.
Fast forward to the 2000s, and the RFM model started to become more prevalent and accessible—introducing many other variables into predictive modeling as well.
Today, machine learning automates this donor modeling process, leveraging hundreds of variables to determine which donors are most likely to respond to your next outreach.
A Few Technologies Leveraging Machine Learning
There are lots of fundraising tools that allow you to leverage machine learning to improve your results.
Fundraise Up
This powerful donation platform leverages machine learning and other AI tools to provide smart and dynamic gift arrays, reduce donation form abandonment, and even prevent fraudulent transactions.
Wiland and Donor Bureau
These tools both provide donor models to help you predict who might give next. Each of these can enrich your data to provide additional guidance on where to focus your fundraising efforts.
Generative AI for Nonprofit Fundraising
Generative AI is still brand new technology, popularized primarily by the release of ChatGPT in 2022. This type of AI is used for the creation of text, images, videos and more.
If you’ve used AI for fundraising in any way, it’s likely been a form of generative AI.
You can use generative AI tools for a whole host of fundraising applications:
- Drafting your next fundraising appeal
- Creating a series of social media posts from an article
- Summarizing notes from donor phone calls
The challenge of generative AI tools is that they’re only as good as how they’ve been trained.
This is why when you ask ChatGPT to write you a fundraising email, you don’t often get a high quality result.
The best use of generative AI for fundraising is when you’ve properly trained the tool on how to create effective fundraising content.
That’s why we’ve created a free resource called “How to Train ChatGPT to Write Better Fundraising Appeals.”
It walks through a step-by-step process to train ChatGPT and other generative AI tools on critical aspects of effective fundraising including:
- Your mission
- Your vision
- Your value proposition
- Key donor personas
- Words and phrases you commonly use
- Words and phrases you never use
A Few Technologies Generative AI for Fundraising
There are many tools that leverage generative AI that you can use for fundraising. The amount of tools using generative AI seems to be growing every day.
Here are a couple we’d recommend that you consider:
ChatGPT
It’s no surprise that ChatGPT is a powerful AI tool for fundraising. But there’s more to it than simply using a standard chat including custom GPTs, providing examples for it to learn from, and training it on your brand guidelines.
Avid
Avid is the fundraising operating system that uses multiple types of AI tools to add efficiency and effectiveness to your fundraising. It uses generative AI, trained on over 8,000 fundraising a/b tests, to help you create whole campaigns in minutes.
Simple Ways to Use AI for Fundraising Right Now
Finding ways to adopt AI for fundraising can feel overwhelming.
To make things easy, we’ve identified 2 primary next steps you can take to start using AI in your day-to-day work.
Train ChatGPT to Write Better Copy
As mentioned previously, generative AI tools are only as effective as how they’ve been trained.
To start getting better quality copywriting from ChatGPT, you need to train it on how to write effective fundraising copy in your voice.
A simple prompt to start with is this:
Hi! I want to provide you with a brand voice that you can remember for future tasks. Let’s call it the [My Organization] brand voice. I’ll share many details over the course of the next few messages. Please confirm that you understand.This simple prompt will allow you to train ChatGPT on how to write in your voice. You can then ask it later to write copy in your brand voice.
Some of the most practical applications of using ChatGPT include:
- Drafting fundraising emails
- Drafting direct mail appeals
- Creating social media posts for a campaign
- Creating a blog or article from an outline
- Reformatting articles into ebooks for new email and donor acquisition
To get started, grab a free copy of this resource on How to Train ChatGPT to Write Better Fundraising Appeals. It will walk you through a series of prompts to get your ChatGPT trained to write more effective fundraising copy.
Analyze More Data Using Gemini
If you’re using a Google Workspace, you have Google’s AI tool called Gemini built in. It’s a very powerful tool to help with a lot of tasks, and can specifically help you when it comes to data, donor lists, and segmentation.
Gemini is a generative AI tool. Used in tandem with Google Sheets, it can help you with a number of fundraising tasks:
- Identifying trends in your donor data
- Answering specific data questions
- Creating charts to visualize your performance
- Generating audience lists from a larger data set
For example, I created a spreadsheet with some essential donor data including contact information, first and last gift date, first and last gift amount, and each donors’ current giving level.
With some simple prompts, Gemini was able to tell me:
- How many mid-level donors I have in a specific geographic area
- How many mid-level donors have given so far this year
- The average gift amounts of each key donor level
It even generated a list of all my mid-level donors who have not yet renewed their donation this year, giving me a targeted outreach list for reactivation.
Avid is the System to Equip You with AI for Fundraising
With all the different AI tools available, it can be overwhelming to know where to begin.
Even if you find a tool you like, no fundraiser wants more tools that don’t work with the rest of their technology.
Avid is an AI-powered fundraising operating system.
It brings all your tools together.
It uses AI to power your fundraising intelligence.
It uses machine learning to identify trends, problems, and opportunities.
It uses generative AI to build campaigns for you in minutes.
Want to see how Avid can help you instantly implement AI for fundraising?
See how Avid can help you use AI to bring more efficiency and effectiveness to your fundraising.
