Nonprofits in every industry are experimenting with AI to improve their operations. When it comes to fundraising, nonprofit professionals have discovered strategies to improve brainstorming, marketing scale, and efficiency.
If your nonprofit is looking to get started with AI or expand its use of AI in fundraising, we’ll explore five use cases for how to include AI in your strategy.
1. Major Donor Prospecting
Identifying major giving candidates requires extensive data analysis as your team examines wealth and philanthropy data across your entire donor database. EverTrue’s guide to AI fundraising shares a few ways these tools can speed up this process:
- Identify commonalities of previous major donors. Creating a profile of the traits, behaviors, and resources your current major donors have can help you assess strong major giving candidates. AI can analyze all past major donors to identify patterns in their behavior and create a baseline to compare prospects against.
- Measure a wide range of data points. AI can quickly retrieve and organize data related to donors’ wealth—such as stock holdings, real estate purchases, job titles, and more—and philanthropic behavior—previous major gifts to other nonprofits, board membership, engagement with your nonprofit, and more. This allows you to rapidly qualify each prospect to decide whether they’re worth having your human major gift officers pursue.
- Predict donor behavior. By comparing major giving prospects’ data against past major donors’ giving journeys, AI can tell you which of your major donor candidates are the most likely to respond to outreach, become repeat donors, and make a major gift sometime in the near future.
Along with identifying new major giving prospects, AI can also help you stay up-to-date with your current major donors. Run routine checks on your top supporters to discover if their wealth capacity has increased or if their interests have changed to help refine your stewardship efforts.
2. Donor Communication
Generative AI tools can help you create donor communications at scale. However, be cautious about how you implement AI to ensure your messages still have an authentic, human touch. A few tips for using AI in donor outreach include:
- Use nonprofit-specific AI tools. Popular AI tools, such as ChatGPT, are trained on the internet in general. To create focused content that understands fundraising and nonprofits’ needs, use AI platforms created specifically for nonprofits instead. For some of these tools, you may even be able to share past communications as examples to emulate.
- Refine AI outputs. Always review AI content before sharing it with an external audience. For example, you might ask AI to create five fundraising appeal templates, each tailored to a different audience. Your team would then review the AI content to adjust for branding, ensure each template aligns with its intended donor segment, and add any original touches that make your content stand out.
- Use for brainstorming, not creation. In addition to direct communication, you might also experiment with AI to create other types of written content. Be cautious about how you use AI in other types of communications, especially when discussing topics your nonprofit should be an expert in. For example, rather than asking AI to write a series of blog posts about your mission, instead ask it to brainstorm topics. Then, turn its suggestions over to subject matter experts on your team for the actual writing.
Treat AI as a co-creator rather than your new communications team. Use it to start the writing process by brainstorming, creating templates, and starting first drafts that your team will edit to ensure your heartfelt message comes through.
3. Campaign Forecasting
Plan your nonprofit’s budget and better allocate resources by using AI to predict campaign outcomes. Graham-Pelton’s guide to predictive fundraising analytics explains how nonprofits can share past event and campaign data to help AI make reasonable assumptions about similar fundraisers you plan to hold in the future.
When asking AI to forecast campaign results, consider external factors that may not be present in your data. For example, the previous year, your nonprofit’s mission may have received a sudden swell of social media attention, which has since faded. This spike may throw off future AI predictions unless it is specifically accounted for.
Additionally, ensure you have extensive, clean data to share with your AI prediction tool. For example, if you are attempting to forecast the fundraising outcomes for the year-end 2026 giving season, but only have data for 2025 and 2024, the AI may assume a simple growth curve or just average the two years. The larger the data sample you can share, the more accurate and detailed the AI’s predictions will be.
4. Donor Journey Management
Moving donors forward in their giving journeys at scale is challenging, even with support from software solutions. AI streamlines this process by analyzing donor behavior to alert fundraisers when a supporter is likely ready for an upgrade.
For example, AI might pick up on a donor who starts regularly attending events or take note that a supporter who has reliably given the same amount every month for two years might be willing to increase their donation amount.
Use AI to strategically improve donor relationships by assessing these and other giving behaviors. Then, decide which signals AI can act on independently and which your team should handle. For example, you might have AI automatically send upgrade requests to supporters who have made consistent donations for a set amount of time, while high-value supporters who increase their engagement might be flagged to your major giving officers as potential prospects.
5. Administrative Assistance
AI can handle a wide range of everyday administrative tasks for your nonprofit, freeing up your team’s time. For example, AI can:
- Handle manual data entry
- Take meeting notes and provide summaries
- Schedule follow-up meetings
- Send automatic reminders
- Create new tasks as directed
You may also use AI to assist with other research and content creation tasks outside of donor outreach. For example, many nonprofits experiment with AI grant writing tools to quickly analyze grant databases and identify high-value opportunities, while other organizations use AI to assist with budgeting projections.
Research AI tools built for nonprofits, consider your needs, and start experimenting with the wide range of platforms available to engage donors and streamline operations. Outlining a clear goal and a short list of prospective tools will strengthen your pitch to your board to start exploring AI fundraising.
About the Author
Hannah Davis is the Senior Manager of Growth Marketing at EverTrue. She works with nonprofit advancement teams to help fundraisers connect with more donors in meaningful ways. Before joining EverTrue, Hannah worked in higher education advancement at the University of Connecticut Foundation, leading annual giving communications and donor engagement efforts. Her experience in fundraising fuels her passion for helping nonprofits modernize their outreach while staying donor-centric.