By Nick Ellinger, Moore
The mission of Microsoft circa 1980 was “A computer on every desk.” It’s rare to have a statement that is both ambitious and lowballing.
It’s time to update this. It’s time for AI agents on every fundraiser’s desk to make their lives easier and their donors happier. AI agents are there to pursue tasks that you give them by interacting with their environment autonomously (that is, on their own) and using these inputs, plus memory and reasoning, to perform tasks. Here are some.
Democratizing donor knowledge
Right now, the most sophisticated fundraising nonprofits aren’t messing around with RFM segmentation. They use AI on billions of data points to best predict who will give, in what channel, in what amount, and on what journey.
Case in point: a health care organization tested RFM segmentation versus a modeled solution. They saved $315,000 by using the modeled list. But most organizations can’t afford to save $315,000 on a mailing just like I can’t afford to save $30,000 on a new Aston Martin – it’s out of scope.
No more. With agentic services, you can now upload your list (or hook it directly into the modeler) and instantly get back the people on your file who are most likely to become major or mid-level donors, complete with a customized email you can send them right now. All for a subscription where you pay only for the records you use, making it affordable for small organizations to use the tools the big ones do.
Real 1:1 communications
A highly customized communication might have five different variables that are selected for and customized on. However, in my book The Perfect Donor Communication, I go through every letter of the alphabet and show a variable that nonprofits can profitably select by and customize to, whether cause connection or ethnicity or faith or ZIP code (something had to be the Z).
Humans can’t hold these in their heads at once; an AI can.
Imagine getting a letter or email from a nonprofit that feels like it was written just for you… because it was. AI can take a core story, program, or narrative and create the perfect donor communication (hey, that’s a catchy phrase!) for each individual receiving it.
The drudgery
Physicists have proven that the total disorder of every system increases over time. Less well known is that they were watching a CRM when they made this observation. A long-time donor can be turned into a new one simply because someone accidentally typed in .con instead of .com.
AIs excel in important, boring tasks like data cleaning, shortcutting your pivot tables and eliminating the need to remember whether this query should be an INNER JOIN or LEFT JOIN.
But more than that, agents are going to change your relationship with data. You can now have conversations with your data to learn more about patterns that interest you and explain concepts to your leaders. They can also switch from you having to pull insights to pushing them to you, highlighting when investment in a new audience is paying off or a new potential higher-value donor has entered your file.
A modern fundraiser is a juggler across many domains, audiences, and channels. The new AI agent platform can equip them for that world, taking the easy things off their plate and allowing them to create unique 1:1 communications for their most valuable audiences. If we are going to unlock a new age of American giving, it will start here, with advanced tools for all.
