AI for Fundraising: 4 Use Cases for Your Nonprofit

When you’ve done a task or been responsible for a project for a long time, it can be hard to identify methods for doing it differently, even if there are common hold-ups or hiccups in the process.

For nonprofits, fundraising can be one of those activities. It is crucial to your operations, and even if you’ve polished your methods over the years with help from a consultant or software tool, fundraising still takes up a wide margin of your team’s bandwidth. When you make tweaks that reduce time spent on current activities, you can reinvest that saved energy into your mission. In this guide, we’ll walk through several common nonprofit fundraising activities where AI can remove friction and support your organization in accomplishing its mission.

Grant writing

The grant application process is often hugely labor-intensive. Think about the steps in the process. You have to research grantmakers, assess fit, write the proposal, and complete any post-award reporting that’s required. Grants can take up a lot of your team’s bandwidth. 

With strategic use of AI, your nonprofit can free up capacity and still reap the benefits of this very important funding source. 

Here are a few ways to incorporate AI into your grant application process:

1. Research funders: To set your nonprofit up for the best chance of success, begin any grant application process by researching giving patterns, mission, and potential connections that could introduce you directly to the grantmakers. You can use AI-powered grant databases to research funders and quickly find best-fit opportunities.
2. Proposal writing: Getting a first draft of your grant proposal, including summaries of your organization’s objectives and outlines, is often the hardest part. With the support of a dedicated grant writing AI platform, you can overcome that hurdle and hone the proposal from there. However, FreeWill’s guide to AI for grant writing cautions that “you need to collaborate with AI when writing grant proposals, not fully outsource your work to it,” since grant writing is a complex process.
3. Analyze data: Once you’ve been awarded a grant, the funding organization may have specific reporting requirements, which you can leverage AI to help accomplish. AI can also dive into your own grant application data to help you figure out what worked and what wasn’t as successful. 

When using AI in any circumstance, drafting a clear, step-by-step prompt is important, so you have the best possible output. It may take a few tries, but remember, working with AI is a collaboration, not outsourcing work completely. 

Prospect research

Receiving prospect research data can be both exciting and overwhelming. There are so many new potential supporters to reach out to—but how do you know where to start? That’s where AI for prospect research comes in.

Predictive AI tools can help prioritize prospects, so you start with individuals who are most likely to give based on factors like their wealth and affinity for your cause. This also saves your team time on digging through every entry and helps you act quickly when you’re ready to turn a list of prospects into loyal donors who are excited about your mission! 

Remember to review AI outputs to make sure they make sense, or use a tool that has built-in verification. 

Donor engagement

Creating relationships with donors is vital to your nonprofit’s success—and AI cannot replace the human element needed to forge connections and build trust. However, it can manage the rote tasks that support a robust donor engagement strategy so that you and your nonprofit’s team can focus on the donors themselves.

AI can help your team in the following ways:

• Personalization. According to Bloomerang, “AI-driven donor segmentation can help you enhance your targeted marketing materials. For example, segmenting donors by reason for giving allows you to reach out to each group with case studies and testimonials that speak to their philanthropic motivations.”
• Automate and create cadences. In addition to the personal touches of calls and face-to-face interactions with donors at events, keeping your donors in the loop with planned communication cadences keeps your nonprofit and mission top of mind. With AI’s help, you can select the frequency and channels (including phone calls and event invitations) that will resonate most with your donors.
• Chatbots. A donor-facing, AI-powered chatbot on your website can serve as a first point of contact for answering common questions about your mission and donation options. For example, a website visitor can learn about current volunteer initiatives or be directed to your recurring donation form. Here’s an example.

AI can be a useful addition to your nonprofit’s toolkit for all phases of the donor journey and to support donor retention. Think through any manual tasks that could be automated, so you can spend more time connecting personally with donors.

Fundraising campaign marketing 

Whether your organization is launching a campaign to shore up your annual fund or fund a capital expenditure, you’ll want to ensure your message throughout the campaign is clear, consistent, aligned with your mission, and compelling to supporters. 

AI can support your campaign through every step of your marketing strategy. It can help you:

• Understand your audience: After your team has determined the target audience for your campaign, generative AI tools can create personas and provide insights on raw data you’ve collected. Recent research is already showing that AI’s capabilities can reduce the time and financial investment needed for traditional market research in for-profit sectors.
• Draft a case for support: To communicate the need for donors to invest in your mission, start with a case for support. This is the thesis for your fundraising campaign. What will the funds raised in the campaign support, and why is it important? With an understanding of your target audience and goals, you can work with AI to tailor the case for support so it resonates with the donors and prospects you’re planning to reach out to.
• Create campaign assets: The emails, social media posts, and conversations you have with donors to generate excitement about the campaign should all be aligned with your case for support. By including your final case for support in AI prompts, you’ll receive better results that will contribute to a stronger message. 

AI can also run A/B testing on your messages to see what has a greater impact. By working with AI throughout the marketing process, you’ll set your campaign up for success. 

Best practices for AI

Anytime your nonprofit employs a new process that interacts with sensitive data or helps prepare donor-facing communications, do your due diligence, and AI is no exception. 

There are so many benefits to employing this technology but take the time to understand how any submitted data is used and kept safe. Your donors rely on your protection of their information. Using tools that safeguard data and being transparent about your organization’s use of AI will ensure your nonprofit remains trustworthy. 

Remember, even the best AI tools for nonprofits can occasionally hallucinate facts or miss the subtle nuances of your mission. Human oversight is always essential to ensure the end result is authentic and accurate.

The innovations that AI tools have brought to fundraising are exciting, and there are sure to be more as we continue to discover new capabilities for this technology that can further your mission and do more good in the world.