What AI Can — and Can’t — Do for Donor Relationships

Nonprofits are under pressure to raise more with fewer donors as first-time donor retention hovers around 19%, according to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project. 

“That's painful to think about,” Jon McCoy, co-founder of We Are for Good, said during the session, “Retention Is a Love Language: Using AI to Communicate With More Care (Not Just More Often)” at last week’s Fundraising.AI Global Summit. “And Virtuous did this study recently that shared that even if a 5% lift in retention happened in your donor group right now, that can turn into 20% revenue growth in just five years. So the small shifts that we can make in focusing on the people that are already giving to us is where it's at.”

Though relationships remain the heart of fundraising, nonprofits are testing ways to boost donor engagement and strengthen those relationships with artificial intelligence (AI). While AI can support fundraisers, it can’t replace them, nonprofit leaders and technologists shared at the event. From content creation to stewardship, speakers offered practical examples of where AI adds value — and where only authentic human connection will do. 

Use AI to Support Donor Communications — Not Replace Trust

AI shouldn’t be used to churn out generic or inaccurate copy, Michael Mitchell, vice president of advancement at Feed the Children, said. Using AI to write copy based on constituent interviews works only if a human verifies the output.

“These are ethical storytelling ideas,” he said during “Retention Is a Love Language.” “And the challenge is we're just applying them to AI. We're not going to use AI to sensationalize. We're going to make sure that this story presents a person in a position of strength and dignity in their own story. And even doing some work to create custom GPTs with things like “evaluate this story for how well it's going to follow our internal principles of ethical storytelling” and letting AI even self-police itself is another way to do that.”

AI also should not replace human gratitude. Despite her arthritis, Amina Mohamed, founder and executive director of Cameras for Girls, handwrote thank-you notes and enclosed a photo taken by a new student to demonstrate impact. Though she used AI to help craft the language, each note was unique to the donor.

“One of our newest corporate sponsors wrote back after he got my card,” she said. “And he took a photo of his wall, and he framed this 4x6” photo in a frame and hung it on a wall. And he said, ‘That wall is now reserved for all the photos you're going to continue to send me’ — and that built trust.”

Use AI to Scale Donor Engagement — Not Sacrifice Accuracy

AI can also help nonprofits repurpose stories across channels and test new formats more efficiently.

Candid, for example, launched a LinkedIn newsletter, using AI to draft content from recycled thought leadership pieces. The effort has already attracted 8,000 subscribers since its summer debut.

“It ended up being a lot less work for us than actually creating these from scratch,” Kate Meyers Emery, senior digital communications manager at Candid, said in the session, “AI Meets Authenticity: Creating Social Content That Resonates.” “… We wouldn't have taken on the project had we not had AI to do that heavy lift at the beginning.”

Still, oversight is critical. Emery cautioned that AI tools can misinterpret context. Grok, the AI behind social media platform X, consistently flags smaller nonprofits as hiding financial information because they file shorter 990-N forms and passes judgment on organizations based on their overhead ratio. In another case, Gemini, Google’s AI assistant, misreported the paint color of the House of Seven Gables’ building after mistaking an April Fool’s Instagram post for fact.

“I think it was a really good warning … that you need to make sure you know what AI is saying about your nonprofit,” Emery said.

Charity: water is also experimenting with generative AI to produce campaign videos at a fraction of the cost of traditional shoots. The shift comes as the organization moves away from trying to cultivate current donors on social media and instead focuses on brand awareness. 

“When we use it like that, we will mention it in the copy or the caption or in the video — ‘We've used AI to create this,’” Brady Josephson, vice president of marketing and growth at Charity: water, said in the same session. “That may change, but for right now, in our desire to not hoodwink people and try to lead the way in transparency, we're trying to say it pretty clearly.”

Authenticity Still Wins

AI cannot replace the human touch — just like how Mohamed’s handwritten notes made a real connection AI could never replicate. 

“If you lose what makes you human and you react only to what AI is able to do because you have a stressful time, or you're trying to get something out the door — whatever it is — you've lost the battle,” she said. “So AI for us, I call it my best friend because it helped me be much more productive, but [it’s] not a substitute for that humanity that we also need to be top of mind.”

Dmitry Koltunov, founder and CEO of Arbor, suggested the 10-80-10 rule during the “AI Meets Authenticity” session. For a piece of authentic-based content, this tactic requires a human to create a strategy with your audience and goals in mind for the first 10% of the process. AI handles the next 80% of the process and then a human adds final touches for the final 10%.

“And the most important thing to do there is to keep the imperfections, to keep all the things that make you you and to keep the humanity of all the stuff,” he said, “but make sure that the message is exactly the one that you want to say, and it hits the audience that you want to hit, and it addresses the goals that you want.”