There’s a category of AI tool gaining traction in the fundraising world right now. The pitch: let AI handle your donor outreach to certain audiences. My first reaction was confusion then frustration. “What fundraiser thought this was a good use of AI?” Then I thought “why someone would buy it?” To be fair, this particular tool has been pitched recently by a few tech companies as a solution for mid-level donor pools.
There is an argument to made that mid-level donors are genuinely hard to manage at scale. They’re easy to neglect for any size organization but that is the real problem. What people fail to remember about this group of committed partners is that they are your future major donors. The relationship you don’t invest in today is the transformational gift you never see. If you’re letting a bot keep them warm, don’t be surprised when someone else shows up in person and closes the gift you were managing with a drip sequence.
The real question is why you can’t get to them yourself. Maybe your portfolio is too large. Maybe you’re under-resourced or a one person shop. Perhaps you’ve been in reactive mode so long that proactive relationship-building feels impossible. All are legitimate but they’re yours to solve and a chat bot buries them deeper for you. So let us look at what this really means for us as human people. The uncomfortable part: sometimes you are the problem. I have been the problem. I have let donor relationships go dormant, I’ve been buried enough in the operational work that made me feel I could excuse the most important work… the actual human conversations.
In times like this the answer for me was never to find a smarter way to avoid it. It was to humble myself, name what I had done wrong and get back to the work. In short, take action myself.
We talk constantly about moving from transactional to transformational relationships. You cannot automate transformation. Donors at any level know when someone is genuinely present with them and they remember when someone is not. Believe me, I know… and so do you. Don’t lie.
This isn’t just a fundraising problem that was simply an example for context. We all have our own. Whether you’re in sales, ministry, medicine, or just trying to show up better at home, healthy automation is good. However, at some point you have to draw a line in the sand between what a tool can do and what only you can do. I guess I just found mine