4 Inventive Ways AI Can Help Revolutionize Fundraising

Fundraising presents a constant challenge for nonprofit professionals. It’s key to find ways to streamline and simplify the process, leaning on tools that bolster fundraising outcomes to fuel your mission. 

So whether your nonprofit is launching a large-scale capital campaign or looking to improve your annual charity golf tournament, having the right technology in your back pocket can be a game-changer. Artificial intelligence (AI) has incredible power to improve your nonprofit’s fundraising. Here’s how:

1. Improved Data Hygiene & Management

Clean, organized data is crucial for effective fundraising. Your fundraising strategy is only as good as the data you have supporting it, so if your donor information is disjointed or incomplete, your strategy will likely fall short.

Data hygiene is more important than ever and should be a priority for nonprofits of all types and sizes. Good data hygiene ensures you have easily-accessible, complete data that aids in robust audience segmentation and reporting. 

AI can automate the processes of data cleaning, integration, and maintenance. Nonprofits often struggle with fragmented and outdated donor databases, which can lead to missed opportunities. AI algorithms can continuously scan databases to identify and correct errors, such as duplicate records, incomplete information, and outdated contact details. By standardizing data formats and integrating information from multiple sources, AI ensures that the donor database remains accurate and up-to-date. 

Your CRM may have some baked-in AI features. Depending on its capabilities, Double the Donation suggests using AI to:

• Suggest new tags to better organize data
• Easily compile useful data reports
• Catch any data anomalies and correct human errors
• Seamlessly share data between different systems (i.e. your CRM and your accounting software)

This streamlined data management not only enhances the effectiveness of fundraising campaigns, but also saves time and resources that can be redirected toward mission-critical activities.

2. Enhanced Donor Targeting

Your nonprofit likely has a specific audience that makes up your donor base. For example, if your nonprofit focuses on animals, your target audience is pet owners and animal lovers. If you focus on environmental concerns, you likely focus your efforts on the eco-friendly population. Defining your nonprofit’s target audience for fundraising allows your team to hone in on the most promising prospects, increasing efficiency and outcomes. 

Traditional approaches often rely on broad-based approaches that may not resonate with all potential donors, but AI can analyze vast amounts of data from different sources, such as social media interactions, donation history, and demographics, to identify patterns and trends that help you better target donors.

Perhaps you’re planning a charity auction to support a youth sports organization. You can leverage AI to:

• Identify key prospect groups, such as the families of current team members, local golfers, and people who have attended your events in the past.
• Create segmented communications for each outreach group based on their interests, preferences, and motivations.
• Track which communication strategies and groups yielded the best responses and curate future messages accordingly for the youth sports organization.

By helping determine which types of supporters you should focus on based on campaign-specific details, your nonprofit’s mission, and specific donor traits, AI can enhance your donor-targeting efforts. 

3. Streamlined Workflows

Maintaining a thriving fundraising strategy takes a lot of work, including daily tasks. While necessary, menial tasks can take time away from more meaningful, mission-critical activities. One of the best ways AI can help your nonprofit’s fundraising efforts is to remove routine, time-consuming work from their plates. Instead of processing credit cards and sending receipts, staff can spend their valuable time on meaningful fundraising activities, such as stewarding donors and connecting with sponsors. 

AI can streamline fundraising workflows by automating routing activities and tasks, such as: 

• Scheduling volunteers quickly and easily, based on each individual’s availability, interests, skills, abilities, and other criteria. 
• Answering frequently asked questions from supporters. While a bot doesn’t replace personal communication, using AI to send automated messages to simple questions like “Do you take credit cards?” can save a ton of time and effort.
• Processing payments and automatically sending emailed donation receipts.
• Keeping your fundraising website up-to-date with registered participants and sponsors.
• Providing reminders for donor touchpoints, such as check-in phone calls, chats over coffee, or follow-ups on requests.

AI has the potential to save your nonprofit hundreds or even thousands of hours of staff time (which also means monetary savings) in your fundraising workflow. 

4. Accurate Fundraising Predictions

One of the most critical, but most challenging, parts of nonprofit fundraising is accurately predicting or forecasting fundraising outcomes. AI can revolutionize this area, with predictive analysis tools and insights that were previously unavailable, leading to more precise forecasting and strategic planning.

The benefit of using predictive analysis in nonprofit fundraising is that it leverages AI to forecast donation patterns, optimize campaign strategies, and enhance donor engagement, ultimately increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of fundraising efforts.

Predictive analysis helps your fundraising team future-proof your strategies and plan for long-term growth by forecasting trends such as:

• The overall health of the economy
• Donor lifetime value
• Churn rate analysis

For example, let’s say a nonprofit used AI to analyze three years of data, identifying a trend of increased holiday donations linked to social media campaigns. Using these insights, they planned a targeted holiday campaign that saw a 25% increase in donations compared to the previous years.

As AI continues to advance, it has the potential to further enhance predictive capabilities by integrating emotional sentiment analysis and real-time economic forecasting, helping nonprofits achieve sustainable growth and greater impact.

Final Thoughts

AI is changing the world we live in, with the potential to make nonprofit fundraising simpler, more streamlined, and with better results. It doesn’t have to be complicated, and you likely don’t have to start from scratch. Review your current CRM to see if there are any AI features included, and do some research on how they might apply to your nonprofit. If you’re looking to make a change in CRM, compare platforms that offer AI in some capacity to better understand which features make the most sense for your nonprofit to leverage. AI is here to stay, so find ways to harness its power to do good!