Leveraging AI in Your Digital Fundraising

AI is everywhere right now, and for good reason. Fundraising teams are under pressure to do more with the same resources, and we’re all looking for ways to expand capacity, reduce manual effort, and stay focused on what matters most: building stronger donor relationships. As a digital fundraising expert, I’d like to share a few practical ways you can use AI to enhance your online giving strategy. The goal here is to augment your current processes, not to replace the expertise and personal connection you and your staff bring to every interaction.

Here are five areas where AI can make an immediate impact:

• Identifying who to target
• Creating compelling content
• Personalizing the ask
• Automating the messaging
• Evaluating performance and opportunities

Identifying Who to Target

AI is great at evaluating large datasets and distilling trends. This can be especially powerful when working with your database of constituents. It takes a lot of reporting and number crunching for a human to come up with lists of supporters that are ripe for a specific type of fundraising campaign, but AI can surface these insights in minutes.

For example, within Raiser’s Edge NXT®, you can ask Chat for Blackbaud AI to compile a list of constituents who made multiple one-time donations last year. With the list it provides, you can launch a targeted sustainer campaign. You could also ask for a LYBUNT (donated last year but not this year) or SYBUNT (donated some year but not this year) list and target that group with an appeal related to this year’s fundraising goals. And that’s just the beginning. Once you get started, you’ll find new ways AI can expedite and mature your data segmentation practices!

Creating Compelling Content

Have you ever struggled to add pizzaz to your donation form intro content? You need to be concise, lighthearted but with a tinge of urgency, and articulate about your goals all at the same time. Then, there are the images: how do you find the perfect image that tugs at the heartstrings but doesn’t look cheesy? Generative AI can provide a strong starting point to work from. You’ll need to tweak the output to get something that’s just right, but it’s usually easier to refine and trim content than it is to write from scratch! You can use the same process to create an email or text appeal.

Personalizing the Ask

You know a lot about your constituents and (if you have time) you use some of that data to make sure your conversations and outreach messaging are relevant to each person. AI can surface insights from your constituent data that may be difficult or time‑consuming to identify manually. Then, you can prompt AI to use that rich context to draft an email or text message that will resonate with each constituent.

For example, AI can surface the fact that Mabel attends your gala every year, so it will mention that in the message it drafts. AI may also note that Antoine has a target donation ask range of $200-350, so it will update the donation form URL in his message to ensure that the suggested ask amounts start at $200, not lower. These personalized messages mean deeper engagement, leading to longer relationships with your donors.

Automating the Messaging

Let’s take AI a step further and look at some possibilities for using agentic AI. Agentic AI can support multi-step workflows by performing tasks repeatedly, based on a data trigger. Our engineers describe this as an automated “worker” that updates your query on a daily, weekly, monthly, or even hourly basis and then performs the task associated with that query. Consider the types of campaigns you don’t currently have bandwidth for that you could actually launch with the help of automation: things like upcoming event reminders, happy birthday emails, or an invitation to your donor portal for all new recurring donors. This really opens the door to more repeat engagement.

Evaluating Performance and Opportunities

As I mentioned earlier, AI is great at evaluating large datasets and distilling trends. Imagine how useful that could be in helping you evaluate your online giving performance. We’re working on a feature for Online Giving in Raiser’s Edge NXT that uses AI to assess your donation form performance. We provide several data points for it to reference and compare against similar organization data. Then, it develops a narrative summary that shows how you’re doing and where you might want to improve. These are valuable insights you can share with leadership to show how your new donation forms are performing.

There are so many ways—big and small—that AI can impact your online giving processes and performance. Whether you’re just dipping your toe in and want to have it help you draft donation form content, or you’re diving all the way into automating campaigns, the future of digital fundraising is wide open. You can achieve so much more (in less time!) by thoughtfully exploring and embracing AI as a powerful partner in your fundraising work.