3 Ways AI Can Help Grow Your Donor Relationships
Nonprofit development and donor stewardship are hard work but critical for sustainable growth. By investing in and fostering your relationships with donors, your organization can receive larger, more consistent gifts over time. Generous major and mid-level donors identified and cultivated through development work can completely change how your nonprofit pursues its mission.
But while focusing on donor relationships is a crucial aspect of any successful, big-picture fundraising strategy, it also can prove quite time-consuming.
Today, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning for nonprofits offer a new approach for growing organizations, drastically reducing the time and energy needed to kickstart donor relationship-building. AI tools can efficiently work alongside the current prospect research and growth efforts of small and mid-sized organizations to help reach new levels of success. Simply put, AI can give all of your stewardship efforts a boost, helping your team better direct their attention and more thoughtfully focus on personal donor interactions.
Let’s walk through three ways AI can help nonprofits grow their relationships with donors.
1. AI helps you make asks at the right times.
Your fundraising communication cadence plays a major role in your relationships with donors at all giving levels.
Too few touchpoints and you risk losing out on donations or inadvertently causing your donors to forget about your mission. But including donors too frequently in many different appeals can give them a bad impression of your organization, make them frustrated by your communication, or completely drive them away.
Rather than spamming donors with every new campaign or appeal introduced by your organization, you should aim for greater precision (think quality over quantity). This means only including individual donors in appeals at the times when they’re most likely to give and are interested in hearing from you—and this is where AI comes in.
AI tools learn from the entirety of your nonprofit’s fundraising data to show your fundraising team exactly who would be receptive to appeals at specific times. When integrated into your fundraising strategy, this can result in smarter, more personalized ask cadences, which you can then supplement with more frequent messages of gratitude and impact, event invites, and other non-financial asks.
AI essentially verifies donor communication plans to make sure your fundraising team utilizes valuable analytics when looking to appeal to donors in individualized ways.
Since communication is at the core of your donor relationships, any steps you can take to communicate more intuitively and organically with supporters are worth it. With consistent, well-paced appeals, you’ll create the right touchpoints for growth without overwhelming donors or missing opportunities for additional gifts.
2. AI helps you proactively find stewardship and growth opportunities.
Potential major gifts or donation upgrade opportunities are often driven by prospect research—studying past behaviors, publicly available data, and current connections to make assumptions about individuals’ giving capacities and motivations. These findings can then directly guide your cultivation and solicitation processes.
AI tools can work hand-in-hand with the prospect research process to supplement audience-building activities and unveil new outreach opportunities.
AI can measure individuals’ likelihoods to give major or mid-level gifts by finding deep patterns in your fundraising data and then using them to project predictions for future behavior. For example, our tools at Dataro can measure a donor’s likelihood to:
Give the equivalent of a major or mid-level gift within the next 12 months
Bequest your organization a gift in their will
Join your monthly/recurring giving program in the near future
Increase their recurring donation amount in the near future
We’ve seen development teams use Dataro’s tools to quickly generate lists of likely major or mid-level donors. They then compare this list to their own list of prospects generated through in-house research.
This approach has two key benefits: confirming your research by highlighting prospects who appear on both lists, and unearthing valuable prospects who you might’ve missed. This allows you to strategically point your team to exactly where they’ll be most likely to have an impact and start building more value in your database as you identify missed prospects.
3. AI helps you identify churn risks in advance.
Recurring giving is an important way for nonprofits to both secure reliable revenue and keep donors engaged and invested. But if you have a recurring giving program, you must actively manage it to reduce costly churn.
While robust donor management tools are invaluable for tracking and learning from your relationships over time, they can’t necessarily help you predict churn in advance.
AI can help you proactively identify at-risk donors who are likely to churn out of your recurring giving program—a task that’s nearly impossible to do efficiently or accurately through traditional data analysis. The value for donor relationships is immediate, namely, saving recurring donations (and their sustained relationships) that you would have otherwise lost.
This also means that your team can instead focus on re-engaging at-risk donors and growing your relationships rather than expending time and energy identifying them. From there, you can easily reach out to get back in touch, express your gratitude, and offer new engagement opportunities, all without relying on vague assumptions or wasting your team’s time.
The scalability of development work is a major barrier for many organizations. This is why so many growing nonprofits hold off on large-scale campaigns, prospect research, and other activities that are so crucial for taking their missions to the next level.
But today, nonprofits have more options than ever before and should feel empowered to drive their missions forward with confidence. Specifically, AI and properly-scaled research support services can help any nonprofit professional fundraise and build relationships like a longtime pro.
Tim Paris, CEO and Co-Founder
0468 629 276
About Tim
Tim is the co-founder and CEO of Dataro. He holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience and a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology. Following roles in academia and startups, he co-founded Dataro in 2018 alongside schoolmate David Lyndon. The company’s mission is to help charities improve fundraising using the latest machine learning and predictive modeling techniques.