4+ tips for using AI to build your fundraising

Hello, AI Tool. Please write a direct mail appeal for our organization.

If you use AI like that, you will get a powerful demonstration of the old adage, Garbage in, garbage out.

Which is exactly what’s happening in some parts of the fundraising world.

More and more and more garbage.

You don’t have to do that. You can use AI to build decent fundraising.

But you’ve got to do it right.

I’ll let you in on a secret. I sometimes use an AI tool when writing fundraising. Sparingly, and in specific conditions.

And I’ve learned four must-dos if you want AI to help you produce effective fundraising:

1. The AI MUST be trained in fundraising principles

Seriously. Don’t even think about using a tool that is not trained on fundraising. You’ll get something that sounds like a press release with a tin cup stapled to the end.

That’s because the AI has read a million corporate websites and not a whole lot of fundraising. (And frankly, the fundraising it has read is mostly terrible.)

This is the hard part. Your AI fundraising tool needs to know a lot about what works in fundraising. Otherwise, you’ll get garbage.

2. You must oversee the work with expert supervision — and fact-check everything

No matter how excellent and complete the AI is trained on fundraising, it is going to make mistakes. It will ignore things you know it has been told. It is going to use that flat, affectless voice that makes AI writing so puzzlingly irritating. And it is likely to hallucinate facts and make strange errors no actual human would ever make. And, of course, there will be stretches of AI Slop, where it gets oddly repetitive and abstract.

You need someone who understands writing and who really knows fundraising to review what the AI gives you. No need to focus on grammar – it’s good at that. But specifically to make sure it doesn’t include made-up stuff, doesn’t ignore fundraising principles, and make sure it sounds human.

3. Supply it with all the information it needs

You wouldn’t hand a human copywriter a three-sentence prompt and expect a brilliant appeal. And AI tool needs good direction too. In fact, it needs it even more, because there are things you can get away with not telling a human writer, because they already know certain truths.

A human writer will (I hope) tell you if you haven’t given them all they need to create a good campaign. An AI tool will just run with what you give it, even if it’s incomplete. It’ll make stuff up.

Give the AI tool a quality brief. Who’s the donor? What’s the program? What’s the specific offer? What’s the story you want told? What’s the tone? When is the deadline? Who’s the signer?

Here’s more on building a useful brief for fundraising: The magic document that improves your fundraising and helps you love your colleagues.

4. Pay attention to how you prompt the AI

Prompting is a craft. The way you ask the AI for something really matters for what you get back. Vague prompt, vague result. Specific prompt with examples, tone direction, and clear instructions — much better result. Learn from your mistakes and from the AI’s mistakes.

And here’s the tricky part: this stuff keeps changing. What worked six months ago might not work as well today. New models, new capabilities, new quirks. You have to keep learning. Fundraisers who get good at prompting have a serious edge.

A sort of fifth hint I find useful: Don’t give your AI tool the entire assignment. Let it do a limited assignment. Such as:

• Have it read the interview transcript for the stories you want to include, and ask it to put them in narrative form. (But be sure to check the original, because sometimes it misses the best parts of the story.)
• After you’ve written the call to action, give it to the tool and ask it to write several versions of it. Then scatter the best ones through your copy.
• When you’re approaching your final draft, show it to the tool and ask it to critique it. (Some people say to specifically tell it to “roast” your copy. It often finds things you should have included.
• If you have a number audience specific versions you need to include, have the tool do that. Be sure to specify that it keep it simple. If you don’t, it might give you entirely unique copy for each version. Which you then have to carefully edit.

More posts on AI and fundraising.

Over at Moceanic, we’ve built (and continue to refine) an AI fundraising tool. It’s called Copy Koala. It has a great track record of producing superb response in direct mail and email fundraising. It combines powerful training, smart input and prompting, and expert human editing. And the cost to use it is shockingly low. It might be right for your organization. If you have budget and the authority to spend it, consider setting up a quick online meeting with Sean Triner to see if Copy Koala might be right for you.