How AI could wreck the future of fundraising

I’ve written elsewhere about a moment early in my career that marked a turning point. Let me paraphrase:

My mentor at the time was looking at some fundraising copy I’d written. He was clearly frustrated. Then he said the words that turned out to be the magic words: The mistake you keep making is you think it’s about how good your writing is. But that’s not what fundraising is about. Fundraising is about connecting with donors. Good writing is fine, but if you aren’t connecting with donors, you’re going nowhere.

He’d no doubt been telling me this for months. But until that moment, I didn’t have ears to hear.

That little snippet of truth — if you aren’t connecting with donors, you’re going nowhere — was the most important piece of the fundraising puzzle for me. Everything else followed that.

It seemed like a magic moment.

There was nothing magic about it. My mentor had been saying it for months, in different contexts and in different words. It wasn’t until something in my mind finally locked in and and became an operational truth for me.

All that repetition leading up to that moment — was it all a big waste of time? Was I a numbskull for not getting it the first time I heard it?

No.

That’s how learning works.

It doesn’t become yours until you’re ready to make it yours.

Basic fundraising advice is available to you right now. It’s in book after book, blog after blog, seminar after seminar. Yet it doesn’t get through to us until some combination of life experience, repetition, and imprinting make that happen.

It’s terribly inefficient. But it’s human.

And that’s one of the things about AI use that worries me. A well-trained AI fundraising tool already “knows” that truth about connecting with donors. It may or may not use it well, or at all. But it knows.

Whether the person operating the tool knows it or not.

And that person may never go through the extended and sometimes painful process of learning that basic truth. Because the tool just spits it out for them.

So 10, 20, 30 years from now, when that fundraising professional is becoming a grizzled old hand, they won’t really know what’s going on in the fundraising they create. They may be good at operating whatever the tool has become by that time.

They may legitimately be considered an “expert.” But not really.

They won’t know good fundraising in their heart, mind, and bones.

Today, there are a lot of fundraising professionals who are good at their work because they’ve written thousands of appeals in various media. They know this stuff. When they see AI BS that misses the point, they can fix it.

But the experts of the future? Will that have that deep, ingrained knowledge? Or will they be examples of the scary future Mark Phillips describes in his Fundraising Insight newsletter at AI won’t fix fundraising:

My fear is that AI could further turbo-charge the enshittification of the sector.

(Go and read this newsletter now.)

Here’s my advice to young fundraising professionals who are using AI tools a lot:

Break free from the tool now and then. Go untethered. Go slow. Go frustrating. Do it the old way. It’s the only way to deeply ingrain what makes fundraising work.

Then you can oversee your AI tools. You can see through their hallucinations and BS. You can give them better input. You can fix it when it goes wrong. Because the experts of today won’t be around. It’ll be up to you.

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.