Several years ago, I sat with a development director late one evening. The office was mostly dark. A handful of desk lamps glowed in an open floor plan that had clearly seen better days. She had her laptop open to a spreadsheet that looked like an eyechart of graphs and statistics.
“This,” she said, gesturing to the screen, “is what it feels like to love your donors and still not know what is going on with them.”
She was not inexperienced. She was excellent at her job. But like so many fundraisers, she was working with an invisible blindfold on.
She could see gifts. She could not see the story behind them.
She could see recency, frequency, and amount. She could not see the quiet signals between gifts that reveal who is leaning in, who is drifting, who is questioning, who is ready for a deeper relationship.
Most nonprofits live here.
Yet, donors are known, recognized, and remembered in most other aspects of their lives.
→ Their streaming services anticipate what they want to watch.
→ Their music apps learn the contours of their moods.
→ Their coffee shops celebrate their birthdays.
→ Their shopping experiences and social feeds are tailored to their preferences.
They are used to being treated as unique individuals with specific styles, preferences, and desires…used to being heard. Then, they open an email from a nonprofit they love and receive the exact same message, at the exact same time, in the exact same voice as tens of thousands of other people.
No wonder something feels off.
I do not believe we are facing a crisis of generosity. I believe we are facing a crisis of relevance, recognition and meaningful engagement.
And that is exactly where AI – specifically, human-centered AI for nonprofits – becomes not a threat, but a tool that lets us return to what fundraising was supposed to be in the first place.
Too often, I hear fundraisers stall before they even begin using AI – not because they lack curiosity, but because they feel stuck on questions that don’t have simple, tidy answers.
After eight years working at the intersection of AI and generosity, I can almost anticipate the questions before they’re spoken. They surface in every room, from small community nonprofits to the largest institutions in the world.
In this post, we’ll explore these five common questions about nonprofits and AI directly. I’ll walk us through each of them together.
1) What is the Best AI Tool for Nonprofits?
2) Can AI Help Us Understand the Donor Behind the Data?
3) Will AI Replace Human Connection?
4) Will AI Replace Fundraisers?
5) How Can I Start Using AI in My Nonprofit?
1) What is the Best AI Tool for Nonprofits?
When leaders ask if ChatGPT is free for nonprofits, the short answer is that there are free versions and paid tiers. But the more important answer is that the real cost is not financial. It is ethical and operational. You should ask what you are using it for, how you are protecting your data, and whether it is advancing your mission or distracting from it.
As for “the best AI tool for nonprofits” or “the best AI tool for fundraising,” I have become increasingly convinced there is no single answer. The best tool is the one that fits your culture, your strategy, and your data reality.
This is exactly why we put together several free guides, such as:
→ Nonprofit AI Field Guide (5 Essentials for AI Success)
→ How Ready Is Your Nonprofit for AI?
Instead of dictating a stack, they help leaders diagnose where they are, clarify what they need, and start small without getting lost in hype.
If you want the best AI tool for your nonprofit but feel wary of chasing shiny objects, those are the kinds of resources I point you to first. Not because they answer every question, but because they help you ask better ones.
Before you adopt a single new tool, get clear on your readiness, your ethical posture, and your mission-first strategy.
2) Can AI Help Us Understand the Donor Behind the Data?
So, can AI help reveal the people…the stories…behind the gifts and the data housed in our CRM?
With AI, this possibility comes to light.
I recently visited a safety-net hospital housed in a nondescript building in the middle of an impoverished community. They had adopted Virtuous CRM+ after years of wrestling with a patchwork of systems that could tell them what donors gave, but rarely why.
Within a few months of turning on Virtuous Insights, our AI-powered prospecting tool, the team began to see things they had never been able to track before: patterns, clusters, and subtle changes in engagement that had been invisible in their traditional reports.
One donor in particular stood out. For six years, she had given the same amount on the same date, never opening emails and never attending events. In most systems, she would have appeared as a low-engagement, low-priority supporter – someone easy to overlook.
But the machine learning model inside Virtuous Insights surfaced her as something different. It wasn’t a change in wealth or a spike in activity. It was a meaningful pattern in her giving that hinted at something more.
Her consistency was not transactional. It was emotional.
The team reached out with a simple, human question: “We’ve noticed that you give faithfully on the same date every year. Is there a story behind that day?”
Her reply arrived within hours. The date marked the anniversary of her son’s transplant. Her annual gift was a ritual of gratitude and grief.
For a long moment, the staff simply sat with the weight of her words. For six years, the organization had seen the transaction but lacked the tools to understand the meaning beneath it.
This is where AI for fundraising becomes something more than a tactic. It becomes a way of honoring what donors are trying to express through their generosity. It allows us to respond with care instead of formula.
The staff member who received that email printed it out and brought it to the next team meeting. They didn’t read it as a data point. They read it as a responsibility. And it became an epiphany – a realization that countless stories just like hers were quietly waiting inside their CRM, unseen only because no one had the tools to notice them.
3) Will AI Replace Human Connection?
Many fundraisers want to know if AI is going to pull us away from our humanity, or will it help us serve people better, raise more funds, and amplify our impact.
Here is what I tell them, drawing from a deep body of practice rather than theory. AI for nonprofits is not one thing. It is a set of capabilities that can help us do three very human things at scale:
1) Listen more carefully
2) Understand more clearly
3) And respond more personally.
Sometimes that looks like Virtuous Insights quietly enriching donor records so a fundraiser can see connections and risk sooner than they ever could manually.
Sometimes it looks like Virtuous Momentum, our AI fundraising agent, helping a major gifts officer triage an impossible inbox, draft thoughtful follow-ups, and keep donor plans active without sacrificing sincerity.
Sometimes it looks like a small nonprofit using a tool from our 50 Best AI Tools for Nonprofit Success guide to summarize call notes or clean up contact lists so a two-person team can get their evenings back.
Several months after that first donor story, I joined a different organization for their weekly Wednesday standup. This time, the room was small, with scuffed white walls and a tired conference table that had probably seen more pizza boxes than capital campaign plans.
What struck me immediately was what appeared on the screen.
In the past, their meetings had revolved around static reports: LYBUNTs, SYBUNTs, open pledges, email metrics.
Now, Virtuous CRM+ was showing something different.
Instead of just lists, the team was looking at behavior: donors whose engagement was rising, donors whose signals suggested they might be testing their commitment, donors who were unexpectedly drawn to specific programs.
The development manager pulled up a profile where Virtuous Insights had surfaced new demographic and behavioral details the team had never had time to compile themselves. The donor had recently interacted with content related to a program she had never supported before. After a few personalized emails through Virtuous Momentum, she was not only giving more consistently but had agreed to host a small gathering. None of it felt automated from her perspective. It felt attentive and personalized.
Listening to the staff talk, I realized something subtle had shifted. They were no longer using AI language at all. They were using relationship language.
→ “She has been more interested in X lately.”
→ “He is showing signs that he might be pulling back.”
→ “They are really leaning into our work around Y.”
The tools had receded into the background where they belonged. The relationships had moved to the foreground where they always should have been.
This, to me, is AI for fundraising done right. It is not a replacement for human connection. It is the removal of the blindfold that kept humans from connecting as well as they wanted to.
4) Will AI Replace Fundraisers?
At some point, in every room where AI comes up, someone asks the question directly:
“Is this going to replace fundraisers?” It is almost always asked half jokingly and half seriously.
My answer is consistent: If your fundraising is nothing but mail merges and manual tasks, then yes, parts of that job should be replaced.
But the essence of fundraising – listening, interpreting, accompanying, connecting – cannot be automated. In fact, AI for fundraising, used responsibly, makes those deeply human skills more important, not less.
In 2023, I was shown an early sketch of a new product designed to optimize major gift portfolios, and I was asked whether I would serve as an industry advisor as Momentum founders, Nick Fitz and Griff Bohm, built an AI tool that could increase portfolio capacity by 50%, return 2-3 hours a day to fundraisers by automating routine tasks, and improve fundraiser retention by making their work more sustainable. When they invited me to join as an early-stage advisor, the answer was an easy yes.
Over the past few years, I’ve watched that sketch become a tool that has fundamentally changed how major and mid-level gift officers work. Instead of pouring their best energy into sorting emails or wrestling spreadsheets, Virtuous Momentum has allowed them to spend their time where it matters most: in personalized, meaningful conversations with donors.
I’ve seen small teams use Virtuous Momentum to automate routine acknowledgments so reliably that they could reclaim the time for five additional personal calls each week- calls that, in several cases, reshaped the course of donor relationships.
At the same time, our machine learning engine, Virtuous Insights, has quietly identified donors at risk of lapse months before they would have fallen out of view, giving staff just enough lead time to re-engage them with care rather than urgency.
In every one of these examples, the technology didn’t replace the fundraiser. It restored them to the work they were actually hired to do.
If you strip fundraising down to its core, what remains is profoundly human: the ability to see, remember, interpret, and respond to generosity in a way that makes people feel less alone in their desire to make a difference. AI can help us do that more consistently, but it cannot want it for us.
5) How Can I Start Using AI in My Nonprofit?
The last organization I visited while shaping this article was a modest nonprofit with an outsized impact in its community. They had set up a few chairs in a circle in a repurposed storage room. A longtime donor was coming in for the first in-person conversation she had ever agreed to.
She talked about her life, her late husband, the neighborhood where she grew up, the first time she heard about the organization, and the date she chose every year to make her gift. The staff listened, not as professionals extracting “intel,” but as humans being invited into someone’s story.
After she left, one of the team members said quietly, “I wish we had asked that question years ago.”
That, for me, is the quiet pondering at the center of AI for nonprofits: What are the questions we wish we had time to ask, and how can technology help us notice when it is time to ask them?
No algorithm can feel the weight of a donor’s memory. But an algorithm can signal that something about their behavior is worth our attention. No AI can comfort a grieving parent or celebrate with a donor whose life has just taken a hopeful turn. But AI can remind us who needs that call today, and what they might need us to remember when we make it.
That is why, when people ask me where to start, I do not begin with tools. I begin with posture.
→ Do you believe your donors are more than the sum of their transactions?
→ Do you want your systems to behave in a way that reflects that belief?
→ Are you willing to let new visibility change old habits?
If the answer is yes, then it makes sense to step into an environment built to support that kind of work. Virtuous will not listen instead of you – it will listen with you. It will help your team notice the small signals you used to miss, the raised hands hiding between touchpoints. It will not replace your fundraisers. It will give them room to be human again. It will not solve disconnection overnight, but it will keep you from walking past the very stories that make your mission possible.
Final Invitation
So here is my final invitation: If even a small part of this resonates, take the time to see Virtuous in motion.
Not for the sake of another demo, but to experience what it feels like when your philosophy and your platform finally move in the same direction.
Because this is not really a story about AI.
It is a story about how generosity meets impact – and whether we will build systems worthy of the people who give.
I’ve chosen to hitch my work to Virtuous because it is one of the few places I’ve seen where technology doesn’t compete with humanity, but protects it. Where donors are not abstractions. Where fundraisers are valued as relationship-builders, not task managers. And where the future of generosity is treated as something we are responsible for shaping, not something we should fear.
We cannot keep doing the same things and hope for a different result.
Our donors deserve better.
Our missions deserve better.
And frankly, so do we. It’s an honor to walk beside you as you build a more responsive, more generous future for the communities you serve.
Ready to turn intention into impact?
Virtuous Momentum helps you grow recurring giving, rescue lost revenue, and engage donors automatically…with no CRM migration required. See how Virtuous Momentum accelerates generosity.
Want to know which donors are leaning in…or slipping away?
Virtuous Insights reveals who to reach, when to act, and how to personalize engagement using predictive AI and 360° donor profiles. Discover the power of donor intelligence.
→ Book a Virtuous CRM+ demo now, and ask about Virtuous Insights.
