| TL;DR → Philanthropy has long emphasized targeting and segmentation, often without questioning the underlying assumption: people are best understood in groups. → The concept of N of one, rooted in statistics and precision medicine, challenges this by treating each individual as their own data point. → N1 Philanthropy is when we apply this logic to generosity and donor relationships. → Donor relationships are not binary or static; they change over time. → When nonprofits listen continuously to each individual donor, relevance and trust are restored. → Used responsibly, AI enables this shift by helping organizations respond to people as they are, not as categories assume them to be. |
Philanthropy has spent decades trying to get better at targeting donors, segmenting audiences, and optimizing campaigns.
What it has not spent nearly enough time doing is questioning the assumption underneath all of that work. The assumption that people can be understood in groups.
N1: A Mental Shift to the Individual
In statistics and medicine, there is a concept known as an N of one. Often shortened to N1, it describes a way of seeing the world that resists averages. Instead of treating people as members of a category, it insists that each individual is their own data point, shaped by a unique genome, history, environment, and future. Precision medicine is built on this insight. A disease may share a name, but the person experiencing it never does.
I first encountered this way of thinking in 2014 while serving as Associate Vice Chancellor at UC San Diego. Working alongside Dr. Barbara Parker, then head of the Moores Cancer Center, I had a front-row seat to a quiet but consequential revolution. Early forms of predictive AI were beginning to reshape how clinicians understood disease itself. Cancer was no longer treated as a monolith. It was becoming personal.
What struck me then was not the technology. It was the humility it demanded. For hundreds of years, medicine had been built around averages because that was all it could manage. Once clinicians could see the individual more clearly, the old models did not just become outdated. They became ethically insufficient.
Once that shift took hold in medicine, everything else followed. Treatment stopped being one-size-fits-all. Diagnosis became dynamic rather than static. Outcomes improved not because physicians suddenly had more data, but because they had better questions.
Who is this person?
What is changing?
What matters now?
That way of thinking did not stay confined to hospitals and research labs. We now live inside N1 systems every day.
N1 Systems in Our Everyday Life
Netflix understands that to earn continued attention, it does not treat viewers as a segment. It treats each person as a constantly evolving individual. What you watched last night matters. What you abandoned halfway through matters. What you ignored matters. Your homepage is not my homepage, and it updates continuously because relevance, not volume, sustains attention.
Amazon operates the same way. Years ago, out of curiosity, I turned off all my recommendations to see what would happen. I essentially created a version of myself that Amazon knew nothing about. With no context or history, the system could not personalize much of anything. The one product it consistently predicted I would buy was nail clippers. Apparently, the only truly universal human need.
It is funny, but the lesson is serious. Without understanding the individual, systems default to the lowest common denominator. Precision disappears. Relevance collapses.
Philanthropy has been operating like that default Amazon account for decades.
We organize generosity around abstractions. Donors. Prospects. Lapsed donors. Segments and cohorts that made sense in an era of limited data and limited tools. They helped us manage at scale, but they also flattened the very thing philanthropy depends on most: human connection.
N1 Philanthropy is the shift away from those abstractions. It is the recognition that there are no donors or prospects, only people. Each one with a measurable, continuously changing degree of connection to your mission. Each one an N of one.
Applying N1 to Fundraising
This idea followed me from medicine into fundraising.
In 2017, while working in healthcare philanthropy, I helped build an early predictive model to identify which patients were most likely to make a gift to the hospital that cared for them. Once again, the technology itself was not the most important part. What mattered was the ethical clarity it required. We were not predicting generosity in the abstract. We were asking how connection forms, how gratitude emerges, and how timing matters. And what data existed to help us quantify connection in real-time.
The same pattern repeated itself. Precision medicine does not treat a disease in isolation. It looks at genetics, environment, behavior, and history. It accepts that health is dynamic rather than fixed.
N1 Philanthropy applies the same logic to generosity. A person’s connection to your mission is not binary. It is not on or off. It is not donor or prospect. It is a living signal that changes over time. Someone may feel deeply connected after a personal experience, then drift as life gets busy, then re-engage after a story, a thank-you, or a moment of relevance.
Connection breathes. Our systems, historically, have not.
Virtuous: Using AI Respect Human Attention
This is precisely where Virtuous departs from the pack. Not because of technology alone, but because of a fundamentally different posture toward people and purpose.
From the beginning, responsive fundraising was not treated as a feature or a framework, but as a responsibility.
If generosity is dynamic, then the systems that support it must be built to listen continuously, adapt ethically, and serve both nonprofits and the people they exist to engage.
That belief is woven into our platform, leadership philosophy, and corporate values, including a commitment to measure success not only by growth, but by a double bottom line that aims to increase net generosity by ten billion dollars over time.
This is where artificial intelligence, used responsibly, becomes catalytic rather than corrosive. Virtuous Insights, for example, is our prospect research product that rescores every individual every day, not to label people or lock them into a category, but to listen more closely to the signals they are already giving.
Book a Virtuous Insights demo here.
This kind of continuous listening is what makes N1 Philanthropy operational rather than theoretical. It allows organizations to respond to real humans in real time, rather than forcing people to conform to static assumptions.
Our AI fundraising agent, Virtuous Momentum, builds on that understanding by aligning outreach to where a person actuallyis in their journey, not where a calendar or a static segment says they should be. For gift officers, this creates a profound shift in capacity and focus.
Major Gift Officers using Virtuous Momentum increase portfolio capacity by up to fifty percent, effectively doubling productivity without adding headcount. Midlevel officers often move from managing hundreds of relationships to thousands, without losing personalization. What changes is not the scale of work, but the quality of attention.
Book a Virtuous Momentum demo here.
More telling than any of those numbers is what happens to the humansdoing the work. Gift officers gain back one to three hours each day, time that can be reinvested in conversations, visits, and moments that deepen trust. Organizations using Virtuous Momentum also see dramatically higher retention among gift officers themselves. In a profession where burnout is common and tenure is often measured in months, people are staying for years.
When systems respect human attention, humans tend to stay.
That distinction matters.
Connection: Philanthropy’s Greatest Multiplier
In The Generosity Crisis, I argue that the central challenge facing philanthropy is not capacity, but disconnection. People are not less generous. They are less connected. N1 Philanthropy is about restoring relevance, dignity, and trust by treating people as individuals rather than rows in a database.
Virtuous CEO, Gabe Cooper, has long articulated this through the idea of responsive fundraising. Organizations must respond to people in ways that reflect who they are, what they care about, and how they engage. N1 Philanthropy is the philosophical foundation that makes responsive fundraising inevitable rather than optional.
When every person is an N of one, responsiveness is no longer a tactic. It becomes an ethical posture.
Of course, this raises real questions about responsibility. In Nonprofit AI, I emphasize that beneficial AI must be human-centered, transparent, and aligned with mission. N1 Philanthropy demands the same rigor. Real-time insight must never become real-time manipulation. Precision must deepen trust, not erode it.
The goal is not to predict generosity in order to pressure it, but to understand connection in order to honor it.
The same transformation I witnessed at UC San Diego under Dr. Parker’s leadership is now unfolding in fundraising. Predictive AI is challenging long-held assumptions about how generosity is identified, nurtured, and sustained. The organizations that embrace N1 Philanthropy will not simply raise more money. They will build deeper, more durable relationships that sustain impact over time.
In precision medicine, the promise is better outcomes because treatment fits the person. In N1 Philanthropy, the promise is deeper impact because generosity fits the human.
No donors.
No prospects.
Just people.
And a future where connection, measured with care and stewarded with responsibility, becomes philanthropy’s greatest multiplier.
N1 Philanthropy FAQs
How does N1 apply to philanthropy?
N1 Philanthropy applies the logic of precision medicine to generosity. Rather than organizing people into fixed categories like donors or prospects, it recognizes that each person has a continuously changing degree of connection to a mission. Connection is treated as dynamic, not binary.
Does N1 Philanthropy mean abandoning scale or efficiency?
No. N1 Philanthropy redefines scale. Rather than scaling messages or campaigns, it scales relevance. AI enables organizations to maintain individual responsiveness even as audiences grow, shifting efficiency away from batch processes and toward systems that prioritize human attention. The result is not less scale, but more meaningful scale…growth without flattening the person.
What role does artificial intelligence play in N1 Philanthropy?
Artificial intelligence makes N1 Philanthropy operational rather than theoretical. When used responsibly, AI can listen continuously to individual signals and reflect how connection changes over time. The goal is not to label people, but to understand where they are and respond appropriately.
How does Virtuous support this approach?
Virtuous is built on the belief that responsive fundraising is a responsibility. Products like Virtuous Insights and Virtuous Momentum are designed to align outreach with where a person actually is in their journey. This allows organizations to scale relationships without losing personalization.
How is N1 Philanthropy different from traditional donor segmentation?
Traditional segmentation groups people based on shared attributes or past behavior, freezing them into static categories. N1 Philanthropy replaces that model with continuous listening, where each individual’s connection to a mission is measured and updated over time. Instead of asking which segment someone belongs to, it asks what signals they are giving right now and how the organization should responsibly respond.
