At Virtuous, we believe that “good enough” is no longer good enough for nonprofits.
The world that fundraisers operate in is changing every day. More and more households are opting out of charitable giving. Donor acquisition is becoming more complex and expensive. And the job of a fundraiser has never been harder. A new kind of solution is required for this new world of fundraising. And at Virtuous, we are charting the path to unlocking the next wave of generosity.
Understanding what is required in this new world requires some context and a clear vision for what is now possible. And providing that context, as strange as it might sound, starts with a story about healthcare.
For most of modern medical history, cancer has been treated as a category. You had breast cancer or lung cancer or leukemia, and the treatment was dictated by the category. A drug would be developed, tested across large populations, and prescribed broadly. The problem was that the same drug might cure one patient, harm another, and have no effect whatsoever on a third. The medical profession knew this. But it treated people in categories because categories were all it could manage.
Then something shifted.
The Human Genome Project, and the early forms of predictive AI that followed, made a deceptively simple idea visible. The idea was that every patient is an N of 1. Not a member of a category. An individual, with a genome and a history and a biology that belonged only to them. Once physicians could see patients that clearly, population-level treatment stopped being the best available option and started being ethically insufficient.
Our Chief AI Officer, Nathan Chappell, watched this revolution from the inside while working at UC San Diego’s Moores Cancer Center and later at City of Hope. And he was immediately struck by both the moral obligation that this created for the medical profession and the potential parallels with fundraising.
N of 1 Fundraising applies this simple learning from medical research to nonprofit fundraising. Every one of your supporters is an N of 1. A specific human being with unique reasons for caring, a continuously evolving connection to your cause, and a relationship with your organization that is nothing like the relationship of the person sitting next to them in your database. Throughout the history of fundraising, the barriers to honoring that reality at scale were essentially unsolvable. So we settled for segments because segments were all we had.
But with the rise of modern AI, those barriers no longer exist. And at Virtuous, we are building the next generation of AI-forward platforms that make the previously impossible, possible.
The Gap Between Belief and Existing Tools
Every fundraiser I’ve ever met believes that giving is personal and that donors are individuals. And yet the systems most organizations use to manage donor relationships were never designed for this reality. Traditional CRMs, at their core, are transactional databases. They record what donors have done. They know almost nothing about who they are or what they might do next.
The result is a gap between what organizations believe and how they operate. They believe every supporter deserves to be seen as an individual. But like in traditional medicine, their infrastructure treats them like nameless, faceless segments. And that gap between the conviction of every fundraiser and the systems they are forced to use is where Virtuous is leaning in.
But closing this gap requires more than just better tools. It requires a different architecture entirely. An infrastructure that doesn’t just store donor records but leverages AI to actually understand individuals. One that listens to signals, predicts behavior, creates personalized experiences, orchestrates the right action at the right moment, and gets smarter with every interaction. One that gives every member of your team the AI-powered leverage to treat every supporter the way a major gift officer treats their top fifty. One that removes administrative drag from nonprofit professionals and allows them to focus on the mission and people that got them into the work in the first place.
In other words, we believe our sector doesn’t need another database. We need a System of Intelligence + Action designed to create N of 1 donor experiences.
The Foundation: A Truly Open Platform
The first thing N1 Fundraising requires is access and ease of use. The ability for intelligence to flow freely across every piece of your data, every workflow, every interaction in your system. That is why one of our most important bets is the move toward a headless CRM architecture.
Headless what? I know, I know. Stick with me. This first point is a bit more technical – but it sets the foundation, and the payoff is worth it!
Put simply: anything you can do through the Virtuous interface, you should be able to do through our API. Every action, every data point, every workflow – fully accessible programmatically or through your favorite AI tools.
To fulfill this promise, we are working to launch a new MCP (Model Context Protocol) and a context layer that understands your brand, voice, and goals. And we are launching this MCP on an improved API designed specifically for fast access and AI interactions. This goes beyond raw data access. The MCP gives AI tools full context for how your organization works. What your specific terminology means, your brand, and how your team talks about supporters. This is the difference between an AI that can query your database and an AI that actually understands your organization and takes action.
Initially, each MCP will be specific to a Virtuous product (CRM+, Raise, etc). Though over the longer term, we’ll allow for a consolidated data view across all products through a single MCP.
So what does this mean for nonprofit teams?
First of all, this allows you to unlock team productivity with the ability to operate large portions of Virtuous directly through your favorite AI tools like Claude, Chat GPT, Copilot, etc in plain language, without switching between systems. Simply pull up your favorite AI tool, point it at Virtuous, and ask anything you want.
But for Virtuous, a headless CRM and MCP mean far more than just ChatGPT access. It means that now our team, our partners, and even your own staff can rapidly build custom software, reporting, and integrations on top of the platform using modern AI tools like Replit, Lovable, and ClaudeCode. The platform becomes a foundation for new features, not a ceiling.
Actionable Intelligence Anywhere… with a Fraction of the Work
One of the defining frustrations of modern fundraising is that the data exists, but nobody can get to it quickly enough to act on it. Gift officers wait days for reports. Marketing teams pull lists manually. By the time the insight surfaces, the moment has often passed.
Our Natural Language Analytics, Reporting, and AI Chat (targeting beta in 2026) are designed to eliminate that lag. Your team will be able to build reports, ask questions of your data, and surface insights simply by having a conversation with AI. Launch the perfect dashboard by describing what you want to know. Discover a pattern hiding in your data without submitting a request to your analytics team. Ask which mid-level donors increased their giving last year but haven’t been contacted in ninety days, and get an answer in seconds rather than days.
Agents That Do the Work for You
Understanding your data is just the beginning. Acting on it at N of 1 scale is the hard part. That is why we are investing heavily in our own AI Agents and Agentic Workflow platform. A suite of tools designed to automate the work that currently consumes the majority of your team’s day, so the humans on your team can focus on the work that only humans can do.
The good news is that we are already well underway in launching individual AI agents, and there’s more to come.
Our Prospect Research Agent (live) transforms one of the most time-consuming tasks in major gift fundraising. Board-level web research, public data sources, news mentions, complex wealth data, family dynamics, and more. The agent synthesizes all of it into a complete donor dossier in seconds rather than days. Combined with advanced machine learning and your own 1st party data for behavioral prediction, your team arrives at every conversation with a level of preparation that used to be reserved for your top ten prospects, available for your top ten thousand.
The Raise AI Page and Form Builder (alpha) brings N1 thinking to giving experiences themselves. Using a simple AI prompt, your team can build a beautiful, on-brand giving experience in seconds and tailored to a specific donor segment, a specific campaign, or even a specific individual. Your organization’s voice, imagery, story, and brand identity, applied dynamically to the giving moment. This is what it looks like when the giving experience starts to feel as personal as the relationship.
Like the Page and Form Builder Agent, the Email Builder Agent and improved email functionality (early alpha) allow your team to create beautiful emails in seconds based on your brand, voice, and best-in-class design. Just tell AI what kind of email you’d like to see. Or start with our expanded library of email templates. Then drag and drop nonprofit-specific email components, make tweaks by hand, or simply tell AI about the changes you’d like to see. Launch better-looking and more effective emails, personalized to each donor, in a fraction of the time
Beyond use-case specific agents, the team at Virtuous is building a full Custom Agentic Workflow platform (in progress) that lets your team create automated sequences combining deterministic actions and Virtuous Agents. This is the orchestration layer that ties everything together – routing the right communication through the right channel at the right moment, for every person in your database, continuously, based on real signal rather than an organization’s schedule.
Agentic Workflows are like traditional Automation on steroids. Build any sequence, against any Virtuous data, and run jobs in real-time 24 hours a day. Then super-charge workflows with AI Agents that can work independently to solve problems or pursue a goal. Replace entire administration workstreams of manual tasks so that you can spend more time on the human work of fundraising.
The Gift Officer of the Future
Our Momentum product has always been built on a single conviction: that gift officers should spend their time building relationships, not managing data. AI handles the research, the drafting, the prioritization, and the logging so the fundraiser can do the irreplaceable human work of actually connecting with people.
We are taking that vision significantly further by combining Momentum with our leading Insights data product (in progress). Combining AI-powered outreach with best-in-class third-party signals and wealth intelligence to create what we believe will become the definitive system of action and system of donor intelligence for major gift teams. Accelerated prospect research and wealth data meet accelerated personalized outreach. Not just knowing who to call, but knowing exactly what to say when you do.
And for organizations that need more bandwidth to reach out to prospects and drive results, Momentum Donor Engagement Services (available now) offers something entirely new: a done-for-you model where our team of trained fundraisers handles initial prospect engagement, surfaces qualified opportunities, and makes warm introductions to donors who are showing genuine signals of readiness. It’s the AI insights of our platform, combined with the human expertise of a seasoned development team, applied on your behalf.
N1 at the Point of the Gift
One of the most innovative bets on our roadmap is what we are calling Raise N of 1 Donor Experiences (in progress). This one-of-a-kind platform deploys fully custom giving experiences built dynamically for individual donors, created with AI on the fly.
Imagine a world where a potential donor visits a giving page from an email link, and the experience they see is built specifically for them. Their giving history, their program interests, their engagement patterns – all of it informs a giving moment that feels personal, because it is. Ask amounts tailored to their capacity and connection. Content reflecting the programs they care about most. Personalized notes from your team. A visual experience aligned with the aspects of your mission that have resonated with them before.
This solution solves for the dramatically underserved digital major giving market. High-capacity donors who engage digitally are currently receiving the same giving experience as every other visitor to your website. But because AI is doing the work of creating an individual page in real time, this same experience can be scaled to every supporter at every level.
Custom Built for Every Team, Every Organization
One of the things we have learned from working with thousands of organizations is that no two are the same. Mission, culture, team structure, donor base, technical capacity – all of it varies. A platform that is truly N1 in its approach to donors needs to be equally adaptive in its approach to the organizations it serves.
That is why two of our most important roadmap investments are built around extensibility rather than standardization.
Our Forward Deployed Engineers (available now) program puts our own technical team shoulder to shoulder with customers to build use-case-specific solutions and integrations on top of the Virtuous platform. Not generic implementations. Bespoke tools designed around how your specific organization operates, built with the same AI-accelerated development approach we use internally. The result is enterprise-grade customization at a speed and cost that would have been impossible just a year ago.
And our App Marketplace (in progress) takes that extensibility to the entire ecosystem. A growing catalog of solutions built by the Virtuous team, our partners, and our customer community. Each one designed to solve a specific use case, serve a specific mission type, or integrate with a specific tool your team already uses. The platform becomes the foundation; the marketplace is how it grows to fit every organization’s needs.
Why Now
When Nathan stood in the hallways of UC San Diego and watched precision medicine transform how physicians understood their obligation to patients, what struck him most was a single realization: once you have the tools to see the individual clearly, choosing not to use them is no longer a limitation. It is a decision.
The same inflection point has arrived for philanthropy. Nonprofits now have an obligation to leverage more advanced tools to create individual experiences for donors, save time, and move their mission forward. At Virtuous, we feel a similar obligation to provide the infrastructure for the coming N1 shift in philanthropy. The roadmap we are building toward is our answer to that obligation. Not to do the old things faster. To build something worthy of the teams we serve and the donors who trust you with their generosity.
