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Using AI to Develop Major Donor Communication Strategies

For organizations operating on tight budgets, competing for grant funding, and running fundraising campaigns, all while working hard to deliver programs and services, new tools that boost efficiency and streamline decision-making can be game-changing. Nonprofits of all sizes are already using AI technology to improve their work and fundraise smarter than ever before. 

If your organization is new to AI, why not put it to work where it can help drive the greatest impact for your mission—your major giving program?

By strengthening your relationships with major donors, you keep them engaged and encourage future (and larger gifts), and it all hinges on communication. With the potential ROI that major gifts bring, even small improvements in how you engage these supporters can have massive impacts down the line.

So how exactly can AI help? Let’s take a look at how it works and how you might infuse it into your development workflows.

How AI Supports Your Communication Strategy

Optimizing your communications as part of overall stewardship strategies is one area where AI can really excel.

Easily collected data points (touchpoints with donors, responses, and other interactions) can be correlated with all the other information about donors that you currently have in your database (engagement histories, demographics, locations, interests, and other known characteristics). AI analyzes the complex relationships between all of these pieces of information and identifies historical patterns. 

These patterns can then be projected out over time at a very granular level, down to the specific individuals who are likely to take particular actions in the future. 

With an increased understanding of engagement trends and data-backed predictions about future actions, you can lay out highly targeted communication strategies that will support your goals and encourage donors to take those predicted actions. 

AI-Driven Outreach for Major Donors: 6 Steps

So, how might it work to implement AI into your development workflows? How exactly can it help guide your outreach strategies over time to improve major giving results? 

If you have a predictive AI system integrated with your database (and ideally supplemental prospect research data from a trusted vendor), the process would look something like this:

Graphic: ai-outreach-for-major-donors-steps

Suggested alt text: The graphic lists the six general steps of using AI to support outreach to major donors, detailed in the text below.

Screen your data and refine your segments. Use your AI tool to screen your donors and identify those that it would sort into your segment of major donors and prospects. Compare these findings to your non-AI segmented lists—are they different? AI can help you identify new prospects by deeply examining major donor lifecycles to learn more about the early and often missed signals they exhibit, like histories of political giving or board service with other nonprofits. Overall, this process can significantly augment your existing qualification processes.

Quickly predict major donor behaviors. Next, generate some predictions about your segment of major donors and prospects. Tools like DonorSearch Ai can identify donors who are likely to:

Donate within the next year
Set up a recurring gift
Give over certain amounts
Give the most relative to others over their lifetime

Develop cadences based on these predictions. What are the touchpoints that your gift officers would want to foster to lead to these outcomes? Lay out some general plans and timelines that your team can adapt once it’s time to start outreach. You might even use generative AI tools like ChatGPT to create templated versions of various forms of outreach that occur in the cadences to be personalized later. 

Consider your goals. Take a look at your AI tool’s predictions and think about how they relate to any current organizational goals or the context of your work. For example, a hospital conducting grateful patient fundraising would follow a different set of cultivation and stewardship best practices than a charitable organization preparing a planned giving drive. Make sure to account for these factors in the cadences and lists that you develop, always using human expertise and judgment to make final decisions.

Create quick outreach lists. Based on the AI’s predictions and the unique context of your current goals, use your tool again to create prioritized lists of supporters to contact. Double-check them to make sure you agree and make any final adjustments.

Personalize your communication plans. Work through your list and create versions of your templated cadence tailored to each individual’s interests and relationship with your organization. Create the perfect series of emails, phone calls, direct mailers, event invites, and more that will encourage your prospect to take the predicted target action.

This framework works well for fundraising campaigns and specific initiatives, but AI can help year-round in these same ways, too. Your development team can follow these steps to quickly qualify prospects and lay out a thorough outreach roadmap to follow for months at a time. The ability to generate quick outreach lists, refine your donor segments, and make predictions can help in all kinds of situations. 

Retaining the Human Touch

Of course, all donors should be treated as individuals. Tailoring your communications to major donors is especially important—nonprofits invest a lot of time and energy into building these one-on-one relationships because the return on those efforts in the form of large gifts and long-term partnerships is worth it.

Always build human expertise and oversight into your AI-backed communication processes. Your gift officers who work with donors every day will always have the best judgment when it comes to the nuances of how to communicate with donors and reinforce their unique relationships with your mission. 

It’s also important to understand the essentials of ethical AI usage to set your organization up for long-term success. Make them a part of your regular approach to internal and external compliance. The tools you use, how you use them, how you talk about them, the data they analyze, and where that data comes from are all critical considerations to keep in mind as you move forward into the future of fundraising.