According to a recent Sage and Third Sector poll, 40% of nonprofits experienced a decrease in funding over the previous year. This comes on top of a surge in demand for services, as millions struggle to cope with economic challenges. Against that backdrop, fundraisers must work extra harder to keep funds coming in.

Using AI can assist to streamline operations, better understand contributors, and interact with new supporters more effectively. All of this saves money while also helping you meet your fundraising goals. The following are some suggestions for using AI into your fundraising tools.      

Strategize, establish pipelines, and manage prospects.

Every effective fundraising campaign begins with a strategy. To achieve your fundraising goals, you must plan out your donor journeys and develop a strategy that identifies the greatest contributors and establishes an acceptable schedule for discovery, nurturing, solicitation, and stewardship. These judgments are made after examining the data stored in your organization's database. In most companies, the necessary data—giving history, relationship information, contact information—may be available in many locations, requiring you to open multiple tabs on your computer and switch between them. 

This sophisticated, behind-the-scenes preparation takes several hours, and that's before you even start working on creating connections with donors. 

Develop a daily activity plan.

There are only so many hours in the day, so you want to get started right away when you get to work, but this seldom occurs in actuality. The first several hours of a digital gift officer's day are often spent reviewing to-do lists, checking emails, and determining what needs to be accomplished. Raise, an AI fundraising tool, allows you to get started right now. When you check your inbox at the start of the day, you'll see a collection of pre-drafted emails that just need to be inspected and gently updated before they can be sent. 

Use auto-generated + customized emails.

While your position entails a variety of activities, the main focus is on developing strong personal connections with potential contributors. Most contributors, regardless of their giving level, value personalized interaction from a gift officer who they grow to know over time. As a digital gift officer, you primarily create these connections through email, so you must carefully consider and arrange each email you send. 

Crafting personal and courteous emails that represent your unique style while not sounding like generic bulk mailings requires work and time, which most gift officers lack.  Raise utilizes artificial intelligence to generate a draft email that includes all important and factual information. 

Retain donors with messages that connect.

It's the little things that count, and gift officers who remember birthdays, anniversaries, interests, and connections benefit greatly when it comes to developing relationships with donors. When utilizing traditional fundraising tactics, this entails returning to the database before making each contact and searching for these minor pieces of personal information. Raise, on the other hand, performs this operation automatically and includes any information gleaned from the database into the draft emails it generates, eliminating the need to return to the database.

Keep donor data updated.

The finest organizations collect a plethora of information on their donors. In fact, the more data they have, the more effectively they can tailor their messages and provide each contributor with the appropriate degree of attention and solicitation. However, a database is only as useful as its data. If gift officers are too busy to update the database or CRM after each engagement, they risk losing vital information and making fundraising less efficient.

Gift officers who scrupulously update the data after each contact point discover that they spend hours on monotonous, low-value chores such as updating contact information and copy-pasting mail messages into CRM. AI has the ability to fully eliminate this necessity.

Increase fundraising capacity.

Many fundraising departments struggle to find enough time each day to complete all of their tasks and assume that hiring more gift officers would solve the problem. Often, this is not budgeted for, and even if it is, it might take two years to properly ramp up a new gift officer. A better alternative would be to give tools that assist current gift officers in performing their duties as efficiently as possible. AI-driven fundraising solutions like Raise may immediately boost each officer's fundraising capacity by organizing, simplifying, and automating their various activities, making your organization significantly more efficient at meeting and exceeding objectives.