Fundraising Update

Welcome to Fundraising Update. This week, we see how a humane society used A.I. to help create a campaign to win back donors. Plus, the key to retaining donors is to engage them in ways that go beyond transactional requests for money, according to two new reports.

I’m Rasheeda Childress, senior editor for fundraising at the Chronicle of Philanthropy. If you have ideas, comments, or questions about this newsletter, please write me.

An animal shelter in southwest Florida boosted its giving over the summer after it used artificial intelligence to quickly craft tailored messaging for a campaign.

The Suncoast Humane Society typically doesn’t run summer fundraising campaigns, but the organization wanted to see if A.I.’s ability to generate content could help it quickly create an involved project. The campaign followed a dog named Max and a cat named Whiskers through their journey from street to home with the help of the society. The campaign featured direct-mail appeals, emails, social-media posts, and a weekly blog from the point of view of each animal. The direct-mail and email pieces, which linked to the blog posts, were tailored to the two groups it was trying to reach — lapsed donors and people who had adopted pets — also using A.I.

Courtesy of Rafael Robles

“We were trying to re-engage donors that had lapsed,” says Rafael E. Robles, Suncoast’s chief development officer. “That was the driving force.”

Suncoast enlisted Josh Hirsch, a senior strategist at Soukup Strategic Solutions to help with the campaign. Hirsch says the A.I. helped build personas of lapsed donors and supporters linked to the society’s VIP — very important pets — program that encourages adopters to become donors.

The organization customized the GPT product, a service of OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, by training it on “organizational documents, past impact reports, past blog posts, past schema, so it understood the brand voice and tone,” Hirsch says. The customized GPT was only accessible to the humane society and didn’t share organizational data back to the larger GPT, Hirsch says.

A series of emails introduced Max and Whiskers and shared their backstories. “Whiskers was skittish and afraid of humans at first. And same thing with Max,” Hirsch says. “We were able to show how through the love, care, and the resources available through Suncoast Humane Society, they were able to find their ‘furrever home,’ and now they wanted their other friends to have that same opportunity.”

Hirsch, who finalized the blog posts, says the GPT output was a pretty good first draft, because of the document training, but he still had to revise and add a human touch. “From an efficiency standpoint, I was able to generate and do a lot more in less time and get this campaign moving a lot faster,” Hirsch says.

For more on the campaign, read the entire story.

— Share donor retention fell year over year in the second quarter of 2024

Nonprofits that want better fundraising results will need to engage donors in a wider variety of ways, creating a dialogue that isn’t always about money, especially in difficult times, two recently released studies suggest.

One perspective comes from the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, which released “The Giving Environment: Giving During Times of Uncertainty.” The study uses data from the Philanthropy Panel Study, which follows specific families over time, I reported. Giving patterns during the pandemic offer important lessons for today, the report contends — chiefly that people give, even in times of economic uncertainty, when they understand there is a pressing need, says Una Osili, associate dean for research and international programs.

“There are a lot of really good lessons to take away from the pandemic,” Osili says. “There was a lot of awareness of need. Even though it was a challenging time, people saw an opportunity and a way to make a difference.”

The report found that the decades-long trend of fewer donors giving more dollars continued throughout the pandemic but that some new donors emerged. “This new group of donors may be more responsive to rapid community support, nonconventional forms of philanthropy, and digital fundraising efforts,” the report says.

‘Donor Fatigue Is a Myth’

Separate data from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project identifies similar themes. According to that report, in the second quarter of this year, the number of donors declined in every category — from micro-donors, who give less than $100, to supersize donors, who give more than $50,000. However, the amount donated was up by 3.7 percent. Donor retention fell 4.5 percent, according to the report.

This data suggests nonprofits need to do more to engage their donors, says Woodrow Rosenbaum, chief data officer for GivingTuesday, which helps compile the FEP report alongside the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

“Donor fatigue is a myth,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean that the donors aren’t tired of the same old transactional engagement.”

For more, read the full story.

• More Charitable Giving via GoFundMe? The giving platform GoFundMe is adding new tools to help people give to charity more easily, reports James Pollard, who covers philanthropy at our partner the Associated Press.

  The new tools include fundraising widgets for video game streamers, personalized profiles to highlight users’ philanthropic interests, and an integrated button on Instagram to donate.

  “We play a really important role helping people ask for help and give help in the world,” GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan told the Associated Press. “We want to make sure that people can carry that with them, and communicate and express that, in the places where they spend time.”

  The new Instagram donation feature will also provide charities with more information about the donor. To learn more about the tools and how nonprofits can use them in fundraising, read James’s article.

New York philanthropists Agnes and Oscar Tang gave $20 million to New York Historical to build the Tang Wing for American Democracy. The wing will house the Academy for American Democracy, new gallery spaces and classrooms, and the American LGBTQ+ Museum. The Tang Wing is scheduled to open in 2026.

The Tangs have donated extensively to arts and culture groups and to education and they appeared on the Chronicle’s Philanthropy 50 listof the biggest donors when they gave $125 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2021.

For other notable gifts this week, read my colleague Maria Di Mento’s Gifts Roundup column. To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly and has data going back to 2000.

How to Boost Planned Giving — and Build a Healthy Future for Your Nonprofit. Bequests and other legacy gifts are “the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” one expert says. Here are six ways to create a thriving planned-giving program or bolster your existing strategy.

Even in an Era of Trust-Based Philanthropy, Grantees Can’t Trust Funders. (Opinion)Wellspring’s recent announcement of winding down is the latest example of sudden donor pivots harming grantees and perpetuating power imbalances.

Next Generation Philanthropy. As many organizations see some of their most generous donors aging, they are looking to keep the pipeline of new supporters healthy. The United Way of Northeast Florida is doing that by focusing on donors between the ages of 18 and 40, reports the Jacksonville Daily Record.

The organization is reviving its Atlantic Circle group, which includes donors who have given $500.

“It’s a hub for collaboration and impact,” says Patrick Moran, vice president of philanthropy at the United Way of Northeast Florida. “That generation is what I call ‘rising philanthropists.’ They are at the beginning of their careers and deeply interested in building a community of hope and opportunity.”

The program helps donors participate more through both giving and volunteerism. (Jacksonville Daily Record)