AI for Nonprofit Fundraisers

AI for Nonprofit
Fundraisers

Tips, strategies, and resources for using AI to support nonprofit development

Introduction

I am so pleased to share this site with you. I've seen the power of what these new tools can do firsthand, and can't think of a better way to apply them than to assist with the vital work of nonprofits in our community. Here you'll find my best advice and resources to get started or level up.

– Tom Gromak • May 2026

Tips & Strategies

The Best Available Human Standard

When you think about using AI, the relevant question isn't whether AI is as good as the world's best grant writer. It's whether it's better than the best help you'd actually have access to in a given moment. For most small development teams the realistic alternative isn't a seasoned expert, it's no help at all, or a colleague already doing three other jobs. People are the best bet if you can get them, but AI can help in the meantime.

Framework from Ethan Mollick — oneusefulthing.org

It's Not Like Using Google

Most people's first instinct is to use AI the way they use a search engine: type a question, get an answer, move on. That misses almost everything that makes it valuable. AI can draft, push back, role-play a difficult donor conversation, or help you think through a stuck problem. If you've only used it to look things up, you've barely touched it.

Use It as a Thought and Analysis Partner

Think of it less as a tool that executes tasks and more as a colleague you can think out loud with. Bring it something half-formed. Describe a problem before you know what solution you're after. Ask it to help you figure out what you actually think. That exploratory mode, conversational rather than transactional, is often the most valuable, and the one many people never try.

Iterative and Collaborative

What you get out depends heavily on what you put in. A single thin prompt — "write me a grant proposal" — gets you something thin in return. Give it more, and go back and forth: talk about the funder, the tone you're going for, what you don't want, and anything else relevant. You'll get something you can actually work with.

Context is Key

AI knows nothing about your organization. It has no idea what your mission is, who your donors are, what your voice sounds like, or how your campaigns work. None of that is in the model. You have to provide it. The more you bring, the more the output actually sounds like it came from your organization. This is where voice transcription helps. Talking for a few minutes is a lot easier than typing out a full background every time you start a new conversation. Also consider creating a reusable context document with relevant organization details, mission, tone, and philosophy. Give it to the AI to set a baseline of understanding.

Find the Jagged Edge

AI is very good at some things but surprisingly bad at others, and the edges aren't where you'd expect. The only way to learn this is to use the tools yourself. One person finds AI invaluable for grant narrative drafts; another finds it falls completely flat for their writing style. You won't know which until you try. Test it. Push it past what feels comfortable.

Concept from Ethan Mollick — oneusefulthing.org

Keep a Human at the Center

AI has no stake in your mission. It doesn't know your community, can't build donor relationships, and has no voice of its own. It doesn't live in the real world or accumulate wisdom from experience. Things like judgment, taste, and the sense that a communication came from a real person who cares can only come from you. Use AI for the work where it helps, so you have more capacity for the work where it doesn't.

Pitfalls
to Avoid

  1. Skipping the Back-and-Forth

    Pasting in a one-sentence request and publishing the result won't get you anything more than slop. The first output is rarely perfect. The difference between something generic and something that actually sounds like you comes down to engagement: how much context you gave, how specifically you pushed back, and how many rounds you went.

  2. Assuming Accuracy & Authority

    There's often a sense that the computer knows best. It doesn't. AI sounds 100% confident even when it's wrong. These tools can produce factually incorrect information, cite sources that don't exist, or describe program requirements that changed two years ago. Your lived experience, gut checks, and common sense are crucial. For anything you'll act on — grant deadlines, funder priorities, statistics you plan to publish — be sure to verify it yourself.

  3. Forgetting to Ask It to Push Back

    Many people use AI to generate things: draft this letter, brainstorm these ideas. Fewer think to turn it around: find the problems with this plan, argue against my proposal, tell me what I'm missing. Ask it to read your grant narrative as a skeptical program officer. Ask it to make the strongest case against your campaign approach. You don't have to take every critique, but you'll know more than you did before you asked.

  4. Removing the Human Element

    You are the most important element in an AI interaction. Your unique perspective, preferences, and mindset are the antidote to the "least common denominator" output that AI can tend to produce. It's fine to ask for ideas, wording, plans, and strategies. But if you stop there and just go where it tells you, you'll never get the best out of these tools. Cognitive offloading is real, and can be tempting. If you stay at the center of everything, you'll get better results, and your work will stand alone.

Use Cases

Here are some areas to consider as you think about using AI. Expand any category to see specific ideas.

Writing & Communications Grant writing, donor letters, impact reports — the work that's always in the queue
  • Grant proposal drafting and narrative refinement
  • Boilerplate organizational descriptions reused across applications
  • Personalizing donor acknowledgment letters at scale
  • Appeal letters in multiple tones and versions for different donor segments
  • Impact reports and annual report narratives
  • Social media content around campaigns and milestones
  • Email sequences for donor cultivation
  • Board communications
Research & Strategy Funder research, RFP triage, and prep for major donor meetings
  • Researching potential funders — foundations, grant opportunities, giving priorities
  • Summarizing long RFPs quickly to triage whether it's worth applying
  • Competitive landscape awareness — what are peer organizations doing?
  • Generating talking points for major donor meetings based on known interests
Data Analysis Finding patterns in data you already have but haven't had time to look at
  • Taking existing data and looking for patterns
  • Donor retention analysis, lapsed donor segmentation, giving trends
  • Cleaning and organizing messy exported data — turning a spreadsheet from your CRM into something actually useful for analysis
  • Analyzing survey responses or program outcome data to support impact reporting and grant narratives
Strategic Thinking & Brainstorming Breaking through stuck points, stress-testing plans, finding angles you'd have missed
  • Generating ideas you wouldn't have thought of — LLMs have breadth of knowledge far beyond any individual
  • Stress-testing a fundraising strategy — ask it to argue against your plan
  • Generating campaign theme ideas when stuck
  • Preparing for difficult donor conversations by role-playing them first
Internal Operations Administrative work that consumes time without directly advancing mission
  • Meeting summaries and action items from transcripts
  • Creating templates and systems that didn't exist before
  • Onboarding materials for new development staff

Tools &
Resources

Tools

Claude · ChatGPT · Gemini
claude.ai chat.openai.com gemini.google.com

All three have free tiers. Try them and find what fits how you actually work.

Handy handy.computer

Voice transcription that lets you talk instead of type. Especially useful when you want to give a lot of background quickly.

LLMFeeder GitHub

A browser extension that strips a webpage down to clean text so you can paste it directly into an AI conversation.

liteparse simonw.github.io/liteparse

Converts PDFs to text so you can work with them in AI tools. Use the OCR option if the PDF contains scanned images.

Learn More

Ethan Mollick Co-Intelligence (book) and oneusefulthing.org. Some of the most useful, grounded writing available on how AI actually works in practice.
AI for the People A wonderful six-week email course for anyone interested in learning more about how to think about AI in our daily lives. Excellent for beginners, still great for experienced users. AI for Nonprofits Resource Hub From the Nonprofit Technology Network, AI resources written specifically for nonprofit organizations.

More From This Site

Moving Beyond the Basics Three techniques for getting more out of AI: voice transcription, multi-phase prompts, and multi-lens analysis. The Power of an LLM Debrief How to use an LLM for reflection and professional development. Don't Let the AI Handle It Why to be careful about AI tools that take actions on your behalf.