From burnout to breakthrough: How AI frees nonprofits to focus on what matters most

How can AI help nonprofits combat burnout and focus on what matters most? Allison Fine shares how AI creates time to deepen donor relationships and build a more human-centered approach to philanthropy.

Death and taxes are the only assured things in life, the old adage goes. I would like to add time to that list as well. We can make time appear to go faster, keeping busy instead of watching a pot boil, or slower, staying present in pressure-filled situations, but we can’t actually make more of it.

Talk to nonprofit staff members of any size organization and the one constant refrain you will hear is that they don’t have enough time to do all the work. The world is coming at us at a thousand miles per hour, they say, and we are playing a continual game of whack-a-mole just to keep up. This contributes to the sky-high burnout rate of nonprofit executives who do their real work—strategizing, thinking, and planning, not just batting back emails—late at night and on weekends.

The last chapters in digital technology brought us email and social media. These have made the wheels of organizations spin faster, and louder and more publicly. All of this speed and activity has created even longer to-do lists. There are more questions from the public to answer. More files and data on shared drives to store and find. More reports to create. More content to create. It has been estimated that staff members can spend up to two full days every week of their time on administrative tasks.

What if there was a technology that could do most of that work for you? There is, artificial intelligence (AI).

Right now, AI is best at doing time-consuming administrative tasks. A chatbot can answer the same questions that get asked every day (“Is our donation tax-deductible?”) Generative AI tools like ChatGPT can craft the first draft of social media content and other communications. AI built into HR software can do the first pass at screening resumes. An AI assistant like Microsoft Copilot can find information stored on a shared drive.  

Of course, integrating AI into organizational systems and processes needs to be done responsibly and ethically. It is important to ask and answer questions like these: What does it mean when first conversations are with chatbots instead of people? How do we make sure that people always check communications before they go out into the world? How can we mitigate the bias built into software to make sure that we aren’t screening out resumes from women and people of color? 

Using AI to do these tasks is not the real return on investment, however. Using AI strategically and well creates something organizations have never created before: free time. This isn’t more time—there are still only 24 hours in a day—but time freed up from administrative tasks. This is the “dividend of time”—time to do something different, something better, time to do things that only people can do well.

Time to fix the leaky bucket problem.

Sixty years ago, companies selling magazine subscriptions and catalogs created direct mail fundraising. They created enormous lists of potential donors, mailed them solicitations, and expected, or hoped for, a 3% response or so. This was expensive, but don’t worry, these companies said, these donors have a high lifetime value and will be with you for years.

The reality is that donors do not stay with organizations for years. Many studies have shown that nearly 80% of them give one gift and leave. Organizations lose money on the original acquisition mailing (or emailing or texting) and then lose money every year after. This is the leaky bucket. In a panic, organizations do this year after year to try to keep the bucket somewhat filled. Rinse and repeat, in an annual cycle of desperation.

The panic makes transactional fundraising seem necessary and justified as even more appeals get sent to donors in a “spray and pray” approach. It contributes to the burnout rates of nonprofit staffs. It also is hated by donors. So far in this century, 20% fewer people give to an organization than in the year 2000. 

Transactional fundraising is a choice, not a necessity.

There is an alternative: relational fundraising at scale that will make every donor feel like a million bucks. We are beginning to pioneer this next chapter in fundraising at Every.org with the aim of ensuring that each donor feels great about and is well-thanked for their contribution, wants to tell their friends about their contribution and the organization, and, most importantly, wants to give again.
 

Here are the steps to getting started:

1. Use your dividend of time with intention.

This gift of time should not be squandered doing the same tasks as before. Organizational leaders need to be intentional about what new kinds of activities can be prioritized to increase the donor retention rate.

2. Customize stories and thank-you messages.

Stories about an organization’s impact can be customized to individual donors based on their past activities and preferences. The American Cancer Society used AI to determine the best ways to communicate with donors for the channel and messages. The result was an astounding 400% increase in the donor conversation rates.

3. Pick up the phone.

Using AI to handle administrative tasks enables us to be more human than ever before. We can spend more time asking donors why this cause is important to them. More time asking for advice and input (that is actually used instead of being window dressing). More time building community.


Getting off the hamster wheel of transactional fundraising is a leadership challenge, not a technical challenge. The dividend of time can be used to reduce the sense of loneliness and disconnection that so many people feel. When used carefully and thoughtfully, the highest purpose of AI is to help us become more–not less‒human.

The views and opinions of third party content providers are solely those of the author and not Fidelity Charitable. Fidelity Charitable does not guarantee the accuracy of the information provided by such third parties.