Welcome to Fundraising Update. This week, we look at how organizations plan to use an A.I.-powered fundraiser to interact with donors. Plus, we delve into the mindset of the ultra wealthy and how donating changes them.

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.

Thanks to our sponsor DonorPerfect for supporting Fundraising Update.

Colleges Put A.I. Fundraiser to the Test

Ever since the emergence of ChatGPT and other more powerful artificial intelligence tools, some professionals have worried that A.I. will take their jobs. A new tech startup, Givzey, will put that concern to the test in fundraising. The company has signed up 13 organizations that will spend 18 months using an autonomous fundraiser — an A.I. tool that will interact with donors in hopes of raising money for the institutions.

Adam Martel, CEO of Givzey, says his goal is for the A.I. to raise money from donors, and that he doesn’t believe it is taking jobs away from real-life fundraisers.

“We have a staffing crisis in fundraising,” Martel told me during an interview. “Anything we can do to help organizations get to more donors, in addition to helping them hire as many fundraisers as possible, is a good thing. This isn’t going to replace fundraisers because there’s such a lack of fundraising talent out there.”

Martel says the goal of the autonomous fundraiser is to reach donors who don’t have a gift officer assigned to them — and that most organizations wouldn’t hire a gift officer to serve — but who could benefit from more personalized engagement.

“Eighty percent of the giving pyramid isn’t touched,” Martel says. “They’re not talked to, regardless of what level they’re giving at, because only 10 to 20 percent of the giving pyramid is managed by major-gift officers or fundraisers. They are wonderful, but they can’t scale.”

Martel views the autonomous fundraiser as a way to bring that personal touch to a bigger chunk of donors. While his positivity about A.I. in fundraising abounds, others in the field are approaching the idea of using A.I. to talk to donors with caution.

Givzey

“I’m not anti-autonomous fundraisers,” says Nathan Chappell, co-author of The Generosity Crisis and an executive at the data firm DonorSearch. “But I am skeptical and concerned about this idea. Just because the technology allows us to do this, it doesn’t mean we should.”

How Does the A.I. Fundraiser Work?

Givzey’s autonomous fundraiser is a computer-generated avatar that looks like a real person and speaks to donors in plain language about the institution it represents. Current fundraiser avatars can be male or female, white or Black, and Martel hopes to expand the diversity of the avatars in the future. Donors have to opt in to communicating with the autonomous fundraiser, and they are clearly informed that it’s not a real person.

Givzey is testing the autonomous fundraisers through research and development agreements at 13 institutions, mostly universities, along with a hospital and a nonprofit research lab. The organizations are paying to use the product. Martel declined to disclose the exact price, but did say that it was more than the $15,000 to $20,000 that Givzey hopes to charge if the company can get to scale.

For more on the autonomous fundraiser, read the full article.

Need to Know

“People change once they’ve chosen to engage with a problem and with a community they’re trying to help.”

— Jen Shang, fundraising researcher and author

Fundraisers spend countless hours trying to suss out what will motivate a wealthy donor to become a long-term giver of big gifts. They might talk to a rich donor about how good it will feel to donate a large sum or how that donation will transform the charity’s work. A new book suggests what motivates rich philanthropists is often far more complex, reports my colleague Maria Di Mento.

Meaningful Philanthropy: The Person Behind the Giving, written by Jen Shang and Adrian Sargeant, builds on the findings of a study Shang and Sargeant, founders of the Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy, conducted in 2022. For the study, the two researchers interviewed 48 wealthy philanthropists from around the world about their charitable giving and involvement with the organizations and causes they support.

Shang recently spoke to the Chronicle about the book.

What made you decide to turn your 2022 study into a book that delves into the psychological side of giving?

Part of it was that fundraisers can’t see all the stepping-stones on a philanthropist’s roadmap. When we first released the findings, we didn’t know if people would want to access this kind of detailed information, but then people started to ask questions and we realized they wanted more information. I presented the findings to over a thousand people and got a lot of questions from the audience and in individual conversations with philanthropists and fundraisers. A lot of the questions they asked had to be addressed.

Why is it so important that fundraisers understand how making a big gift contributes to a philanthropist’s psychological well-being?

For the majority of the people I interviewed, the reason they started their philanthropy is not the same reason they sustained their philanthropy. It’s not the reason why they’re still doing philanthropy and why they find philanthropy meaningful.

People change once they’ve chosen to engage with a problem and with a community they’re trying to help. They grow with the community and learn about what they are doing for others, and they experience different aspects of themselves and the community that they could not possibly have experienced until they started to walk the walk. So, focusing on why people give is such a limited and constrained way of thinking about philanthropy. It doesn’t give enough space to the importance of exploring this much deeper journey that people could potentially be exposed to.

For more from the interview, read the entire piece.

Plus ...

• Voting Tied to Philanthropy By Muslim Women. For fundraisers looking to diversify their donor rolls to include more Muslim women, they may want to reach out to registered voters. Research from the Muslim Philanthropy Initiative found that 87 percent of all zakat— a form of charitable giving required of Muslims — given by Muslim American women came from registered voters.

  Researchers Shariq Siddiqui and Nausheena Hussain reported that Muslim women who are registered to vote are 15 times more likely to volunteer than other Muslim women. They also determined that about 61 percent of the Muslim American women who said they volunteered gave nearly 94 percent of the total zakat contributions the participants in this study said they made in 2022.

  “Our findings indicate that nonprofits eligible to receive zakat funds, but do not engage with Muslim American women, are losing out of valuable financial and volunteer resources for their mission,” the researcher wrote. For more about the study, read Siddiqui and Hussain’s full article.
  

Gift of the Week

Stephen Jones and Melanie Sanchez-Jones gave $5.6 million to Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania. The funds will endow scholarships, experiential learning opportunities, and faculty support within the university’s honors college, which will be renamed the Eileen G. Jones Honors College, in homage to Stephen Jones’s late mother, whom he credits with pushing him to do well in college.

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.

Advice and Opinion

How Charities With Thrift Shops Can Get Better Quality Donations. Telling donors that their neighbors have provided high-quality furniture, clothing, and other goods can cut the number of worthless items charities receive in half.

Steph and Ayesha Curry’s Plea to Philanthropy: Don’t Let Pandemic-Era Tutoring Programs End (Opinion). Individualized support helped our own children. We’re committing $25 million to Oakland schools so all students have the same opportunity.

What We’re Reading

Publicity Brings Donation. A high school in New Orleans is going to be $1 million richer, after NBA legend Charles Barkley saw a report about two of its students. A segment on CBS’s “60 Minutes” lauded the pair for finding “an alternative way to solve the Pythagorean Theorem during their senior year. Without using circular reasoning, they were still able to use trigonometry, which had puzzled mathematicians for over 2,000 years,” MSN reports.

Impressed by St. Mary’s Academy’s ability to produce such tenacious and ambitious students, Barkley decided to donate $1 million. The gift is structured as $100,000 annual contributions over a decade — the basketball champ made the first payment earlier this month.

“Mr. Barkley is thrilled to support St. Mary’s Academy and is very focused on transforming future generations through education and opportunities,” a representative from the Charles Barkley Foundation said. “He has a love and passion for what the academy stands for and how it is shaping the lives and futures of young girls in New Orleans.” Telling stories about what organizations do is always important. Barkley’s gift is a reminder that inspiring stories often spur donors to give. (MSN)