Two weeks ago we introduced six organizations testing agentic fundraising with us over five months. Every one of them opened with the same question: personalized to what?
It is the right question. Most personalization in the sector is a merge field and a segment name. What follows is the actual mechanism we are running, and the challenges we’ll have to overcome.
On August 4 we said we’d go through this touchpoint by touchpoint. This is touchpoint one.
💭 What the engine runs on
Evidence, not house style. We keep a library of more than 200 studies on donor behavior, each one peer-reviewed or checked against a live test. A personalized email campaign will draw on about ten of them. That library does the deciding: when the system picks an ask amount, a send time, or whether to open with impact or with thanks, it’s applying a specific finding rather than a copywriter’s instinct. Findings that don’t replicate in a cohort test come back out of the library.
Enrichment, starting with your own systems. The agents pull a supporter’s CRM history, giving record, event attendance and email engagement (most fundraising platforms, CRMs and mail tools connect without much work), then add outside context you always had a right to and never had time to find: where someone studied, where they work now, what they’ve said publicly about the things they care about. Very little of this is new data. Most of it was already sitting in three systems that never spoke to each other.
Worth saying plainly: enrichment carries obligations. UK and EU GDPR for European supporters, state privacy law in the US, and a supporter’s reaction to being profiled matters as much as the legal position does. We’re using data with explicit consent.
Nonprofits are in an unusually strong position here. A retailer enriching a stranger’s profile is doing surveillance. You’re adding context about someone who already put their hand up for your cause, sometimes years ago, and who has spent every year since being sent mail that reads as though you’ve never met. We almost never hear a supporter complain that a charity knows too much about them. The complaint is the reverse. That’s a better starting point than any commercial sector has, which means the standard for doing this properly can be set here rather than imported later from retail. Every cohort organization is making the call deliberately, and where one of them decides the answer is no, we’ll publish that too.
🧹 What happens when the data is poor
Most organizations don’t have a clean file. They have a decade of one-time donors, no interests captured anywhere, and an unsubscribe rate nobody wants to bring up.
Between them, the six cohort organizations hold over 200,000 email contacts. A large share of those people have heard nothing from the organization holding their address since the day they last gave.
Enrichment is what splits that pile in two. On one cohort file we scrubbed and enriched the whole list down to roughly 10,000 contacts with real engagement in the past year, and rebuilt each of those briefs with employment, education and interest context. That’s the group worth running a personalized program against. The rest aren’t dead. They’re unasked.
And for the unasked, the move isn’t smarter inference. You just have to ask.
One cohort approach: a short, plainly written email to historical donors saying we’d like to know you better, with a two-minute quiz attached. Not a satisfaction survey. Net Impact’s version is themed around impact across the mission, and uses interests as the way in rather than a form to fill.
Questions about what they care about and how they’d like to hear from us. Nobody expects most people to reply. Everyone who does becomes a supporter brief that didn’t exist before, and the raw material for the next twelve months of contact.
🤖 How a journey actually gets sent
The decision engine reads the supporter brief, applies the evidence library, generates the sequence, then behaves like an inbox: it either sends, or it parks the message for a human to approve. Timing is set per supporter rather than by the campaign calendar.
Nobody in the cohort is running this unattended, and we’d be suspicious of anyone who claimed they were.
👋 Come and see it running
We’re running a workshop on 23rd September, 11am (ET) on personalized campaigns and what it takes to unlock them inside your own CRM.
Reply to this email or send a note to hello@aifornonprofitsnetwork.org to sign up for free.
🎯 The personal edge
Each organization is testing this from a different starting position.
Income Movement has built one of the largest economic-security movements in the country. We’re working out what a first ask looks like when it has to be worthy of that trust: personal, respectful, and in the movement’s own voice.
Cameron House, a 150-year-old San Francisco community institution, is testing how warm supporters become first-time and then monthly givers.
CAUSE is building a scalable recurring giving program out of years of scattered supporter data, to fund the civic infrastructure that helps communities participate and lead.
Generation180 is turning one of the sector’s most engaged clean-energy newsletters into a digital giving program.
Livestrong has spent years giving people affected by cancer resources and guidebook downloads, and those downloads captured emails. The question is whether that audience can be re-engaged for support without trading on the moment they first arrived. Livestrong is also building on Ellis, its AI support companion.
Net Impact needs no introduction here: readers met CEO Karen Johns in our February “90 days” case study. Net Impact holds a large alumni file and is testing re-engagement now that those alumni are established in their careers and in a position to give back.
The first Cohort Diary, one of the six writing in their own words, runs next month.
📊 Does any of this work
Too early for the full answer, but the first signal is encouraging. One organization that started with us in May saw donations captured around one of its events rise 12% after adding personalized outreach either side of the event.
One number from one event isn’t a result, and running this in the open means we say so rather than putting it on a slide.
Here’s what we’re measuring across the 200,000 contacts and the campaigns and events behind them, and what we’ll publish over the next three months:
One-time capture rates from events and digital touchpoints, before and after personalization
Conversion from one-time gift to monthly, which is the number that decides whether any of this pays for itself
Reactivation of contacts with no engagement since their last donation
Where the agent’s output had to be overridden by a human, and why
Baselines are set. We’ll report the KPIs that moved and the ones that didn’t.
✈️ Come and find us in…
Chicago
We’ll be in Chicago from 1st through 5th September, presenting with our partners at Project Equity.
If your organization is in or near Chicago and you want to talk properly about any of this, the cohort, agentic giving, or the state of your own supporter data, reply to this email and we’ll find a time.
NYC Climate Week
Climate Week NYC runs September 20 to 27. We’re supporting Net Impact’s session, Impact Meets Intelligence: Careers in AI, on Monday September 21, 4 to 6pm ET in midtown Manhattan. Come and say hello.
Drop a note to hello@aifornonprofitsnetwork.org and we’ll grab a coffee/beer.
🚪 Join the second cohort
The waitlist for Cohort 2 is open: Join the waitlist now.
Same shape as the first. Real deployments, findings published here as they happen. If you’re sitting on a dormant list, a large pledge file, or an audience you’ve never asked, you’re exactly who we want to hear from.
Or just reply to this email with the state of your own file, and we’ll tell you honestly whether personalization is your next move or whether something else should come first.