When to use AI in corporate fundraising

It was Fireside’s third anniversary last week, and we held one of our firstproper team away days to mark the moment. We spoke about our favourite and least favourite things about the year. What we were proud of, and what we’d like to change. The team had one primary complaint…

…that there used to be an employee of the month programme. Until there were actual employees. The employee of the month hallway would just be a line of pictures of me until it actually mattered.

So we’re bringing it back. But just to annoy the team, I’m giving the crown to our increasingly used assistant: AI.

We’ve been asked a few times over the last few weeks about how we’d recommend using AI in corporate fundraising, so we have three key recommendations. Before we get into it, though, we want to stress the importance of turning the privacy settings on any AI you use on - making sure that you’re not teaching it your own commercial information.

With that out of the way, the three key uses we'd recommend are...

Pricing your partnership offers

Google Gemini, in particular, is great for helping you work out what you might want to offer to a company in exchange for certain price points. While you still need a menu of products that your charity are happy to offer to pull from, and a strong understanding of what the company’s goals are, if you have those, Google Gemini is great at providing you a steer as to what you might offer for, say, £5,000, £15,000 or £50,000. You need to capture enough detail for the prompt to work, but we’ve seen this be really powerful in convincing charities to add a zero to the proposal they’re about to send… and still getting a yes.

Simplifying your content

One of the quotes that really sticks out to us from our recent interviews asking companies why they give is this. ‘I’m billed out at £500 an hour. If it takes me two hours to understand what you want and why I should give it to you, you’ve cost my firm a grand.’

This really solidifies one of the points we talk about the most. Your emails, pitches and conversations need to be crystal clear. To do that, they need to be simple. The app Hemingway is excellent for working out the reading age of your copy and making suggestions to improve the readability. We’ve been using this one for years, but it’s still really worth knowing. 

Prospecting

Now this is a contentious one. Given how much AI hallucinates, using AI to prospect can be pretty dangerous. But we’ve found working with our friends at Ziptrix, Tom Brushwood and Chloe Dickinson that it is possible… with the right agent. They’ve built a model that is incredible for finding the right kinds of prospects.

The catch, of course, is that they’re cold prospects. AI can’t yet secure introductions from your board of trustees like we can. And warm prospects tend to lead to partnerships much faster… But we have to admit, the cold prospects they find are pretty decent, and a strong starting point for network mapping processes.

We do a lot of building pipelines and are looking to offer some of their AI in our services moving forward, giving you some prospects to test the tools and outreach methods with. Prospecting with AI needs to be done exactly right to work, and models like ChatGPT don’t cut it, but we’re starting to see a future where it might. If you’d like to improve the warmth of your pipeline, we’d love to chat to you - or if you want to try your hand at cold, try Ziptrix too.

There’s probably plenty more we could use it for, but that’s enough to declare the robot overlords employee of the month for now, don’t you think?

We’d love to hear your thoughts on what you will and won't use it for. 

Will we see you and your AI assistants by the Fireside?