Sooner or later, someone in your organization is going to hear about AI-assisted fundraising and ask the obvious question: "So, an AI is writing our thank-you letters?" It might come from a board member at a committee meeting, a colleague in the break room, a chief executive reviewing operations, a donor who heard something secondhand, or a reporter working on a story. How we answer determines whether the people around us become partners in this work or obstacles to it.
The answer starts with what the AI actually does. It drafts the thank-you note, assembles the pre-visit briefing, and analyzes the donor base for patterns we would never have time to find by hand. That is real work, and it saves hours every week.
But the AI never has the last word. A development professional who knows the donor reviews, edits, approves, and sends every communication, and a person with the right authority decides how donor data is handled and what the organization discloses. Holding that line is what lets an organization stand behind AI-assisted fundraising.
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In Holding Fire: A Skeptic’s Framework for the Fundraiser with AI at Your Side, Stephen Christopher Nill, JD, lays out the Human-Centered AI Framework—his five-principles approach to keeping humans at the center of every donor interaction, even as AI quietly does the work no one fundraiser could ever do alone.
This book was written by a skeptic, for skeptics.
Operations or Governance?
Every organization draws a line between operational decisions and governance ones, and AI tools raise questions on both sides of that line. Choosing to use AI to help draft donor communications is an operational decision, the same kind we make when we choose a word processor or an email platform. Nobody needs to vote on which software helps write a thank-you letter.
The policies are a different question. How donor data is handled, what the organization tells donors about its use of AI, and where the ethical boundaries lie are governance decisions, and someone with the appropriate authority needs to make them deliberately rather than discovering after the fact that donor data has been flowing into an outside tool with no policy in place.
The practical move is to bring both sides forward at once. We describe the operational reality plainly: "We’re using AI to help draft personalized donor communications, prepare briefings for donor meetings, and analyze our portfolio for engagement patterns." Then we hand the governance question to whoever owns it: "I’ve drafted a proposed policy for how we handle donor data, the disclosures I recommend, and what our donors will and won’t know about how we prepare what we send. I’d like the organization to review and adopt it." Framed that way, the guardrails get set by the people responsible for governance, and we keep operational authority over the tools themselves.
The Five Questions You’ll Hear
When people meet AI-assisted fundraising for the first time, they tend to raise the same five concerns, and each one has a direct answer.
The first is donor trust. People worry that donors will feel deceived to learn a note was drafted with AI. The answer is what the Human-Centered AI Framework requires: the AI drafts, and a human who knows the donor reviews, edits, approves, and sends. The AI is a drafting tool, the way a speechwriter is a drafting tool for an executive who still owns the message. We own every word that reaches a donor.
The second is data privacy. People want to know where donor information goes. That is a governance question worth asking, and the answer depends on the specific tools, their security architecture, and whether donor data is ever used to train outside models. Legal counsel should review the specifics before a policy is adopted.
The third is authenticity, the philosophical cousin of the trust question. If AI helps prepare a communication, is the relationship still real? Using a tool to prepare is preparation, the same as reviewing a donor’s record before a meeting. The relationship happens in the conversation, the phone call, and the handwritten line added to the note. Relationships built on deception are empty, and keeping a human at the center is what prevents that.
The fourth is staff displacement. Some will wonder whether AI means fewer development staff. The opposite is closer to the truth, because AI magnifies what a development professional accomplishes and shifts the hours from drafting and data entry toward the relationship work only a person can do.
The fifth is accuracy. AI sometimes gets things wrong. That is precisely why a human reviews everything before it reaches a donor. The Monday morning review is the quality-control layer, the second pair of eyes with institutional knowledge that catches an error the way it would catch any staff member’s mistake.
Bring It Forward First
Who sets the policy depends on how the organization is governed. A traditional board may adopt it directly. A Policy Governance board sets the boundaries and lets the chief executive work within them. A Strong CEO model puts the decision with the executive team and reserves fiduciary oversight for the board. The mechanism changes from one model to the next, but the underlying need does not. Every organization wants clear, intentional policies around how AI interacts with donor data, what gets disclosed, and where the lines are drawn.
In every model, the move that works is to go first. The organization that brings a thoughtful AI policy forward proactively meets a very different reception than the one caught without one when the question arrives unprompted.
In my book, Holding Fire, Chapter 8 walks through all five of these concerns and the governance models in detail, so the conversation with your board or your executive becomes a confident one rather than a defensive scramble.
Next week, we’ll turn to stewardship and the Rule of Seven, and how AI makes seven personal touches across seven channels something a busy team can sustain.
Stephen Christopher Nill, JD, founded CharityChannel in 1992, building it into one of the largest online communities of nonprofit-sector practitioners in the world. He has edited, designed, and published dozens of books for the nonprofit sector through CharityChannel Press. Over four decades, Stephen has built, administered, and advised fundraising programs in the United States and internationally that have raised billions of dollars. He has served as senior vice president of development at a hospital system, chief advancement officer at a West Coast university, director of development at a parochial school he helped to found, and founder and executive director of a charity that feeds the homeless in Southern California.
The Grant Professionals Association presented him with its first President’s Award. The Grant Professionals Certification Institute later honored him with the Pauline G. Annarino Award for foundational contributions to its existence. Stephen has been a frequent commentator on charitable giving for CNN, Fox News, MSNBC (now MS NOW), and other news shows.
He has provided training to attorneys on advanced charitable gift planning techniques on behalf of the State Bar of California’s continuing legal education program. As a lawyer and consultant, he advised hundreds of nonprofit organizations and educational institutions.
Stephen’s engagement with artificial intelligence reaches back to the 1970s, decades before the current wave. Holding Fire: A Skeptic’s Framework for the Fundraiser with AI at Your Side draws on that long history and on his career inside development offices.
He writes weekly to development professionals at charitychannel.com. These days he’s busy writing his first novel and composing symphonic music in his music studio.
