Can AI Help Fundraisers Create Deeper Connections With Donors?
Small-dollar donors are getting burnt out on fundraising appeals. Quiller is betting that artificial intelligence can fix that.
The AI content creation platform, best known as a tool for drafting fundraising emails, was acquired this month by D.C.-based tech firm Grassroots Analytics in a sale that company officials say will turbocharge Quiller’s development. In an interview this week with Campaigns & Elections, executives at Quiller and GA laid out an ambitious goal for the AI that they said would allow campaigns and organizations to more effectively reach donors with less frequent and more personalized appeals.
The idea is to use advanced data segmentation – made possible through AI – to generate specific insights on the outreach methods and issues that resonate most with individuals. Hillary Lehr, Quiller’s co-founder and CEO, said that it’s effectively a way to use “tech to understand people at a more intimate and personal level.”
“Everybody talks about AI as less human, but the best use case is going to be to strengthen human relationships and human bonds in a more thoughtful way,” Lehr said.
At a moment when campaigners and political consultants are grappling with rapidly developing AI tech and its pitfalls – the proliferation of deepfakes, misinformation and compliance concerns – the notion that the technology can be used to create deeper human connections can seem oxymoronic.
But Lehr said that the tech offers a faster, more-comprehensive way for campaigns, committees and causes to understand the people they rely on for support. For Democrats and progressives still reeling from a painful 2024 election cycle, that goes a long way, she said.
“With all of the postmortems – the regrets that we’re kind of wallowing in on the left after last year – it’s more important than ever that we start to create real movement in a direction that responds to the feedback, responds to the analysis of what didn’t work,” Lehr said.
Rethinking Fundraising
Democrats and progressives have already begun brainstorming new fundraising tactics amid growing complaints over aggressive, often spammy outreach practices.
Groups like EMILY’s List are pioneering new subscription-esque fundraising models that allow supporters to commit to a recurring monthly investment in exchange for less-frequent outreach and access to exclusive content. At the same time, ActBlue, the Democratic online fundraising clearinghouse, has rolled out new policies in an effort to crack down on egregious and misleading fundraising tactics.
Grassroots Analytics CIO Meghan McAnespie said that AI can help fundraisers better understand what practices work or don’t work. Through hypertargeting, she said, campaigns and organizations can run “a more effective program” even while “reaching out to fewer people,” challenging the long-held belief that reaching out to more people yields more donations.
“Something we’ve really encountered at the grassroots level is sending less to raise more,” McAnespie said. “In a perfect world, we would only ever be reaching out to the exact person that’s going to donate at that exact moment. We haven’t gotten it down to that, but technology is allowing us to do a lot more with the data.”
Still, McAnespie said, not all fundraising outreach is unwelcome. While some donors may be tired of the texts, emails and phone calls, people are still eager to engage with the campaigns and organizations that they support.
“The thing with fundraising appeals and all that outreach – I think we talk a lot about how people are annoyed…but people also want to help,” she said. “People want to support candidates that they believe in. When something terrible happens, people want to know that they have a place where they can channel their dollars into action.”
