Your Donor Data. A Smarter Fundraising Strategy.

Fundraising technology is moving toward more informed preparation

In its April 2026 AFP ICON announcement, Blackbaud described Action Strategies in Raiser’s Edge NXT as bringing recent donor activity, engagement signals, preferences, and recommended next steps into concise briefings. The company also highlighted AI assistance designed to surface insights and recommended actions within existing workflows.

That is useful context for advancement leaders. These capabilities are being designed around a familiar challenge: helping fundraisers make sense of information before they reach out.

Microsoft illustrates a similar direction in its nonprofit scenario, “Manage the Donor Pipeline.” Its examples show Copilot assisting with giving-pattern analysis, prospect segmentation, message preparation, and summaries of recent interactions that suggest follow-up actions.

These are vendor descriptions and demonstrations, rather than independent evidence of fundraising results. They do, however, show practical possibilities that teams can evaluate against their own needs.

The ingredients may already be in your CRM

You do not need to begin with an overwhelming amount of information. Consider what your team already maintains:

• Lifetime giving and giving across the current fiscal year and four previous years.
• Most recent and largest gifts, including dates, funds, and amounts.
• Wealth screening and estimated capacity.
• Recent contact reports, including dates and notes.
• Next steps, due dates, and open proposals or documented strategies.

Each contributes something different.

Giving history helps establish the donor’s connection to the organization. Wealth indicators provide context about potential scale. Contact reports help explain what the donor cares about and what the team has learned.

The contact notes bring the relationship into the picture.

A gift amount cannot tell you that a donor asked about student career opportunities. A capacity estimate cannot explain that someone requested more information before considering a proposal. Those details often come from the gift officer’s work.

When that knowledge is considered alongside giving and engagement information, the team has a stronger basis for discussing priorities for the week, month, or quarter.

From information to a purposeful conversation

Imagine a donor who has supported a university’s College of Business and expressed interest in helping students gain professional experience. The university announces a new internship partnership.

That development may be relevant to the next conversation. AI could help surface the connection between the documented interest and the institutional update, giving the officer a possible talking point to review.

The same idea could apply to a hospital program, an arts organization’s educational work, or a nonprofit’s community services.

The value is in making relevant connections easier to recognize. A staff member still needs to decide whether the information is timely, accurate, and appropriate for that donor.

This is the kind of strategic preparation that interests me: helping an officer understand why an interaction might matter and arrive with a clearer purpose.

Leadership determines what makes the work useful

Before investing in an AI workflow, leaders should be clear about the improvement they want.

Perhaps officers spend too much time gathering information before meetings. Perhaps relationship knowledge is scattered across records. Perhaps managers need a clearer view of where follow-through or internal support is needed.

Those are specific problems a team can examine.

A useful implementation should fit the organization’s data, staff responsibilities, and expectations. It should use an approved environment for donor information, make the basis for recommendations visible, and preserve human review.

It also needs to recognize uncertainty. An estimated capacity is not a commitment. A missing contact report does not prove that a conversation never happened. A suggested talking point still requires the officer’s judgment.

Those distinctions help staff trust and use the work responsibly.

The return should be visible in the work

For a small advancement team, time spent repeatedly assembling information is time unavailable for other responsibilities. Reducing that preparation burden could create room for better donor conversations, more consistent follow-through, and stronger collaboration.

That is where I would look for a return on the investment.

Are officers spending less time searching across records? Are they better prepared for conversations? Can managers identify where support is needed? Are recommendations useful enough that staff act on them?

The cost of setup, review, and ongoing maintenance belongs in that assessment too. The value becomes clearer when a team can see a meaningful improvement in how the work gets done.

Start with the question your team needs answered

Your organization may already have much of the information needed to support more strategic fundraising. The next step is deciding how that information should help people plan, prepare, and act.

That takes knowledge of fundraising, an understanding of the data, and a practical approach to implementation.