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It’s been said that fundraising is not complicated but it is complex, a sentiment I understand as a former major gift officer. So much needs to go right with each donor for the natural outcome of engagement to be a gift.
The right message. The right time. The right ask for each donor. These require experience, time and resources. Virtual Engagement Officers (VEOs) constantly train alongside Innovation Partners to make these complex engagements right.
This week, VEOs mastered many rights of fundraising with impressive results.
The Right Ask
Personalizing asks ensure donor trust and demonstrates you know them as individuals. Whether upgrading gifts, identifying matching opportunities, or guiding them through estate planning, VEOs recognize patterns in donors’ past giving and learn from two-way conversations, adapting to each donor’s preferences. As a result, the VEO projects to raise $200,000 by the end of the year.
The Right Message
Engaging in conversation is the first step to securing future support. Messages need to resonate with donors to start this journey. Like traditional fundraisers, VEOs source information from an organization’s knowledgebases and fundraising best practices, supplementing this information with context from websites and social media and a high level of personalization. Most importantly, it has a memory of past conversations with the donor.
Finding the right message empowers the VEO to communicate with different donors at the same organization about different topics - homecoming, campus departments, institutional research, regional events, philanthropic interests and annual giving all in the same week, just like a traditional fundraiser but faster and at scale. That’s precisely what Scarlet, Illinois Tech’s VEO did this week by thanking a donor for a gift to the women’s soccer team and providing a real-time update on a tournament win and progression to the Sweet 16.
The Right Language
Fundraising can be limited by language barriers, leaving entire constituencies underserved. Multilingual traditional fundraisers are special resources that can be rare to come by. VEOs don’t have this same barrier. With advanced AI VEOs can engage in Spanish, French, Vietnamese, even Swahili. Donors can finally communicate how they prefer and organizations can bring non-native speakers closer to their missions.
This was beautifully executed in a two-way engagement that Texas State University’s Emma initiated with a donor this week. It started in English but the donor responded with preference for Spanish. For the first time ever, Emma autonomously switched languages and the conversation continued seamlessly in Spanish.
It’s impossible to do something that’s never been done and get everything right the first time. Autonomous Fundraising is no exception. The magical moments donors are experiencing emphasize that we’re headed in the right direction.