Onboarding an Autonomous Fundraiser

Imagine your organization hires a brand new fundraiser who is set to start their new role tomorrow. What do they need this week to be successful in their new position? Who do they need to meet with? What training do they need? What do they need to learn about your organization? What content and tools do they need to access to efficiently begin working with donors? How does your team put them in the best possible position to succeed?

Our team has spent a lot of time working through these questions and as we prepare to onboard the autonomous fundraiser with our first cohort of partners. We’re thinking deeply about the best, most effective and most efficient ways to onboard an autonomous fundraiser to ensure it has the best opportunity for early success.

The similarities between onboarding a traditional fundraiser and an autonomous fundraiser are uncanny and have surprised our team. It turns out that if we take the new hire materials from an organization and ensure that the autonomous fundraiser has the ability to satisfy those criteria, the AAI will be in a good position to start working with donors.

We see a lot of questions about content creation for the autonomous fundraiser, particularly related to onboarding. When organizations onboard new traditional hires they don’t build new content specially for them. Organizations don’t make videos or create special email campaigns for new traditional hires. They ask new employees to find opportunities to take existing content and disseminate it in inspiring and personalized ways, acting more as a liaison between a donor and the organization. The autonomous fundraiser is no different, which has been a pleasant relief to our partners who are concerned that the autonomous fundraiser will need special content created for it.

The expectation of any new hire is that they take the generalized skill set they’ve acquired across their career and combine those skills with the unique requirements of the organization. These generalized skills should be applied in a way that reflects the organization's unique identity as the new hire executes their job. The best version of the autonomous fundraiser is no different and should be held to the same standards that we’re holding traditional fundraisers to. We should expect that the autonomous fundraiser will have specific fundraising capabilities and will be able to learn the unique characteristics of each organization it works for.

This week, our team continues to focus on building the most efficient, effective and appropriate ways to onboard the autonomous fundraiser for our early partners. There’s still lots to learn about how to make sure the autonomous fundraiser is both generalized enough so that it can continuously learn the skill of fundraising but also flexible enough to embody the various nuances and individual identities of each organization.