Solving the Fundraising Labor Shortage: Our First Year of Autonomous Fundraising

October 2025 marked one full year of Autonomous Fundraising. As a team built of former fundraising professionals, we saw the gap in our industry: advancement teams simply do not have enough capacity to successfully manage anywhere close to the number of donors they’d like to have in portfolios.

The biggest challenge facing all nonprofits is that we have a labor shortage. There simply aren’t enough frontline fundraisers. The average gift officer tenure maxes out at 3 years, and economically, budgets constrain us from hiring frontline fundraisers at a significant scale. So we set out to provide a solution that could operate autonomously, without reliance on trainings, adoption, and dedicated time from existing gift officers. The result was the world’s first fully autonomous fundraiser.

Since then, many organizations have adopted AI Enablement tools to grow efficiency and act as admins or interns. But here’s the critical difference: those tools still require a fundraiser to execute – making calls, sending emails, completing tasks. Autonomous Fundraising is fundamentally different. With 100+ VEOs working for organizations across the country, managing 80,000+ donors, VEOs don’t just make recommendations, they independently determine and execute their tasks.

VEOs work autonomously to manage their own portfolios end-to-end, eliminating the need for existing teams to stretch further to manage larger portfolios. This isn’t about making fundraisers more efficient, it’s about adding trusted fundraising capacity to the team that is directly responsible for revenue generation.

Data validates this approach. $3.5 million+ has been raised through the work of VEOs in one year. Because they generate new revenue, VEOs are self-sustaining additions to your team—a fact that many of our Innovation Partners experience and understand.

What comes next?

Year one validated our purpose and created a foundational layer of advancement operations. Fundraising teams are now accomplishing what was physically impossible for human-only teams.

Year two is about strategic expansion—evolving our autonomous capabilities to handle even more complex donor interactions without human intervention.

Our vision is clear: VEO support across your entire donor pipeline. We're building toward a future where VEOs manage increasingly sophisticated cultivation strategies, have verticalized roles within your organization, and complete activities that surprise and delight donors at a scale you never imagined possible with your existing staff.

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