Madison Barefield

Your annual fund is open. Your campaign page is live. But donors land on a single generic donation form with no clear sense of where their money goes or what it will do. They give anyway, or they do not. Either way, you have left something important on the table. Designated giving is one of the most underused tools in nonprofit fundraising. When donors can choose where their gift goes, they feel more connected to the outcome.

You have heard the pitch. AI will transform your fundraising. But then you open three different tools and still spend Friday afternoon manually cleaning up donor records before your board report is due. The promise sounds right. The reality, for most nonprofit teams, has not caught up yet. That gap is worth understanding, because the problem is not AI itself. It is where AI tends to show up and what it is usually built to do, so let’s dive into how to use AI in fundraising.

Running a nonprofit means doing more with less, and that doesn’t just apply to your budget. The good news: a surprising number of software companies offer deeply discounted or free tools for nonprofits. The not-so-good news: a lot of organizations don’t know these programs exist, or they assume the application process is too complicated to bother with. It’s not. So let’s explore the free tools at your disposal.