Donors Share Their AI Fundraising Fears and Doubts

Survey: AI in appeals raises donor concerns. Donors want transparency, choice, and control.

Today, Brett and I are celebrating the 37th anniversary of the planning of our first date.

(Yes, this is how we decided to mark the beginning of our relationship. Highly unusual and pretty weird, I know!)

Since 1988, a whole lot has happened, of course.

In the world of technology alone, we've seen:

• dial-up to broadband to Wi-Fi to 5G
• VHS to DVD to Blu-ray to Netflix
• CD to MP3 to Spotify
• Google & YouTube
• smartphones
• social media
• and now AI

Only AI has induced major warning lights on our radar.

Which is why, even as we celebrate our first date of deep dish Giordano's pizza and a showing of U2: Rattle and Hum at our local cineplex in the Yorktown Mall...

...we also pause to take account of AI's rapid development and how donors are feeling about it.

This just in:

Donors share their AI fundraising fears and doubts.

Just yesterday, we received an email from Fundraising.AI announcing the results of a 2025 study of 1,000+ donors across a range of ages, incomes, and giving profiles.

You can read the report yourself here.

The following are our 3 crucial takeaways.

The bulleted items are ours. After each is a corresponding screenshot from the report.

• 40% of donors feel uneasy about AI-generated appeals.

• over two thirds of donors list "AI-written appeals or reports" among their top three concerns.

• Donors want transparency and the ability to opt-out when AI is used in fundraising.

Final thoughts:

AI is continually improving, which means the implications for fundraising are continually evolving.

• Expect more acceleration. This year alone, all of the biggest generative AI companies have released multiple new state-of-the-art frontier models. Unlike smartphones, this is not a "release one modestly better new version per year" kind of technology.
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• AI technology grows by leaps and bounds in part because the neural networks on which they're based are "grown" (with data, compute, algorithms...) not programmed... and because you don't need to buy new hardware to use the latest, greatest versions. For nearly every new AI release, literally billions of people can instantly access it, often at no cost.
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• The topic of AI is fraught with ethical, moral, and safety issues. Donors are increasingly likely to be affected by AI personally and to have developed strong feelings and opinions about AI and its use.

Proceed with caution.

(In case you're interested, Brett wrote about AI in fundraising in May, here, and in November, 2024, here.)