A few months ago, the world’s first fully autonomous fundraiser interacted with its first assigned donor. During this time, two dozen+ nonprofits joined together as cohorts to engage donors with an AI-powered Virtual Engagement Officer but more importantly research, develop, and accelerate the deployment of autonomous fundraising for our entire industry.

All nonprofits can relate to the fact that they have more donors and alumni than they have fundraisers with capacity to build relationships. This is precisely where autonomous fundraising changes what’s possible.

In this session, cohort members will present the results they’ve seen from autonomous fundraising – donors engaged, dollars raised, and pipeline built, in addition to their experience being the first organizations in the world to deploy a Virtual Engagement Officer to a portfolio of their donors.

We’ll present what we learned, what we got right, where course corrections were needed, and how we navigated AI in a field defined by relationships. We’ll share all of our findings including portfolios for autonomous fundraisers, sourcing engagement content independently, accuracy, transparency, ethics, and more.

Finally, we’ll conclude by looking at where we are going, how we can continue to further personalize donor journeys, push the outer limits of technology, and more.

Change is inevitable, and sometimes it’s imperative. It can be instigated intentionally, or it can be generated organically by an outside force. At Lehman College, a top Hispanic serving institution, the catalyst for change was an extraordinary gift from Mackenzie Scott. This gift, unexpected and thrilling, introduced the opportunity for the Institutional Advancement department to reassess how it interacts with leadership and campus stakeholders and build new habits and practices to improve internal and external communication, which in turn increased fundraising. While a Mackenzie Scott gift is unique, the strategies Lehman implemented in its wake can be applied across institutions. This session will offer perspectives from advancement and foundation executives on how they modeled effective change management and encouraged leaders, volunteers, and employees to embrace new ways of operating.

Join us to discuss the potential for automation, integration and AI in your foundation environment, and how you can empower and elevate those on your team using these tools. Where do you start and how can you use these tools in your leadership role in the next 5 years? We will discuss some examples of how automation, integration and AI are currently being used in our day to day and think future forward to possibilities where these tools allow us all to work smarter, not harder! Come prepared to share your ideas and experiences with automation, integration and AI or any other data driven projects you have been involved with!

Change is often discussed in our business. We make predictions, we adjust to our university's changes in leadership, in strategic plans, etc. We can fall victim to diverting our focus as foundation leaders to all the activities that are "fundraising adjacent" and divert our energy, our resources and our teams away from some of the basic tenants in our business that are timeless...the fact that meaningful, values aligned, authentic fundraising has been and will remain a critical component to the impact of higher education creates for our world. This session will feature a discussion and Q&A about what will change in our space, what will not and how we navigate our foundations to best serve the perpetual mission.