It’s been almost nine months since the world’s first fully autonomous fundraiser interacted with its first assigned donor. During that time, 11 higher educational institutions joined together as a cohort to engage donors with an AI-powered Virtual Engagement Officer (and a second cohort is now live), but more importantly research, develop, and accelerate the deployment of autonomous fundraising for our entire industry.

In this session, Jennifer Shimp-Bowerman of Bucknell University and Natalie Spring of VCU 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, data collection, and more.

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