If you’re a fundraiser, then AI can do your job, and there is a chance that in a few years it will be doing your job and you’ll be out of work.
Before you spit out your coffee (I suppose if you were going to do that, you’ll have already done it), note that I didn’t say AI will be able to do your job better than you can. I just said that it has the ability to do it.
Being good, excellent, or even the best, isn’t necessarily going to protect you from being replaced, because your replacement doesn’t have to be better than you, or even as good as you. They just have to be good enough to get the job done as efficiently and effectively as needed. And that might not be to the high standards of highly talented and competent human fundraisers… despite what those doing the hiring might think.
Anything that can achieve that necessary standard at a cheaper cost than the person currently doing it is always going to be an attractive proposition for cash-strapped charities. Why engage a database assistant when AI will do the job for a fraction of a cost? Why outsource to a marketing agency when AI will write and design your fundraising comms for far less?
Maybe you think this only applies to roles such as copywriting, grantwriting, database management, prospect research and wealth screening, donor data analytics, graphic design, campaign planning (that’s bad enough, isn’t it?).
But surely AI cannot replace one-to-one fundraising, which requires the type of relationship-building and stewardship that only a human can provide?
This month, Nathan Chappell, chief AI officer at Virtuous (an American donor relationship platform), warned on LinkedIn about the technology that could displace fundraisers from relationships.
“This is no longer a hypothetical… autonomous fundraising platforms, designed to function as stand-ins for development officers, are already in pilot at universities, hospitals and research institutions,” he said.
“The avatars look like real people. They speak in plain language about the institution they represent.”
Fundraisers are consoling themselves with wishful thinking when they say that AI will never be able to do what they do. And the many articles and posts cropping up on social media plaintively making this case are an implicit acknowledgement that AI-driven autonomous platforms can and they will – because if they couldn’t, people wouldn’t need to go to such lengths to argue otherwise.
But fundraisers are already being displaced from relationships with donors.
Two years ago, my think tank Rogare devised a typology for how charities and fundraisers are ‘disintermediated’ – cut out of or displaced – from giving, asking for support, and providing help to people in need.
We mooted that philanthropy advisors might be a type of disintermediation. We’re currently working with Rita Kottasz at Kingston University to expand this typology, and, with lots of input from the vice-president of software company Kindsight, Cherian Koshy, we’ve given philanthropy advisors their own category (along with Donor Advised Funds).
As Cherian points out, philanthropy advisors are replacing fundraisers not just in their role of stewarding donor relationships, but in co-creating philanthropic meaning with donors. Yes, this is replacement of one human by a different human doing a similar role, not by a machine. But it establishes the principle that breaks the connection between fundraiser and donor.
Writing in Third Sector last year, Zoe Amar described how charities are being bypassed by people who go to AI search functions to get information about, say, medical conditions, rather than to charities dealing with this condition.
We initially planned to include this as a type of disintermediation in our expanded typology. But the feedback we got is that AI is going to displace charities at many other junction points in the typology. It doesn’t warrant a single place on the typology but is a kind of meta-displacement. As more people use AI to access information – the point Zoe made – it’s very possible that philanthropy advisors could also find themselves displaced by AI.
At every point AI intersects with a type of disintermediation, it is almost certain to also put some of the people performing those roles out of their jobs.
Every time a new technology emerges that does what humans previously did, massive job displacement results. It happened to weavers in the late 18th century and typesetters in the 1980s. Most high streets once had a commercial photography studio. Smartphones have rendered them unnecessary and AI is hammering the nail into professional photography’s coffin.
I can’t see any reason to think the same won’t happen to fundraising, or see why some fundraisers think this pattern of history will wash over them and leave them unscathed.
The donors of the future – in 20 to 30 years from now – will have grown up with AI touching everything about their lives to the point that the technology is totally normalised. The idea that they would need a human fundraiser to help them decide if and to which charities they could/should donate will seem as alien to them as it is for us to go to a commercial photography studio for a family portrait.
Ian MacQuillin is director of the fundraising think tank Rogare.