Can AI Raise Money and Not Replace Humans? 8 Lessons So Far

It’s been almost a year since we learned of the autonomous fundraiser piloted with more than dozen colleges and universities. The fundraiser, an AI-driven avatar, was used to create asynchronous videos for interactions with donors via text and email. The goal was to see if donors would interact with a tool identified as artificial intelligence and if it could raise money.

The answers are yes and yes, according to the fundraisers who have used it and the founder of Givzey, the company that created the tool. Now, the autonomous fundraiser is named the “virtual engagement officer” — or VEO — and the institutions using it are testing how they can better interact with donors.

“We continue to learn, we continue to get better and experiment,” says Matthew Lambert, senior vice president for university advancement at William & Mary, one of the organizations using the AI tool.

The VEO raised $2 million across 50 institutions between October 2024 and July 2025, according to Givzey. Here are some of the lessons learned so far.

The avatar interacts through texts and more.

The avatar doesn’t have real-time video discussions with donors, but it can go back and forth with them over text and email. It can even create “handwritten” notes, which can be mailed to donors.

“We’ve learned that the best way to approach this is to mimic what a front-line fundraiser would do,” says Adam Martel, Givzey’s founder and a former major-gifts officer.

William & Mary named its VEO Wren, and “she” has access to the school’s website content and marketing materials. Her interactions with donors have, at times, been surprising — in a good way, Lambert says.

“What’s been amazing is that she has found content that our team has created over the last several years that we have forgotten about,” he says. “An alum was asking about entrepreneurship, and she found a video from three years ago. It was a reminder that we have so much great content available already in our own universe that we don’t always use in quite the same way that she is.”

Wren sends out birthday greetings and “Happy Holidays” messages, which Lambert says donors enjoy. Many respond in kind, wishing Wren happy holidays in return.

The fundraising department at the Illinois Institute of Technology felt like an AI fundraiser would be on brand with the institution’s cutting-edge image, says Susan Lewers, associate vice president for major and planned gifts. The goal for Illinois Tech’s VEO, named Scarlet, is to warm up donors, and then pass them on to major-gifts officers.

“We really just wanted her to be communicating with people that we thought were major-gift prospects,” Lewers says.

To keep in the loop with Scarlet, Lewers added her personal email address and cell phone number to Scarlet’s portfolio, so she gets the same info other donors receive. Lewers also uses her personal account to interact with Scarlet to see how she responds.

“I’ll ask, ‘Is there anything coming up on campus that I’d be interested in?’ And she’ll respond with, ‘There’s a book club,’” Lewers says. “I’m surprised at how much she knows. That makes me confident that she’s still giving folks accurate information. We haven’t had any major problems with the work that she is doing. No negative feedback.”

The AI fundraiser makes its own decisions when sending messages.

Because the AI fundraiser can use only approved material and doesn’t search the web for data, Lewers has given Scarlet free reign to interact with donors.

“I don’t know how the magic works,” she says. “But the magic has been amazing. I have not put a lot of limits on her.”

But Lewers did have a scare after one text from Scarlet.

“I had a moment of panic when I saw she put together a video and texted it to everyone at the end of the year, and I hadn’t seen the video first,” Lewers says. But all was well. “She used all approved content, and it was really a great, short, sweet year-in-review that she shared with her folks. And we were all delighted with the work.”

Over at William & Mary, Wren similarly makes choices on what to talk about, notes Olivia Harding, a digital-gift officer who helps supervise Wren. When the university was designated an R1 institution—the highest designation for research universities — which Harding says was “big news for us,” the AI took action.

“Wren immediately sees that’s big news for us and starts pushing that out to her portfolio,” Harding says. Some of the recipients, however, had questions. “Several responses were challenging Wren to give more detailed information: What does R1 status really mean, and how is William & Mary going to maintain R1 status? She was able to pretty much instantaneously provide very thoughtful responses with a variety of different initiatives that are currently happening on campus.”

AI takes direction and is part of the team.

While the VEO makes a lot of choices about what to send, human supervisors can tell it to change course.

“I can let her know we really want to make sure that we get more alums to come to this event that’s coming up,” Lewers says, “and she’ll redirect.”

Similarly, Harding, at William & Mary, says she sometimes prompts the AI to focus on new information that could be useful to donors. “I’ll say, Wren: This is an update from the biology department,” Harding says. “If you come across a donor that is interested in biology, you may want to mention to them that there’s a study-abroad trip coming up.”

Another best practice that seems to have emerged in the pilot is treating the virtual engagement officer as part of the fundraising team.

“If people go to our website to see who Scarlet is, she is on our Meet the Team page,” Lewers says. Treating her like a team member is one of the reasons that Lewers has given Scarlet a lot of leeway. She says she wouldn’t ask to read her gifts officers’ emails before they send them, just as she doesn’t pre-approve emails Scarlet sends.

And like other team members, Scarlet submits weekly status reports.

“She emailed me at the end of the week and said: I reached out to 100 people and these are the messages,” Lewers says. “I made sure that they were invited to this or knew about this. And then next week, my plan is to promote this — whatever thing that’s going on — and then ask for feedback. Is there anything else that you want me to be doing?”

No major problems, low opt-out rate.

There have been numerous stories about AI messing up — from an eating disorder AI bot giving harmful dieting advice to an AI-created summer reading list that included books that didn’t exist. But so far, the AI fundraiser has met organizational expectations.

“We can trust the technology,” Lewers says. “She has done remarkable work — way better than I expected.”

Martel, with Givzey, says the company has had no major reports of problems, and an incredibly low opt-out rate of 0.1 percent across donors at the participating organizations.

Engagement skews older.

While Givzey and some fundraisers expected young alumni to be the ones to latch on to AI engagement, that hasn’t been the case.

“Fifty- to 70-year-olds are number one for engagement,” Martel says. “We thought it would skew younger.”

Martel says many of the donors the VEO engages often note that they “haven’t heard from the organization in 15 or 20 years,” although that’s likely not true. “What the donors are really saying is: I haven’t been engaged by anybody at the organization in 20 years,” Martel says. “It’s now consistent.”

Better prospects get better results.

The most common upside of VEO seems to be the quality of prospects. “Bucknell has raised over $250,000,” Martel says. “The goal on the very high end, we thought maybe would raise $50,000 or $60,000. But Bucknell is at $250,000. They really put great donors in the portfolio.”

William & Mary has been happy with the VEO’s success, and the fundraising department is getting one of Givzey’s new products — a virtual stewardship officer. Lambert thinks the university’s fundraising results would have been better if it had assigned VEO higher-caliber prospects.

“We started off very conservatively,” Lambert says. “We gave it to the non-donors or very low-potential donors in our portfolio, thinking if something goes wrong, it won’t have as huge of an impact on us. Some of the other schools ended up putting much higher-potential donors and higher-level donors in there and had tremendous success.”

Lambert encourages those using VEO “to go in more aggressively from the get-go and give them really good donors.”

Concerns like ‘Will AI take my job?’ remain.

Martel and the fundraising leaders deploying AI tools say job loss is not going to happen because there is too much work for humans to do.

“At the beginning, everyone was very scared of the video [feature] in autonomous fundraising taking jobs,” Martel says. “But the reality is there are so many open jobs that organizations can’t fill. The number one thing that we’ve learned is that virtual labor will sit alongside of traditional labor.”

Even if Martel is right, that doesn’t mean it will be easy to get staff on board. For Illinois Tech, there was a short window between signing the contract and the launch date for the new technology, which didn’t allow Lewers to get staff buy-in, some of whom thought they might be losing their job.

“If there was something I would do differently about how we launched,” she says, “it would have been to bring the team along to be more involved in the creation of Scarlet, so that they understood the technology and where we were headed.”

Lambert noted that he has 40 open fundraising positions he hasn’t been able to fill, and that the university had more than 30,000 donors last year, but was able to have “meaningful interaction” with only 10,000 of them due to staff constraints.

“Wren is aiming to hand off to our human gift officers,” Lambert says, who added, “We’re trying to find the right way for AI to be used for good, for more engagement, and to raise more money.”

But AI is replacing…

Martel says there is one thing in the fundraising arsenal that will likely go away due to AI.

“The virtual engagement officer is actually replacing a lot of direct mail,” Martel says.

Lewers says she loves that Scarlet can engage with donors beyond sending them the monthly newsletter, appeals twice a year, and a text on giving day: “That more personalized touch from Scarlet and the ability to have two-way communication has made a measurable difference.”