How Lean Teams Use AI to Drive Monthly Giving
Small nonprofits can use AI tools to launch monthly giving programs, win recurring donors, and grow revenue without adding staff.
By M.J. Prest
Senior Editor, Solutions
July 14, 2026 | Read Time: 6 minutes
Monthly giving sits near the top of nearly every small nonprofit’s wish list — and near the bottom of its to-do list. The appeal is obvious: Monthly donors provide predictable revenue that smooths out the feast-or-famine cycle of fundraising events such as galas, grants, and year-end appeals.
The math has long favored recurring donors. They give more over time, stay longer, and cost less to retain than occasional supporters who must be reminded to give every December. What small organizations have lacked is not the case for monthly giving but the bandwidth to act on it.
That’s because a monthly giving program requires sustained attention, which is the scarcest resource of all in a small fundraising shop.
Using AI to Drive Monthly Giving
Senior editor M.J. Prest explains how lean teams are using AI to build the monthly giving programs they’ve always wanted.
The newest generation of artificial intelligence tools is starting to close that gap. Tasks that once required a consultant or multiple staffers’ time — mapping out a program structure, segmenting a donor database, drafting a welcome email series and thank-you notes, establishing giving tiers, developing a marketing plan — can now be sketched out in a day with well-crafted AI prompts. The tools won’t replace a fundraiser’s judgment, but they can do something almost as valuable for a lean team: get the project moving.
AI used in this way “essentially is meant to be a consultant, like a little monthly giving brain,” says Dana Snyder, who specializes in monthly giving through her fundraising consultancy Positive Equation. “A lot of the time, we don’t have the capacity or the funds to bring an actual person on for that. So how can you have this monthly giving thought partner to make it a bigger priority?”
The Chronicle spoke to people who make and use two AI tools that can create monthly giving programs from scratch and drive results over time. Here are their insights.
AI can build a monthly giving strategy from the ground up.
When FEAST, a community health organization in Los Angeles, launched its monthly giving program in 2024, it attracted only a handful of donors.
“We didn’t really get the traction that we were expecting,” says Sydney Zetune, its executive director. “So it fell away from our priorities.”
Then wildfires ripped through the city in January 2025, and demand surged for the nonprofit’s services, which include addressing food insecurity, chronic disease, and loneliness.
Earlier this year, Zetune returned her attention to the monthly giving program, called Community Table. But what existed was a donation page, not a strategy — and the website copy from 2024 no longer captured the work. The nonprofit had shrunk to three full-time staff, with no dedicated communications or development person. Zetune, who notes English isn’t her first language, has no marketing background.
She had followed the work of Dana Snyder for a while, so when Snyder launched her AI-powered Monthly Giving Builder tool at $50 a month in February, Zetune signed up.
Snyder wanted to give new clients an AI version of her consulting services. She trained the tool on the manuscript of her book The Monthly Giving Mastermind and recordings of her podcast episodes and coaching calls to give it a sense of her style and voice. “It is like DanaGPT in the back end,” she says.
Thinking about getting 100 donors feels overwhelming, but thinking about five or six donors a month feels like something that I can do.
The Monthly Giving Builder prompts users about their goals, needs, and organizational voice — no AI experience required.
In 45-minute sessions over a few weeks, Zetune rebuilt her campaign landing page, refined her launch emails, and mapped a plan to get from FEAST’s current 15 monthly donors to 100 by the end of this year.
That projection gave her a case to bring to her board and reframed the goal itself, Zetune says: “Thinking about getting 100 donors feels overwhelming, but thinking about five or six donors a month feels like something that I can do.”
The technology can amplify an existing program with minimal oversight.
Haven House for Children, a nonprofit that supports children in foster care in Chattanooga, Tenn., has just two people on staff: its executive director, Kimberly Alexander, and an intern.
“I oversee just about everything: fundraising, community engagement, volunteer coordination, partnerships, all of that stuff,” Alexander says. “I wear very many hats.”
When she started in her role last summer, she began using Bonterra’s Network for Good customer-management system to organize and track donor outreach at Haven House. Then she was sidelined by an unexpected surgery in early November — just as the year-end fundraising push was about to begin.
Short-handed and facing a hard deadline, she turned to the platform’s new AI tool Que, which was released in beta in October.
“Not only did it help me catch up, it helped me get ahead to the point where I was able to actually start working on things further in advance,” she says, estimating that Que saved her weeks of effort.
Before AI, one organization raised $3,000 to $6,000 a month from recurring donors; now it typically brings in $10,000 to $12,000.
Alexander had no previous experience with AI, but she found the tool intuitive and used it to refocus on Haven House’s monthly giving program. Before Que, the organization raised $3,000 to $6,000 a month from recurring donors; now it typically brings in $10,000 to $12,000, she says.
The gains have arrived amid broader growth since Alexander took over. In the first six months of 2026, Haven House raised $83,111 — up 29 percent from the same period a year earlier. Active donors have grown 38 percent, and the organization’s donor-retention rate has nearly doubled, from 22.6 percent to 41 percent.
Que works both proactively — noticing what a user is doing and offering to take over a task, like drafting a donor email — and reactively, responding to chatbot-style requests, says Scott Brighton, CEO of Bonterra.
The company studied the jobs that executive directors and development staff do, then rebuilt them as discrete skills the software can complete. For fundraising, “it could do the entire life cycle,” Brighton says: segmenting donors by behavior, picking a target group, designing the campaign, writing the communications, sending them, and tracking how giving changes afterward.
Bonterra targeted monthly giving precisely because the payoff justifies the learning curve, Brighton says. Small nonprofits must rationally spend their limited hours on major donors, leaving a long tail of smaller givers no one has the capacity to cultivate personally. He says the tech company’s customers can opt into using Que for roughly a 30 percent upcharge on their base software fee, which starts in the low thousands.
Alexander says Que is well worth the price tag: “It acts as a partner and it does so much that it also keeps us from having to hire someone. We don’t have the budget to hire someone else.”
