What If Major Gift Fundraisers Had More Time for Donors?

Major gift fundraising is one of the few professions where the thing you were hired to do and the thing you actually spend most of your time doing can be entirely different from each other.

The job description says: build relationships with major donors. Identify who should be in your portfolio, deepen their connection to the mission, and help them find a way to give that's meaningful to them and transformational for the organization. That's the work.

But ask anyone who's done it for more than a few months and they'll describe something else entirely: hours of database work, contact reports to write, LinkedIn research for visits that are still a week away, spreadsheets that need updating, and a CRM that requires more maintenance than it returns in value. The work that was supposed to support the relationship quietly becomes the job itself.

And what gets crowded out, day after day, is time with donors.

That tension is something I've been thinking about for the past several years, and it's what eventually led to the program I'm developing called the AI Advantage for Major Gifts. If you'd like to follow along as it takes shape, you can join the waitlist at letstalkfundraising.com/majorgifts. But I want to tell the story behind it today, because the context matters for understanding what I'm building and why.

Where the Time Actually Goes

Early in my career, I worked for an organization that was a million dollars in debt, running off two separate databases that still couldn't capture everything they needed. There were also multiple spreadsheets filling the gaps. And someone had to manage all of it.

That someone was me.

Between keeping those systems current, maintaining the donor listing with correct giving levels and renewal dates and name preferences, and reconciling information across multiple platforms, I was spending approximately 38 out of every 40 working hours at my desk.

That's not a fundraiser's schedule. That's a data entry specialist's schedule. And it had real consequences. The relationship building, the cultivation visits, the conversations that move people toward a major gift: none of that was happening. We were struggling, and the systems were a significant part of why.

I share this not to revisit a difficult season, but because I think some version of it sounds familiar. The degree varies, but the direction is the same for a lot of fundraisers: administrative work expands to fill the time available, and it does so at the direct expense of relational work.

When Systems Work, Everything Changes

That same career eventually gave me the other side of the picture. When I moved to a better-funded organization, we were able to invest in a proper CRM and spend a couple of months building it out and cleaning up the data. The organization had 150,000 members and no prior major gift history, which was a different kind of overwhelming, but it was a solvable problem.

With a real system in place, I built a scoring algorithm in Excel that assessed our entire database for capacity and inclination, and over the course of a month or two refined it down to roughly 300 qualified prospects. That work set up the organization's first-ever capital campaign.

The goal was $3 million in 18 months, from an organization that had been raising less than $200,000 a year. We raised $4.2 million.

When fundraisers have the right systems and can direct their energy toward the right people, the results speak for themselves. That campaign didn't happen because we outworked the problem. It happened because we had enough clarity about who to focus on that the relational work could actually occur. The systems weren't the strategy. They were what made the strategy possible.

What the Pilot Program Showed

When ChatGPT launched publicly in November of 2022, I started experimenting with how AI might support the same kind of shift: less administrative friction, more time for relationships. Those experiments grew into a pilot program I ran last summer with a group of major gift fundraisers, testing whether the workflows I'd built for myself could actually work for people in different organizations, with different CRM systems, different portfolio structures, and different levels of technical familiarity.

They could.

The follow-up conversations I've had over the past several months, checking in with participants after they've had time to test these systems in real-world conditions, have been illuminating. The standout application, by a wide margin, was contact reports and CRM documentation.

The workflow is straightforward. Immediately after a donor visit, you open a custom GPT, switch to voice mode, and do a brain dump. Everything you can remember, in whatever order it surfaces, as messy as it needs to be. The AI structures that input into a clean, consistent contact report and it's done before you've left the parking lot.

People who had been writing delayed, abbreviated contact reports were suddenly leaving visits with documentation that was thorough, consistent, and in the system while the conversation was still fresh.Prospect research teams had better information to work with. Portfolios were easier to manage strategically. And the institutional memory that lives in the CRM, the one that outlasts any individual fundraiser, was actually being built.

Beyond contact reports, participants were hungry for more. They understood the value quickly and started asking: what else can this do? That curiosity was real, and so was the caution. Data security is a legitimate concern in our sector and it should stay one. What goes into these tools should be something you'd be comfortable with in the world. Personally identifiable donor information stays out. The platforms are meaningfully safer than they were in 2022, but professional judgment still applies.

What Becomes Possible

Here's the vision I've been carrying since those conversations.

Right now, preparing for a qualification visit might take a major gift officer two or three hours. LinkedIn, board listings, news articles, whatever can be found across a dozen different sources, compiled manually and synthesized into some kind of picture of who you're about to meet.

With a well-crafted prompt, that same research takes less than five minutes.

If a major gift officer is currently managing seven to ten donor meetings a week, constrained partly by how long preparation takes, what happens when that preparation takes a fraction of the time? What happens to the number of visits that become possible? To the quality of those visits, when you're walking in genuinely prepared rather than underprepared and slightly behind schedule?

The multiplier effect across a full portfolio, over the course of a year, is significant. More visits means more relationships in motion. More relationships in motion means more opportunities to move people toward a gift. The math is straightforward, even if the relational work that produces it is anything but.

And here's the part that matters most to me: the goal isn't to make fundraisers faster. It's to make them more present. Less time buried in administrative systems means more energy available for the conversations that require full attention, genuine listening, and real human presence. Those conversations can't be automated. They are the job.

Why This Has to Be Built by Fundraisers

I want to address something directly, because it comes up in almost every conversation I have about AI and our profession: the fear of replacement.

I understand it. And I think it's worth being honest about it rather than just dismissing the concern.

AI is not going to replace major gift fundraisers. Not because the technology isn't impressive, but because major gift fundraising is built on empathy, trust, and relationship, and those are human capacities. A donor who makes a transformational gift is not giving it to an algorithm. They're giving it because someone helped them find a way to do something that mattered, and because they believed the organization would deliver on what it promised. That's a human transaction, regardless of what technology surrounds it.

What is true is that fundraisers who use these tools well will have more capacity, more clarity, and more time for the work that requires them to show up as human beings. That's a real advantage, and I think it's worth taking seriously rather than waiting to see how it plays out.

The program I'm developing, the AI Advantage for Major Gifts, is built on exactly that premise. It covers the entire major gift cycle with practical workflows, from prospect identification through stewardship. And it's being built by someone who has spent more than fifteen years doing this work, holds a CFRE, and has been in the donor meetings and the capital campaigns and the late nights in the database. It's not technology for technology's sake. It's an attempt to take what works and make it available to the fundraisers who need it.

If any of this resonates with you, I'd love for you to join the waitlist at letstalkfundraising.com/majorgifts. The founding cohort will have a hand in shaping how the program is built. Because the goal isn't to add another course to your professional development list. The goal is to give you more time for the part of this work that drew you to it in the first place: the relationships. Donors deserve the best of us. Not what's left of us after a week spent managing information.