Hi, it's Mocha.
Last week I introduced you to the tool I built. This week I want to zoom back out to the whole category, because fundraising is where I have spent most of my working life, on more sides of the table than most people ever get to sit. For five years I funded a startup, and grants were only ever one stream. I pitched venture funds. I pitched angels. I raised the round I still lovingly call friends, family and farmers. And alongside all of it, more than ten years of leading parent councils at my kids' schools had me raising twenty-five thousand dollars or more a year for our school communities, one grant application and silent auction at a time. Every one of those seats taught me the same thing, and I have never let it go: the relationship always came first. The money followed the trust, never the other way around. A foundation, an angel, a venture fund, a neighbour with a chequebook: not one of them funds a document. They fund a person they believe.
So when I look at AI landing in development work, I feel two things at once. Real relief that the grind might finally lift, and real protectiveness about the human part underneath it. If you carry both of those feelings too, you are in exactly the right place. Let's be warm about this, and careful.
What this does for your day. So much of fundraising is quiet, invisible labour: figuring out who to call, staring at a blank grant template at midnight, rewriting the same report for the third funder this month. AI can take the grind out of that. It can help you know your donors, find the money that actually fits your mission, and draft the asks. For me, the real gift was never the speed. It was the hours it hands back, so you can spend them where they always mattered most: in the room, with the people who believe in your work.
The tools I'd start with:
Donor CRMs with AI built in (scoring, next-best-action, segmentation):
Bloomerang / Kindful / Virtuous: donor management with AI suggestions, sized for small and mid shops.
Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud (Einstein) / Blackbaud Intelligence: heavier platforms for larger orgs.
Prospect & wealth research:
iWave / DonorSearch / Windfall: capacity and propensity signals on potential major donors.
Grants (find, draft, manage):
Instrumentl: grant discovery and tracking.
Grantable / Grant Assistant (FreeWill) / FundRobin: AI help drafting applications.
Grant Shifter: an integrated find-and-draft option built for under-resourced orgs. Full disclosure, I built this one, so I would rather you weigh it honestly against the others than take my word for it.
And your general assistant from Issue 1 handles a surprising amount of grant and appeal drafting on its own. Mine is Claude, and it has carried more midnight first drafts with me than I can count.
For the founders reading: your rounds live inside the same truth. That same assistant will draft the investor update, the pitch narrative, and the answer to the diligence question you have rewritten ten times. The coffee with the angel stays yours.
💚 The part I care about most. In all my years of raising money, from gaming grants and school fundraisers to angels and venture funds, the relationship always came first, and that is the one thing I will not let AI touch. Used well, these tools are genuine relief: less midnight staring at a blank template, less guesswork about who to call. For a two-person development team, that can be the difference between burning out and making the year-end goal. But here is the line I hold firm: donor communication is a relationship, not a mail-merge. AI can draft the appeal. It cannot have the relationship. Every donor-facing word gets a human read before it goes out, in your real voice. And donor scoring deserves a skeptical eye. It can quietly encode bias and reduce a generous human being to a number. Use it to protect your limited time, never to decide who "deserves" your attention.
If you try one thing this week (under 30 minutes): Take one grant question or thank-you letter you have been avoiding. Paste the basics into an assistant and ask for a first draft. Then do the most important part: rewrite it in your own voice before anyone reads it. Notice how much gentler "edit a draft" feels than "start from nothing."
Your turn: Tell me where fundraising eats your time: research, writing, or reporting. I read every reply, and your answers shape what I write next.
Mocha