Role of AI in Enhancing Donor Engagement with Salvatore Salpietro

The need for change in the fundraising sector has never been greater. But innovations in technology are evolving faster than our ability to understand them. Are these advances good or bad? Do they have unintended consequences? And what is the application to the global fundraising sector? That's what we're here to find out. Welcome to the Fundraising AI Podcast, your up to date resource for responsible AI for the global fundraising community, hosted by Nathan Chappelle and Scott Rosenkrantz.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Fundraising AI Podcast. I'm Nathan Chappelle. I'm here with Scott Rosenkrans and a very special guest today. We're super excited to have you on our podcast, Sal. We've been talking about this for a while and you've jumped in kind of both feet with Fundraising AI and this is probably just a long time coming to have you on, on the podcast with us. So I wanted to start out real quick, have you introduce yourself, share a little bit about what Fundraise up does, the origin story and where you are, you are today, where you're going in the future. But actually, I'm really curious. I know Scott was probably more curious like, what does a Chief Community Officer do? And probably more importantly, how do we get that job? Because that sounds like a project.

I tell you. For the last couple years, I was running partnerships at Fundraise Up. I basically had given the jobs here that no one knows how to do or know what it is. And it's kind of like, go figure it out. Which what I did with partnerships, I love that they have the confidence to give me those roles. As we were growing come January, they said there's a lot of vibe out there for Fundraise up and nobody's. There's no keeper of the flame, there's nobody curating that. There's nobody engaging out there, learning. Would you be that person? I jumped at it. I said, half of my time I'm doing it already, so make that my full time focus.

I love the vibe. I think maybe you should have gone with Chief Vibe Officer. That would have been pretty sweet. I love that sentiment of leveraging what's already out there and amplifying it. It is a pretty cool job, I have to admit. I see you out there kind of just honestly kind of having fun. It feels like you're really enjoying it and it just comes natural to you. Do you feel like you're living and working in your strengths?

Yeah, I. I'm making a conscious decision to not try to build Fundraise up community. Right. This isn't about let's build a following and a rabid fan base. It's about how do I get out in the community, be part of it, learn from it and share what we learn with that community. That's the focus of what community means for me and for so as we're.

We'Re talking about that for people that are listening, I'll get this, we'll let you go at some. You can close this out. Scott, what does Fundraise up do for the people that don't know Fundraise Up? I know you have lots of customers and a really successful story, but if you could explain what you actually do, maybe a little bit of the origin story and where you're seeing the future of Fundraise up for whatever you're allowed to share.

Sure, you can go on YouTube, on our fundraiser, on our Fundraise up channel. And Peter, the CEO, one of the co founders, tells it way better and way more emotional. But in a nutshell, the company is founded by three guys that were not involved in the nonprofit space at all, except for the fact that they were donors. And Peter was making a donation to a very large non profit that is now a customer of ours, which we're super happy about. That came full circle and he couldn't get this donation through on his phone. He was in an Uber trying to get it through errors, wasn't mobile responsive, couldn't just, it wasn't working. He just venmoed his friend the money and said, here, you do it for me. So that was the impetus. He called a friend and they started looking around. This is horrible. This can't be the case everywhere. And they looked around and it was essentially the case everywhere. Then certain prototypes and ideas started getting dreamed up and the on page modal was born, which now we see a number of them out in the market. After we piloted that, adding AI into the product was almost an afterthought. That wasn't, that wasn't, it wasn't like, oh, let's build an AI donation checkout experience. It was build a donation experience that works. And by the way, I'm messing with TensorFlow, let's throw it in there and see what it does with Askarate. Nice. So that's the origin. What we, what Fundraise up does is basically dynamic donor checkout experiences. We optimize that experience at scale and make it personalized to the donor, leveraging AI not just in an ask array but in places throughout the donor experience.

You talked about getting to the nonprofit community and Doing your work in this community. How did you get here and how did you end up at fundraiser?

Great question. My whole life I've been in tech at some in some capacity. When my daughter was born, I had a startup was doing fine for me as a single guy and you know, my life at that point. And then my daughter was on the way, had my wife and I said, I need, I need something more stable. So started looking around, did a couple different job interviews and then a client of mine from years prior said, hey, I'm now the CMO at a national nonprofit, the Child Mind Institute, Manhattan. You kill it, man. Like, can you come up here and help me out with some digital marketing and all that? So we were living in Florida at the time and I went up to Manhattan, we moved to Brooklyn and I started as the director of digital for the Child of Mine Institute. That was my first exposure to non profit like CORE in that capacity.

How long ago was that?

That was 2016. Okay, 2016, 2016, 2017. And got there and I was exposed to the nonprofit tech and tools that they had in place. And I was coming from the e commerce space prior and I was, to use a word I rarely flabbergasted like, like, what is, why does this donation form look like a DMV license renewal form? Like, what is happening here? And why is. The director of development asked me to get more donations on that. Right, right. So I was there, it was there about a year and a half and then I get a cold email from the co founders and they say, hey, we're, we're in Brooklyn. We're trying to find a nonprofit to try this prototype out, give it a shot. And I just wrote back. And it was one of those sliding doors moments. It's like you either delete the spam or you reply. And I said, you know what? I'm desperate. I need something that works. Throw me a login, I'll take it from there. I'm like, I'm not gonna get on calls, not gonna just give me a login. And I didn't go through the director of development, go to the cmo. I didn't get permission, didn't do the meeting, didn't do all the. I just said, you want more donations? I think this will do it. I'm going to put it in. I'll beg for forgiveness later if it doesn't work, but I'm going to skip the permission part. And that's how I was introduced to Fundraise up. And then the guy said, hey, when we're ready to start a company. Would you want to join us? About a year later, they came knocking on my door and said, we're ready to start it. Do you want to come help us get this off the ground? And that was it.

That's awesome. Yeah, I love that because I love somebody selling something. Not selling, but speaking about something that they have firsthand experience and not just they're given a script on. This is how we talk about this product. You've seen the impact that it makes in your own personal space.

We 5x donations, like we were getting visitors a month and nobody was converting. And I put this tool in, and I put it in every article as a little WordPress block right after paragraph three on every article. And five, five times the donation started going through. I said, this is insane. Like, yeah, this has to get out there, you know?

Yeah. I think some of the greatest innovations that we experience come from the areas where there's the greatest need. And our sector is, is often known to be late adopters and kind of slow on, on the uptake. I mean, it reminds me of my early days of machine learning. Was completely built out of total frustration. It wasn't because I had this like, AI is the coolest thing and we should do it because everyone else is doing it was because the things that we have and the models that we were using sucked, frankly.

Right.

And actually realizing that they were creating harm to creating super biased approaches toward rich white men continuously that for years, 20 years of fundraising, that moving to a mathematical approach where we could actually understand the motivations of giving was just, was beautiful. I didn't know that was going to be the end result, but I, I knew that I was frustrated that there was very low efficacy and we're doing it was like throwing spaghetti on the wall and everyone else was doing it and we'd done it that way. But I do, I love the fact that when there's this need and you can see, like, look, we've got to solve for this and talk about friction too. I mean, where I think back on those earlier days of online giving where, you know, just basic friction, I mean, I believe there's, there's, there's good friction and bad friction. Bad friction definitely is having to click on many, many things and getting to the point where you time out or get frustrated and you just abandon the page. You're like, screw this. Like, I just one little barrier comes in between you and that gift, you're going to bail.

Right. So, you know, the threshold for friction is way Lower on a donation than it is for buying a pair of shoes.

Yeah, good point.

And this is something that I, that I, when I'm on the, on the conference circuit, I tell the audiences the friction barrier is much lower because I'm not getting the pair of shoes and I get the serotonin hit. When I donate, I feel generous. When I click donate in the email on your website, I abandon and I bail on that donation. That's on you because it was very difficult. I still get the good feels. Right. So that's what this space has to level up on. Like, you can't have anything in the way between donor, you know that, that moment of generosity when they feel it and when they don't.

Yeah.

Like you can't. Well, you're so.

My dad always said, if someone's doing you a favor, make it easy for them.

Right.

If someone's trying to support you, make it easy for them. Do that.

Yeah, exactly. Insane. The how. How so many do not. And then we go, giving is down 1%. What's going on? You ask them to mail a PDF and I don't. Like, I don't know. Yeah, there's a problem.

And it's interesting as you're talking because I'm thinking also the stakes. The stakes are higher than buying a pair of shoes because you have this anticipation that I'm going to get this hit of dopamine, I'm going to do this good thing. The organization becomes a barrier to that. By not fulfilling your destiny, not only you be like it's on you, but actually you're like, disappointed in the organization because they robbed you of something, something that you had expectations for. Like, I think your brain was already wired to be like, I'm doing this thing because I committed. I'm going to make this donation and all I have to do is click this one more thing and all is good in the world. And then essentially that organization takes it away. Actually, I can even feel myself being like, well, I'm just, I. I'm lost a little bit. Like, I just, like, that sucks. And I, well, I'm going to go to another organization now. So, obviously a tremendous success story from the very beginning, really seeing the use of technology, solid, solid platform to actually help reduce that bad friction. The only good friction I think there is is a friction that requires a human to interact with a human. Like, like, those are, those are good opportunities that we don't want to completely automize our way out of and just have people talk to bots24,7 in terms of technology, though, like, I always find it interesting. We have both Scott, who is like the earliest adopter of early adopters, who spends half of his time fixing things that don't work because he downloaded it a year before it was ever built. I used to be more that way, and then I think I got tired of. Of doing that. So I'm still an early adopter and follow trends, but I'm a bit more cautious on my journey of like, okay, I'll let Scott try it out and once he says it's fine, then it's fine. Where are you at in that? That kind of. Do you just try everything that's brand new or are you a bit more on the. The wait and see?

I'm a bit more on the wait and see. A bit weird. Like, it doesn't matter if it's new tech, old tech. If I try it and it's amazing and it works and it solves a need. I'm in. And I'm your biggest fan. We use a lot of tech here. And, you know, I got direct lines with the product teams and I'm like, you're going to market, but I'm going to give you feedback every day about that. But like generative AI, I didn't install Copilot or Perplexity on my phone until six months ago. Maybe I wasn't using it in a daily way until recently, but like, fundraise up, like, I was desperate. My level of desperation was high. Got this tool, I said, it works. I'm all in. I'm fanboy for life. Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know where I sit on the bell curve. It depends. It depends on how upset I am about what I'm trying to get done.

Yeah. So you're probably.

I mean, that's what we often talk about. Yeah. People. People adopt when the pain is strong enough.

Right.

When there's enough desperation. Like, what I'm doing is not working for me anymore. I need to try something new.

Yep.

So how.

There's a tool called Krisp and it's an AI sound microphone cleanser. So you can, you can have really bad microphones and be in a room full of people and it'll just take everybody out and clean the audio.

That's cool.

And early adopter on that because we didn't have money to buy 600 headphones and I was using AirPods and I needed to talk in a room full of people. Like, like you said, how, how high is the level of frustration?

Yeah. And I, I think that's where, where with the nonprofit sector adopting AI like this generosity crisis has been such a slow burn.

Right.

Like we're used to this now. We feel this pain, but it's been the same pain we've had for years. So it's nothing new. It's nothing like I'm. I know what I'm going to expect when I do the things the same way that I've been doing them. So the whole devil knows better than devil. You don't like people are afraid to make that switch because I'll just keep plugging away the way that I've been doing it for so long.

Yep, yep, that's, that's a common, a common approach.

So how, how are you guys using AI at fundraiser? You talked about it a little bit, but what as much as you can. Again, how would I see it if I'm interacting with you?

If you're a donor, you're not going to know necessarily. And that's, that's the beauty of it. Right. You don't know when Uber is routing you to a different driver because they're going in a different direction and they're using all these AI modeling to, to figure out how to get you there. Right. The beauty of it is just I just know that it was personalized and felt better. So when we started out we had AI in one place and it was in the Askaray. And that's what you see now kind of coming up in the market around in various platforms is the AI Askaray. But since then we've applied it throughout the platform and if you're in our dashboard, every feature that is AI powered has a little AI icon next to it. And we make sure the, the nonprofit admin user knows that we're using it in a number of places that, that make the experience more personal. So for example, the upsell we call them upsell we call nudges where a one time donor might get nudged to go monthly. Right. And that threshold of what's the amount where you nudge them and don't is different for every org. The basically the, the, the mid size gift is different for non profits of different sizes. Right, Right. Aryan has a different mid level gift than animal services, than research and medicine, et cetera, et cetera. AI works out. Hey, what's that number where I don't ask them to switch monthly and just take the big gift. So that's one place, another place is. And I'm not giving any secrets away. This is on our website fee coverage and this is a hot Hot topic in the donation form space. And we've heard, we've heard, we've been quoted on some other platform sessions and so on that will reference fee coverage and how that can bring down the conversion rate. And our rebuttal is, well, yeah, if it's a bad donation form, right, sure. Like, like my tip goes down if I get bad service at a restaurant, my propensity and likelihood to cover fees is going to go down. If this is not frictionless, our, our job is like delight the donor, make it so easy that they're blown away. So we added AI to the fee coverage and this was mind blowing to me when we figured out, hey, when we pre select the box to cover fees, abandonment goes up on larger gifts, but it doesn't have an impact at the lower levels. And the AI's job was to figure out what is lower levels. Where is that line? Okay, so the AI works out what's the vanity threshold for a donor to where you presumptively pre selecting the box offends me to the point where I abandon. And every single account is different. Every nonprofit has a different vanity threshold. So now the AI says you can turn, you can in our dashboard, you can choose pre select always, let them opt in always or let AI figure it out and the AI will based on the gift amount, pre select or not pre select the fee coverage box, which ultimately results in more revenue and a higher conversion. So it's at every step in the process the AI is looking okay. Right now I'm going to pitch this askaray. Now I'm going to see if I want to nudge them to a better gift, a higher value gift. Now I'm going to use AI to order the payment methods based on device. And what I see, maybe Apple pay should be at the top on a mobile phone, but maybe it should be second on a Safari browser on a desktop. So it's going to reorder. And so every screen essentially has AI applied where it's just increasing concept.

Yeah, I think that's incredible because most people think, oh, a donation form is a donation form and just fairly static and they're the same for everyone. And just what you described are so many nuances to it. I remember the first time I was introduced to Fundraise up was at, I think it was in D.C. at an ANA conference and there was a. I was sitting in a session, which is rare cause I never sit in sessions. And it was Fundraise up talking about doing some custom work with ifaw, the organization that Basically rehabilitates elephants. And I don't have, like, the strong affiliation with elephants. I mean, there's probably other animals. I'm like, Labradors. I like, super, like, into it. But I was so impressed. And in this session, they were talking about how understanding the likelihood of someone being a subscriber and even in some cases where a person says, no, I don't want to be a subscriber, that fundraiser found out that if they present that idea a second time, even after the fact, that there's a certain percentage of people be like, okay, I was wrong. I actually do want to be a subscriber. I was so impressed with this that I actually ended up making a recurring donation to ifaw. And again, like, I mean, amazing stories, but it was just a really cool example about how Fundraise up was aligning with this nonprofit. And they're fairly large and complicated and figuring out, like, what's this for you? And what's this for your type of donors? Cause your earlier point of, like, people affiliate with animals different than cancer research and other things. So, yeah, it was a. It was really interesting study. And so everything that you just shared in a multitude of ways, like, it makes that seemingly simple process super nuanced and complex. And I guess it shows how quickly the human brain is processing all these things.

Right.

And if any one of those things becomes a barrier, you're just abandoned. Right. Because it almost like, intuitively, that tension of, like, I want to do this, but it's going to cost me something. I want to do it, but I'm not sure if right now is the moment or this is the right time or the right amount of money. And you're eliminating those reasons to just make it feel and reinforcing those positive vibes that go along with the whole donation experience, which is really awesome.

There's one other example of that, which. Which, you know, is. Is more human, is if I'm making a donation and it's in, there's a dedication, someone the AI has figured out that don't recommend a monthly gift after that, recommend an annual gift. Celebrate that. Like, take. Make that decision for them.

Right, Right.

Let them opt into it. Right. Present that because this is a tribute, this isn't in honor of someone, and they're doing it for some reason and set it and forget it. Right. So to your point.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's awesome. And I. I love that it's not blatant like, hey, we're using AI. Everybody should know that we're using AI just for the Sake of using AI. Right. But it's thoughtful in your execution of it, and it's still being transparent to the. And to the client. Right. AI is making a role in this decision, and you're allowing them to make the decision of where does that take the place of us making a decision for the people that we're engaging with?

Yeah. One thing that is going to be interesting so. Oh, sorry, I think I froze for a second. One thing is going to be interesting is that as we're thinking about the nonprofit's responsibility of ethics and privacy and transparency is whether or not. And the government will probably regulate this sometime next year, that organizations that are using AI on a website will have to have a thing like we have with cookies now. Right. That wasn't just goodwill. That was a mandate that you had to say, if you're storing information about this individual in a cookie, the person has to accept it. We're going to end up doing the same thing in the nonprofit sector eventually. Study that Cherry and Koshy and I just funded and will be coming out when we surveyed 1,006 donors. So recent donors in the last 12 months showed that they are concerned about nonprofits using AI to do these things without any transparency. And so it's, it's great that you're sharing that. And, and I think the encouragement is for nonprofits to have some sort of disclosure on their website somewhere. It's like, look, if you want our privacy policy, it's here. And also, yes, we use AI to essentially optimize your donor experience and in a positive light. Not in this, like, creepy, weird way. It's this way of like, we're trying to improve your donor experience. We're trying to facilitate that so it feels personal and it's timely and it, it's satisfying your wishes. And I think to your point about Uber and a thousand other algorithms that we interact with on a daily basis, we are so used to trading privacy for convenience. And we'll do that a lot. Right. Just because it's like, I want to be able to accomplish what I want to accomplish now. And I understand that technology is behind there.

Right. But those other platforms, The Ubers, the TikToks, the Everythings, they don't have those disclaimers out there. It's buried in the term right somewhere in there. But we just accept the terms and we get on with it and we use it. So as for the space and will we get there now? I'll preface this with that Fundraise up doesn't use any personal information in any of our AI. It's completely anonymous data. It's anonymized. It's basically what a Google Analytics session would see for a user. And we use that so there's no bias baked into it. Right, Right. But will we add the AI badge? Maybe, I don't know, short. Every tool that nonprofits are using has AI in it pretty much already. Yeah. Right. Microsoft Word, Grammarly, whatever you're using.

Right.

AI in there, and it's core to the fabric of it. Will a policy, will some sort of badge stop them or hinder them from adopting these tools? We're going to be on the back foot if we do because like as we said, Uber, TikTok, et cetera, they're going guns blazing.

Yeah. I do think it though it will be on the it, the impetus will be on the nonprofit to say we're using tools that use AI and disclosing like to customize your donor experience or to personalize your donor experience. And that can be a broad swot to cover all the applications. I don't think it would be on an application by application basis because that would be just insane. But broadly, nonprofits want to use data to improve the donor experience. And I think it's good from a ethics and transparency perspective to be like, like we. Just the same way we accept cookies now, I mean it's very, very similar. It's like we use cookies to essentially make your next experience better with us. Right.

And I mean we all remember when GDPR came out and we were all scared of that. Like, like we're dead. Right. We can't. Mark, I can't email anybody anymore. It's done. This is like that times a thousand. It's more ubiquitous. It's, it's, it's, it's everywhere. It's in every tool. It's impossible to not use AI now. Right. Like if, like you're on your computer, you're using it. That's it. Right. So I think also leaning on some of the existing frameworks, they may not be complete, but GDPR's ISO, PSI, SOC2, we have all of those certifications because there isn't a GDPR for AI, for example. Right, Right. So if GDPR says, hey, respect privacy, respect that donor consumers wishes, we adhere to that. Our non profits have to do that. And we currently operate under that assumption.

Yeah, absolutely.

We'll see where it goes.

So speaking of seeing where it goes, where do you see the AI making an impact in the nonprofit sector in the next five years? What do you See in terms of adoption of changes that it's making to organizations and just overall how we act as a sector.

I saw this question when you sent it over. I gave it some thought and I don't think AI in fact I, I'm pretty convinced it's not out to transform the sector. It is out to transform process trans mindsets, transform efficiency and what we expect in productivity. We're, all we're doing is looking to create constantly more efficiency all around the wheel at Fundraise up specifically our product is let's create efficiency for the nonprofit, for the donor, for revenue outcomes. And all of that's ultimately to create more impact, more mission dollars at a lower overhead. And that overhead can be mental overhead, burnout, overhead, cost overhead just make things easier. And it's built into the business model as well that we have. But I don't to reiterate, it's, it's not AI is going to transform the sector. It's going to transform our expectations of the out outputs, our mindset, the process. It'll transform the tech in the sector. I hope you know, at some point every platform in this space will have some sort of AI in it. We were fortunate enough to be at the forefront, be the first platform to have any sort of donor facing AI in, in the, that donor experience. But increasingly it's, it's, it's everywhere. But I think that's, that's, that's my take on what's the impact gonna be. It's gonna be, it's gonna change how we work. Not the industry itself.

Yeah. So secondary impact because we're gonna be adapting to all that it's allowing us to do.

Yeah. I think, I think there's a lot of unnecessary fear around it. You know, it's this, this has benefits to us just like the Internet did and all these, these, these parallels that, that have been drawn about different technologies. Sure, AI is way bigger and the biggest technological advancement maybe since the Internet, but it's, it's, it's just going to change how we work. It's not going to change this industry specifically. I don't think we're still going to have problems to solve and things like that.

Yeah. And ideally this is the technology that helps scale generosity. Right. If we use this well, we can do more, more accurately, faster and be happier in the end, essentially serving our missions better. One of the things that we've talked about with you and I and Scott was there as well around is that tension between adoption, whether it's like being afraid of it and being slow to adopt because I'm not sure if it's as secure and safe and private, it's unregulated, that kind of thing and making it easy to adopt. I think that's an interesting conversation because our sector one is we have to make sure that we're safeguarding trust and things that we do. And that does require doing things ethically and being competent and that, but also removing some of the barriers. I think when we hear a lot of nonprofits that don't use AI and I reflect on conferences that Scott and I go to a lot, it's because, oh, oh no, it's not private, oh no, it's not secure. Oh no, it's going to replace all the humans, which a lot of it is just unfounded. Right. So I don't know, what are your thoughts on how you balance that tension between adoption and whatever we call it, regulation or safety to make sure that we don't do harm to our sector, but we also don't make it so burdensome that people don't want to adopt it because they feel like they're just scared of it.

That's a big question. Kind of addressed it a bit earlier where we're looking at pre existing frameworks, GDPR certifications that are out there, compliances at a larger level that can kind of take some of that sting away and apprehension. But I talked to nonprofits and have talked to many of them and they'll say something to the effect of, well, AI is new for us and I'm sure you both have as well. And let me run this up the chain and see if this is okay. And I go, well, are you guys using Facebook ads? Are you guys using xyz? Are you guys using this tool? Like this is not, this isn't a radical shift like you don't have on your staff that is just sitting there analyzing spreadsheets and spreadsheets of demographics so you can build an audience on Facebook. You're going into Facebook ads and going check the box, find a lookalike audience. You know, that answers your question directly. But we're getting back into. You're using it already. This can be such a big discussion point, I don't think.

But, but you just pointed out also that you as an organization have one, looked at frameworks adopted. Frameworks have gone through from ISO to SOC two.

Sure.

Those are big lifts. Those are, those are things that are showing that you're committed to ensuring privacy and security for your clients. And I think, yeah, I, I think that is a symbol. And I think as people are evaluating well is this good versus bad AI which we don't really talk about in those kind of binary terms but working with vendors who aren't taking those precautions and say organizations like Just trust us, we're using Meta's llama 2 open source model and knowing that it has some really bad ramifications used improperly like that model will teach you how to build a chemical weapon if you want. So what could go wrong? Yeah but yeah, so I, I think, I think there's probably more scrutiny on vendors now go to go through those extra precautions and to adopt a framework or build a framework, adopt a framework, have solid governance. But I think to your point AI I don't think any tech platform exists in the future without AI because it just is going to seem so archaic and it those that use it will outperform those that don't by a magnitude. So it's just ubiquitous to everything that we do. So I think that's one of the tensions that in the nonprofit sector find it's like well how do I evaluate good versus bad or how do I know what AI is going to uphold my organization's values? And it's by looking at things like what are the commitments of the organization I'm buying from to ensure that they're also they can check all those boxes.

Sure. And, and we went a step further. We got, we got privacy compliance in Canada called pip Pipeta P I P E D A Different countries have different needs or you need a server on that territory. Whatever. I, I mean I, I looked at one website for, for one platform in the space and under compliance as it said, it said something to the effect yes. Answering the question of are you si, ISO or soc 2. I was like yes. All of our.