The
missing
seat.

Meanwhile, the thing AI is supposed to help with keeps getting harder. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project puts donor retention at about 43 percent, which means most of the people who gave last year will not give this year. Generosity holds because fewer people are giving more. That is a fragile way to fund a mission.

So the sector has a capacity problem and a generosity problem at the same time. AI introduces a technology that could help with both, but almost nobody has the time or expertise to implement it. I believe this capacity and expertise gap can be solved. Not by adding more to-dos to the list, but by giving the work a plan and a home.

01Giving is personal

One answer is an easy answer, but I don't think it's the right one. The easy answer is to automate all fundraising. I have watched that play out, and it often makes the retention problem worse. Because giving is personal, people can tell when they are being processed.

AI should do the work that keeps people from doing the human work. The moment it starts doing the human work itself, you have traded a relationship for a transaction.

The truest thing comes from my colleagues Nathan Chappell and Gabe Cooper, who recently wrote a book about it: it's not donors, it's not prospects, fundamentally, it's people. Human beings. Each person is generous because of a personal reason. A first gift is personal because someone believed in your mission enough to act, and what happens in the ninety days after decides whether there is a second act of generosity. Seven out of ten people never give again, not because they stopped being generous, but because nothing that followed made them feel like staying. The organizations that get this right treat generosity as a relationship they are responsible for, and they use technology to be more present in it.

That is what AI is for in a nonprofit. It clears the menial work that keeps people from doing the human work, and it keeps humans at the helm. The goal then, with any implementation of AI, is to enable and empower more human work, not less of it.

02Every organization is a software organization

This is not a new idea, but it's perhaps even more critical in today's AI-native world than ever before. Watts Humphrey opened a book for executives in 2002 with a chapter called “Every Business Is a Software Business.” Forbes ran the same headline in 2011. Plenty of people have said it since, the same way Gary Vaynerchuk spent years telling every company it was also a media company. In the same way that “being a media company” has evolved to “be a storytelling company,” I believe we're at a catalyzing point where every company needs to fully lean into “being a software company.” And yes, that's especially true for nonprofits.

The historical idea of every company being a software company manifested primarily as a purchasing decision. Choose the right systems, keep the website up, move the paper into a database, etc. If you had no engineers, you bought from people who did, and that was the whole of it.

That is the critical part that has now changed. Now, any product is buildable at any size organization with no engineers at all. What used to be a “job” that required custom product development or a large SaaS contract can now be built by just about any team. So if every organization should be a software organization, the questions that require answers are:

• HOW can I build it?

• WHO will manage it?

• HOW can we tell it's actually moving the mission forward?

03The seat

Every organization I have seen get this right has one thing in common. Somewhere in the building, the work has an owner. Someone senior enough to decide, technical enough to build, and close enough to the mission to know what matters. Someone who can look across the whole organization, name the one number that would prove the year worked, find what is holding it back, and see that it gets fixed.

In for-profit companies, that work sits next to the CEO with the title “Chief of Staff,” and companies are hiring for it faster than almost any role on the org chart. In tech-forward organizations, we're seeing more “AI Chiefs of Staff” that do things like draft emails, keep calendars, and serve as automated personal assistants. Those are useful, I've built several, but for mission organizations, that is not the primary thing that is missing.

What is missing is the role itself: the recognition that this human-centered, AI-forward work (once again to quote Nathan and Gabe) is a seat, that it matters, and that someone has to hold it.

There is a second reason this seat sits empty. The work spans story & identity, design, data, systems, product development, and AI. It's difficult to find one individual who can cover all specialties holistically, and if you do it is usually cost prohibitive.

The organizations that get this right solve it the same way: an accountable, operation and orchestration layer that can diagnose the problem, design the solution, and deliver the tactical solutions that move the mission forward.

Most nonprofits won't post that job. The market salary is usually out of reach, and the person who can do it can usually earn more somewhere else. So the seat sits empty, and the work lands on folks who are already at full capacity.

That is the gap Nonprofit Builders exists to close. One seat, held by someone accountable for the number, with a bench of strategists, designers, developers, and nonprofit systems specialists behind it. The ownership of a hire and the range of a team, for less than either.

04How we're solving it

First, we work backwards. Before anyone talks about tools, we write down what good looks like at the end of next year, in the organization's own numbers, as if the announcement had already gone out. Then we work backwards to identify what has to be true to get there and what is in the way. Seeing that clearly is the method I wrote a book about, and it is the critical step in effective problem solving.

Then we build, and we build on what you already have. This is not another tool to evaluate, and it is not a replacement for the ones you run. We connect to your CRM, your giving platform, and the systems your team already knows, and we build the specific pieces tailored to the jobs in front of you. We've spent years inside of the problems you're facing, the tools you already run, and understand the jobs to be done to move the mission forward.

What that looks like in practice: A donor journey that runs on its own with a named owner. A reporting system that gives the board real answers. A knowledge base that gives a new hire a week of context in an hour. Each piece of work is scoped, has an owner on your team, and is relentlessly measured, so we both know whether it worked. Story, design, data, systems, and AI are delivered by the same hands, because that is the only way the pieces hold together.

And we train as we go. The point is a team that can do more next year than it did this year, with more of the work in its own hands with more capacity and more joy.

You can bring us in by the piece or by the seat. We can help you solve one specific problem in a few weeks for a fixed price, or establish an ongoing partnership, where we sit at the table and there is always something in motion. Either way, it costs less than the full-time role you would otherwise need, and if you add up what most organizations already spend on tools, it is often less than that.

The nonprofits doing the most important work deserve the same caliber of design and product thinking the best companies in the world run on. Why should a mission have to compromise on that? I started Nonprofit Builders because I am convinced it should not have to, and because I have spent my career building the skills and the model to make sure it does not. If you run one of those organizations, the first conversation is free, and it starts with what good looks like for you. I'd love to have that conversation with you.