As a nonprofit fundraising professional, you’ve likely heard the gist of why you should personalize donor communications many times. Your supporters want to know that they’re integral members of your organization’s community and partners in your mission-critical efforts, so your interactions with them should acknowledge them as such. If a donor starts to feel like you see them as a revenue source rather than a valued individual, it’ll hurt their relationship with your nonprofit and potentially cause them to stop giving.

But in today’s rapidly changing nonprofit landscape, it isn’t enough to add a donor’s name and most recent gift amount to an email and call it personalization. Instead, scaling your fundraising efforts requires a strategic approach backed by one of the biggest drivers of innovation in the sector—predictive artificial intelligence (AI).

In this guide, we’ll discuss how to leverage two related types of predictive AI solutions to improve fundraising personalization—predictive modeling platforms and donor signaling tools. But first, let’s dive deeper into the benefits of this approach, especially for major giving.

Why Scalable, Technology-Driven Personalization Matters

As of 2025, more than 85% of nonprofits were exploring AI usage for everything from marketing to grant writing to bookkeeping. However, less than 13% have reported using AI to inform decision-making via predictive analytics, indicating an area of untapped potential with this technology.

DonorSearch’s AI fundraising guide lists personalizing the supporter experience through tailored outreach as one of the major roles this technology can play, but that recommendation comes alongside many other benefits of nonprofit AI, including:

• Automating mundane tasks to increase your team’s bandwidth.
• Providing accurate, actionable insights to maximize fundraising effectiveness.
• Saving time and money by helping your staff work smarter, not harder, on campaigns.

When you consider these benefits together, predictive AI tools come to the forefront as the solutions that can fill the most essential roles for your nonprofit. Additionally, by combining predictive modeling and signaling, you can figure out precisely who your best giving candidates are, when to engage each of them, and what your next move should be to create an individualized donor experience that leads to loyal support.

Steps to Scale Personalization in Fundraising

While predictive analytics can help you improve personalization to engage supporters at every level, it’s particularly useful for major giving, since every major donor’s journey with your nonprofit will be unique and intensive. Let’s walk through a basic framework to help you develop your strategy.

1. Thoroughly Research Your Supporters

Predictive AI will only produce useful recommendations if you provide it with accurate data. So, conducting prospect research on both new and existing supporters is still a critical first step in major donor fundraising.

Your prospect research should be comprehensive, covering not only potential donors’ wealth, but also their philanthropic history and possible motivations for supporting your organization. Your predictive analytics tools will need information on giving capacity and affinity to draw actionable conclusions.

Additionally, ensure your nonprofit’s prospect research tools, AI solutions, and donor database all integrate with one another. This way, data will transfer automatically between platforms, saving even more time and reducing the risk of errors associated with manual entry.

2. Identify Top Prospects Using Predictive Modeling

Once you have a solid foundation of data, it’s time to start leveraging your AI tools. The first one you’ll turn to is your predictive modeling solution, which can help you visualize your candidate pool and prioritize your prospects according to who is most likely to:

• Respond to outreach
• Make a first gift
• Donate multiple times in the near future
• Upgrade their support
• Have the highest lifetime value among your donors

These predictive supporter analytics allow you to pinpoint which prospects will be most worth your team’s time and effort to cultivate—not just to receive one major gift, but to build a relationship with a donor who will enthusiastically support your mission for years to come.

3. Build Your Personalization Strategy Around Donor Signaling

Predictive modeling helps you figure out the who of your fundraising strategy. AI-driven signaling gives you the when and what to build your full approach.

Donor signaling tools use predictive analytics to develop outreach cadence suggestions for each individual donor, allowing you to:

• Choose the right times to meet with prospects, send follow-ups, and make solicitations or upgrade requests.
• Optimize pipelines and portfolios to ensure prospects get regular communications from a consistent point of contact while keeping staff assignments manageable.
• Integrate various communication methods (emails, phone calls, in-person meetings, etc.) so they all work together toward a common goal.
• Adapt your plan as you go by leveraging wealth and philanthropic data alongside engagement insights from the cultivation process and real-time alerts.

With these recommendations on your side, you can personalize every aspect of your top prospects’ experience with your organization, from message content and communication methods to donation request timing and amounts. This precise customization is the scale your nonprofit needs to develop the most effective major giving program possible in the modern age.

4. Supplement Your Efforts With Generative AI

Although we’ve focused primarily on predictive AI so far, your nonprofit may also have experimented with generative AI, which powers tools like ChatGPT that process data to create content rather than provide recommendations. The best nonprofit AI strategies involve generative and predictive AI working together, especially if the end goal is improved personalization.

Once you’ve gained the insights you need from predictive modeling and signaling, that data can inform the email drafts, phone call and meeting talking points, donation appeals, and follow-up messages you create with generative AI. Remember to always review outputs before using them to ensure they’ll resonate with your intended audience.

One nonprofit-specific type of generative AI tool that you’ll likely find helpful as you seek to personalize major donors’ journeys is a prospect report generator. These solutions automatically summarize the most important points from your research and analysis of individual prospects so you can quickly reference this information throughout the cultivation process. Again, make sure to integrate your tools whenever possible to create a seamless workflow from start to finish.

For your nonprofit to personalize donor journeys at the necessary scale to navigate the modern major giving landscape, you need the right tools. Use the steps above to get started with predictive modeling and donor signaling solutions, and connect this software to your generative AI and donor data platforms to make your personalization efforts efficient and effective long-term.