AI Real Talk: What Your Donors and Competitors Are Saying (and What They’re Actually Doing)

Presentation Summary: Come to this session if you’re tired of the breathless hype and you crave real talk — and real-world data.

With nearly two-thirds of for-profit marketers already using AI and automation, AI is widening the gap between nonprofit and for-profit marketing programs. Is the nonprofit sector heading in the same direction? What are the likely implications for YOUR fundraising or advocacy program of using generative AI? And how might today’s leadership decisions impact the sector long-term?

In this session we’ll provide dozens of data points to help leaders make wise choices about AI. We’ll share a meta-analysis across academic studies, for-profit and nonprofit survey research, and in-market test results from multiple nonprofits. We’ll combine this with new data from our 2025 M+R Benchmarks study showing how 200+ nonprofits are and aren’t using AI in their programs, compared to for-profits. We’ll also share how many of those groups have official AI use policies, and what those policies tend to include.

Then we’ll look at how all that data is playing out in the real world — including how real donors behaved (not just how they SAID they’d behave) in head-to-head tests, with big implications for how generative AI might be impacting the sacred bond of donors’ trust in your nonprofit.

We’ll deepen your knowledge with “tales from the trenches” of fundraising and advocacy programs using AI across content creation, data manipulation and analysis, and much more — Human Rights Campaign’s award-winning direct marketing program, Progressive Multiplier Fund’s work scaling low-dollar fundraising for dozens of nonprofits, and M+R clients like the American Cancer Society and Feeding America.

When the dust settles, you’ll have a data-informed sense of the current state of the nonprofit sector, where it’s going, and what YOU should be doing about it right now.