How AI Could Help Improve Your Nonprofit’s Cold Outreach to Donors

It’s hard to imagine any nonprofit fundraising team that doesn’t want to send more personalized outreach messages to prospective donors. By doing the research before you reach out, you can approach prospects as individuals — referencing their unique interests, backgrounds, and goals to start the kind of genuine conversations that lead to lasting partnerships.

But finding the time can be tough. With everything else nonprofit fundraising teams need to coordinate and accomplish, researching and drafting personalized messages for hundreds of potential donors may feel unrealistic.

AI tools may offer a solution. Today, early adopters of AI are using the technology to innovate and become more efficient, with 60% using it to automate repetitive tasks. For fundraising teams, these types of gains from AI tools could be a game-changer when it comes to crafting personalized outreach to the right individuals. 

Here are a few ways that your fundraising and development team can use AI-assisted tools.

Generate summaries of leads and donor accounts in seconds

Researching potential donors and decision makers within companies can be incredibly time-consuming, often requiring you to visit multiple websites to gather the information you need. Lead IQ and Account IQ are two new AI-assisted features in LinkedIn Sales Navigator that streamline the process.

• Account IQ - Within seconds, see an overview of need-to-know insights about a particular company, including with key account and relationship intelligence.

• Lead IQ - See an instant summary of an individual lead’s experience, achievements, interests, commonalities, and activities to help you make a warm connection.

With the help of Account IQ and Lead IQ, your fundraisers can spend the hours they’d otherwise devote to lengthy internet account research on drafting better, more informed outreach instead. And when your outreach results in a meeting or phone call with a prospect, you’ll have all the information you need at your fingertips to navigate the conversation with confidence.

How to use Account IQ and Lead IQ

To use Account IQ: From your Sales Navigator dashboard, navigate to the Account Page of your target organization and scroll down to the Account IQ section to find information like:

• A financial report: How the organization makes money and revenue estimates.

• Strategic priorities: What the organization is focused on and recent initiatives.

• Business challenges: Major strategic challenges the organization faces.

• Key people: Noteworthy executives and possible decision makers within the organization.

• Executive voices: Topics that leaders at this organization have been talking about on LinkedIn recently.

• Competitive landscape: Details about the industry the account operates in and who their key competitors are.

• Related news: Key company news and articles.

To use Lead IQ: From your Sales Navigator dashboard,  navigate to the profile of the lead you are targeting. Scroll down to the “Get Insights about [Lead Name]” section, and click “Generate Lead IQ.” You’ll see a bulleted summary about the lead’s interests, recent activities on LinkedIn, and key information on their company

Personalize cold outreach messages much more efficiently

When it’s time to start drafting your next cold outreach message, you can customize your message by referencing information from the information you learned from Account IQ or Lead IQ. You could even get the conversation started by highlighting a topic you noticed in the executive voices summary that connects with your nonprofit’s mission.

Looking to make things even easier? Why not experiment with using an AI platform to help you with some of the heavy lifting and create a strong first draft? Microsoft Copilot, for example, has both free and paid versions that can help you generate the first drafts of emails, InMails, and more in a fraction of the time that it would take you to write them yourself.

Start by crafting a prompt that gives your AI tool the information it needs to be as helpful as possible. This can include telling the tool what you want it to create, describing the style or tone you’d like the outreach message to reflect, and providing key contextual details and information about the opportunity. You could even share a template to help educate the tool about what these messages typically look like, such as one of the free outreach templates offered in the LinkedIn for Nonprofits Resource Hub. You can also explore resources like the course, Introduction to Prompt Engineering for Generative AI, to help you finesse your nonprofit fundraising AI prompts.

After your AI tool creates a first draft, consider making suggestions about how it can improve it, like asking “Can you please make this message a little shorter?” Once you’ve edited the draft and made it your own, you can easily copy and paste it into an email or InMail message on LinkedIn.

As you start incorporating AI tools into your fundraising efforts, keep in mind that AI is best used as an assistant, not a replacement. Your fundraising team are the experts, so be sure to review all content generated by AI for accuracy and edit as needed.

And don’t forget to add that essential human touch. By speeding up or eliminating busywork, AI creates more space for your team to let their personalities shine through their outreach — helping them make more personal connections with more potential donors, partners, and other key supporters.

Find out why 67% of surveyed global nonprofit professionals agree that LinkedIn is a valuable tool for fundraising. Eligible nonprofits can even get up to 50% off on LinkedIn’s discounted products.