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Practitioner · typically years 2–7Fundamentals & EthicsFree preview

Ethical AI in Fundraising: Keeping the Donor Free

AI is already in your shop, whether or not anyone decided. A working standard for using it that keeps the donor free, the fundraiser accountable, and the relationship human.

Through the Environment lens

Member and supporter data now runs at a scale that invites the same acquisition-and-scoring AI this module asks you to inventory movement by movement, and a rapid-response appeal is where the pressure to skip that inventory is highest. Generated urgency and an invented fact about a threat destroy trust faster than almost anything else this module names, because an environmental appeal lives or dies on whether its claims are true, and a donor who catches one fabricated statistic stops believing the next real one. Every scientific claim in an appeal has to trace to a source a person checked, which is this module's rule against reduction to a score applied to the land and the science instead of to a person, but with the same discipline underneath it.

Continuing education

1.25 points

Ethics, Accountability and Professionalism · Current and Prospective Donor Research

Learning objectives

  • Apply the seven movements as a test for any AI use in fundraising: it may prepare the inviter and serve the record, and it may never stand in for the relationship or decide who a person is.
  • Name the four ways AI use fails a donor (synthetic sincerity, reduction of the person to a score, donor data leaving your custody, and accountability with no one's name on it) and state the disclosure standard that answers each.
  • Adopt a written AI use policy for a development office that names permitted and prohibited uses, the donor-data rules, the human sign-off, and the review cadence, and can be read aloud to a donor without embarrassment.
  • Audit the AI already running in your shop, rate each use by the data it touches and the decision it shapes, and decide what to keep, change, or stop.

Designed for CFRE continuing education. Not yet accepted; no CFRE points can be claimed.

Lessons

Each lesson opens on its own page. Complete written lessons are available now. Downloadable editions open as each one clears review, and video editions follow.

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