Resources
A growing collection of white papers, discussions, and conversations on the topics shaping the nonprofit sector, from fundraising to technology and everything in between
Can AI assistants become the new donation page? Every nonprofit benchmark this year reports the same thing: organic search traffic is falling, and AI chatbots are the reason. This has sounded an alarm in the sector, but I actually believe that technology developing right now paints a different picture of the future. Gifts and website visits are decoupling. Visits will keep falling. Gifts, from the same pool of searchers, can hold and then grow because the growth is arriving in...
“I’ve lived through 25 years of technology shift in the nonprofit sector and here is what I think it means for AI adoption.” In September 2000, I founded a software company called Engaging Networks and began selling a hosted engagement platform to nonprofit organizations. In those early days many nonprofits expressed very real concern about hosting their data in the cloud. This sounds like a silly objection today as virtually everything runs in the cloud. Over the next twenty years,...
For more than two decades, digital fundraising has been organized around the campaign. A nonprofit identifies a need, develops an appeal, selects an audience, and sends the same message to thousands - sometimes hundreds of thousands - of people on the same day. The model works. Email remains one of the most productive digital channels in nonprofit fundraising, and its revenue continues to grow. But the same benchmarks that confirm email's value also show how hard relevance is to achieve...
The debate about whether AI will reshape software is usually framed as a contest of model quality: better models make better features. That framing hides the real change. The decisive difference between an Al-first platform and a legacy platform with Al bolted on is not how good the model is. It is a question about who, or what, sits at the center of the system and decides what happens next. Classical SaaS was built around a human orchestrator. The software...
I recently wrote a paper with a friend (Gemini 3 Pro) about the very real risk to tech startups in 2025 posed by Hyper Innovation. Here are three examples of why this threat is so real: 1. Frontier LLMs are improving their models at a pace that makes new tech look like old tech in six months 2. The person sitting at the desk across from you can build your product just as easily as you did (leveraging newer tools)...
