A friend at a nonprofit I work with told me recently about an AI-led acquisition campaign platform they tested. 

The tool was pitched as an online-marketer-in-a-box. 

Upload your brand and comms guidelines, point it at a campaign goal and voila – it will build the landing pages, write and create the ads, set the targeting and bring in new donors. 

End-to-end AI acquisition – incredible! 

The only problem?  

It didn’t work. 

Now I’m an AI believer. It’s incredible technology. I use AI every day. I test new tools as they come out.  

But being a believer doesn’t mean being uncritical. And in this story, there were problems… 

Once the campaign began, the AI tool behaved like what it was – early beta software. 

Even with the brand guidelines uploaded, the creative came out generic and off-brand. 

Ask it to change one thing and it would break three others. In the end, the team built the campaigns and ads manually. 

Beyond that, the donor journeys were over-engineered and unrealistic. A real donor was never going to follow all the way through to donation. And they didn’t.  

My friend summed it up in a line that stuck with me: 

“It was bringing us more work than solution.” 

That’s the sentence I’ve been turning over in my mind. 

The whole point of this kind of tool is productivity. You plug it in, the machine does the work, your labour and costs go down while your results go up.  

But in this case, the reality was the opposite. 

Now again, I’m a fan of AI. It’s transformative. It increases our productivity and it lets us do things we couldn’t do before – like building online apps or doing advanced data analysis with no prior experience in those fields. 

But to make best use of the tech, you need to know what you can – and can’t – expect from it.  

What AI is, and isn’t, right now 

To me, we can think of AI like the tech that’s been quietly improving our driving experience for decades. Power steering. Cruise control. External cameras. Emergency braking. Parking assist.  

Each one makes driving easier, safer and more comfortable.  

But none of them replaces the driver.  

AI can help you think through your strategy. It can help you understand your donors. It can help you sharpen your offer, spot weak creative, generate variations, pressure-test a judgement call. 

But what it can’t do yet, with any reliability, is take the whole thing off your plate. 

Running strategy, crafting the offer, designing visuals, cutting video, writing copy, setting up ad campaigns, designing targeting and ad groups, making bidding calls, reading the data across multiple platforms, adjusting on the fly… That’s an enormous basket of skills. And right now, AI cannot handle all of that on its own, unsupervised. 

You still need an experienced human at the wheel who knows what they’re trying to achieve. 

Questions worth asking before you buy 

This story isn’t about the supplier. That’s important. 

When you want to innovate, you try a lot of things. Most don’t work, but those that do can change the world. 

The supplier in this story is doing honest, important work.  

But when you as the customer are trying an early beta product, you need to understand the risk – along with the potential reward – of the game you’re in. 

For a start, ask the right questions of the supplier: 

• Has this been tested in real campaigns before? What’s the real record? 

• Can we test the tool internally before signing up? 

• If the AI doesn’t work up to expectations, who will fix the problems? Does the supplier have the capacity and expertise? 

• What happens if we stop? Do we keep the leads, the creative, the data? 

And a couple of questions for you:  

• How high are the stakes here? Is this a critical, core campaign or an experimental pilot on top of your normal schedule? 

• If the AI and supplier don’t deliver on the promises, do you have a fallback plan? 

Lead it. Don’t be led by it. 

The fundraisers winning with AI today are the ones who already do the fundamentals well. They use AI to do more great work, more efficiently, and to a high quality.  

They don’t use it to avoid the work. 

The productivity gains are real. But they belong to the people who are still masters of the process. 

If you hand the whole process to the machine, you don’t get productivity. You tend to get AI slop. 

Be a believer. But know where AI is right now, and where it isn’t. 

And keep your hands on the wheel. 

Want to get the inside scoop for using AI to boost your productivity and produce quality fundraising? Book a free 25-minute call with expert Sean Triner. He can help! You will come away from this call energized, encouraged, and ready to grab quality AI with both hands! 

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