How to Keep Your Fundraising Sounding Human When You're Using AI
Here's something I've started noticing about AI-written fundraising content.
It's polished. Often beautifully so. The grammar is clean, the rhythm is good, the structure is solid. And yet — donors are starting to feel that something is off. They can't always name it, but the warmth that used to come through in a fundraising letter feels a little manufactured now.
I don't think most fundraisers using AI are doing anything wrong. They're trying to keep up with deadlines, draft appeals faster, write better grant reports. AI is genuinely useful for all of that, and I'm using it myself in plenty of my own work. What I've noticed is something more subtle: AI tools tend to round off the rough edges that made writing feel personal in the first place — and those rough edges are a big part of how trust gets built in fundraising.
This is a post about how to keep your fundraising sounding human even when AI is helping you write it. Not because AI is the enemy, but because warmth is the thing your donors are actually responding to when they decide to give.
What AI Tends to Smooth Away
When you hand a draft to a tool like Claude or ChatGPT, here's the kind of thing it tends to do:
It removes the unfinished sentence — the one that trails off because the writer was actually thinking mid-thought.
It replaces a specific detail with a general one. "The Thursday morning food pantry where Maria volunteers" becomes "our community programs."
It generalizes the emotion. "I'm tired and grateful in equal measure" becomes "this work brings both joy and challenges."
It picks the safer word. "Stewardship" instead of "the thing we've been entrusted with."
None of those changes are wrong, exactly. They make the writing more efficient and more "professional." But they also strip out the texture that made the original feel like a real person sat down at a desk and wrote something true.
The smoother the writing gets, the harder it is for the reader to feel they're being addressed by a human. And for fundraising — which runs on the relationship between two people, the asker and the giver — that smoothing has a real cost.
Three Things Worth Protecting
When I'm working with AI drafts in fundraising, here are the three things I try hardest to keep:
The specific detail nobody else could have written
Every fundraising appeal is made stronger by one detail that could only have come from your specific organization. The volunteer who keeps a notebook of staff birthdays. The faded sign on the back door of the food pantry. The hymn you sing at the end of every team meeting. AI can't write these because it doesn't know them. So add at least one to every piece of donor communication you send out. It's the single best protection against the generic-AI sound.
The handwritten finish
Not literal handwriting — though that has its own power for major donor letters. What I mean is the postscript that wasn't planned. The aside in parentheses. The "by the way, you would have loved last Wednesday's volunteer meeting." These are the things AI can't generate because they require knowing what happened last Wednesday. Reserve them for the moments that matter most.
The reading-aloud test
This is the simplest one. Before any AI-drafted appeal goes out the door, read it aloud. If it sounds like something you'd actually say across a table — pausing where you'd pause, with the same rhythm you'd use in conversation — it's ready. If it sounds like a brochure, it needs another pass with a real person editing.
Most AI drafts pass the eye-test but fail the read-aloud test. That's the gap worth closing.
A Practical Way to Work With AI
Here's the workflow I've landed on for using AI to help draft fundraising content. It's not the only way, but it's the one that has kept my own writing sounding like me:
Use AI for the structural lift. Outlines, first drafts, "give me three different ways to open this letter," reorganizing a clunky paragraph. AI is excellent at all of these.
Bring the real specifics to the draft yourself. Names, dates, the small details from this week. AI cannot invent the truth — it can only guess at it. So feed it the real stuff before it starts writing.
Replace at least one paragraph with your own words. Not edit — replace. The most important section of the letter, written from scratch, in your voice. Even a short paragraph done this way will carry the whole appeal.
Read the whole thing aloud at the end. If anything sounds off, change it. Trust your ear more than the AI's polish.
Add a real, human postscript. A P.S. that wasn't generated. A specific thank-you for a specific thing. The line AI can't write because it doesn't know your people.
What I've Come to Believe
I've been thinking about this for a while now, and here's what I keep landing on: AI is going to make professional fundraising writing technically better and emotionally flatter, by default. The orgs that do this well over the next few years will be the ones that use AI to free up time for the parts only humans can do — the relationship building, the in-person meetings, the actual phone calls.
If you're using AI to write more appeals, faster, while reducing the time you spend with donors — that's a trade I'd reconsider. If you're using AI to clear your desk faster so you can spend more time on the relationships — that's exactly the right trade.
The warmth your donors connected to was never about your writing being perfect. It was about being recognized — feeling that a real person noticed them, knew them, was speaking to them directly. AI can help you write more. It can't do the noticing. That part is still your job, and it's the part that matters most.
C.J. Bergmen is a pastor, licensed counselor, and fundraising strategist. He writes about philanthropy, nonprofit strategy, and the intersection of generosity and impact at CJBergmen.com and partners with Sage & Main.