I remember walking into the computer room at school for the first time. Acorn BBCs, I think they were. Beige keyboards wired to heavy monitors, each one glowing green, with a little square cursor blinking in the top left corner. The air smelled of warm plastic and carpet tiles. There was no internet; the World Wide Web had not been invented yet. There were no mobile phones, no Google. I am 46 years old.
I have been a fundraising professional for over twenty years, and the technological leaps I have experienced and participated in have been monumental. I spent a year at a Bible college after sixth form, and I remember using a website to research an essay. It was called Hollywood Jesus, and it looked for religious parallels in movies.
At university, I did have an old desktop computer in my room, but it was not connected to the internet, and I would just use it to write essays and save them on a little square “floppy” disc. The most advanced software at the time was a little paper clip character that popped up to help you format a letter. This computer had spreadsheets, it had a word processor, it had a calculator. I remember laughing to myself that my teacher had said, “You will not always have a calculator with you.” Then, with the advent of the little Nokia phone, I realised that I did have a calculator with me all the time, as well as the infuriatingly addictive game Snake.
These phones got smarter year after year. What began as a little brick that made calls and sent short SMS texts of just a line or two soon became a computer in my pocket with a full keyboard. At some point, we were introduced to “predictive text” technology that would predict the next word. Imagine that. If you are typing a message, it would suggest a spelling or the next word in your sentence.
Eventually I became a fundraising manager and decided I should probably set up some social media accounts for the charity I worked for. I found one called Twitter and one called Facebook, and would later regret abbreviating the charity name in the social handle. They have had to live with that ever since. Facebook was made globally available in September 2006, just a few years into my career. Turns out those social media websites caught on.
Before social media, fundraising was almost all done face to face at events and through direct mail. Websites slowly grew in popularity, CRMs evolved beyond recognition, and I remember doing my first “fuzzy” search for a supporter record, where the database would find names similar to the one I had typed. It was impressive at the time.
Google’s in-built AI mode informs me that I am a “Xennial”, born between 1977 and 1993. I “experienced an analogue childhood and a digital adulthood, having reached adulthood before the social media boom but after the rise of the internet, navigating life with landlines and library cards.” I would once look up numbers in a Yellow Pages book the size of a large box of cereal and the weight of a small baby. I saved work to floppy disks, taped radio Top 10s on cassette tapes and watched movies on VHS tapes (do not forget to rewind), before adapting to smartphones, broadband internet and storing all my prized albums and memories on “the cloud.”
I share all of this because it matters.
If you were born before 1993, you will have your own version of this story. Your own floppy disc moment. Your own first encounter with a website, a CRM, a smartphone, a social media platform. Each time something new arrived, it felt unfamiliar, occasionally overwhelming, and eventually indispensable.
Now, AI has arrived. The reality is more familiar than you think. That predictive text on your old Nokia? That was a form of AI, predicting your next word from patterns. Your CRM’s fuzzy search? Pattern matching. The recommended posts in your social media feed? All driven by algorithms learning from your behaviour. You have been using artificial intelligence for years. You just did not call it that.
What has actually changed
What has changed is the scale and the capability. Predictive AI, the kind that analyses your supporter data to identify who is most likely to give, lapse, or increase their giving, has been quietly helping charities make smarter decisions for some time. Generative AI is the newer arrival: tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity that can draft copy, summarise reports, and answer questions in seconds. One looks at your data and helps you decide where to focus. The other creates content at speed. Both are powerful. Both need a human being paying attention.
I know that can feel daunting. I also know that if you have navigated every shift I have just described, from floppy discs to Facebook to fundraising in a pandemic, you already have the instincts this moment requires. You know that technology works best when someone is accountable for how it is used, when the people closest to your supporters have the final say, and when the purpose is clear before the tools come out.
AI does not change any of that. If anything, it makes those instincts more valuable, not less.
Having spent over twenty years in the charity sector, specifically in fundraising and marketing, I am committed to helping charities and their leaders grasp the power and potential of AI, whilst keeping human judgement, empathy and ethics at the heart of what we do. As it always has been.
Just as with CRMs, social media and smartphones, AI is a game-changing technology that can hugely scale and enhance our fundraising, so long as human decisions remain at the heart of our work, rather than expecting AI to make decisions for us.
We have been here before. We adapted then. We will adapt now.
Darren Richards is the founder of Charity AI Partners and the ‘Charity AI Guy’. He is the author of The Plane Parable and host of the Someday Arrival podcast. Writing in a personal capacity. @CharityAIGuy