AI That Builds Donor Relationships: What We Learned in Our Conversation With Best Friends and Arbor

Nonprofits are being asked to do more with less. Teams are time-poor, budgets are tight, and “segmentation” often becomes the manual workflow people default to when they need to move fast. That was the throughline in our conversation with Best Friends and Arbor: the goal isn’t more activity. It’s clearer decisions that protect relationships and reduce wasted effort.

AI is already reshaping segmentation and content workflows

The conversation focused on two practical places AI is already showing up in nonprofit fundraising work:

• Audience segmentation and donor engagement: getting clearer about who’s worth attention, and how to prioritize outreach when capacity’s limited.

• Content creation: using AI to turn real conversations and recordings into usable content faster, while keeping the organization’s voice intact.

A key point was that efficiency only matters if it preserves trust. Fundraising doesn’t work when donors feel processed. It works when donors feel understood as individuals, not treated like segments.

Scale forces prioritization before execution

Best Friends shared what it looks like to operate with a huge file:

We have a database of five million constituents who have some kind of relationship with us.

Barbara Camick

Director of Annual Giving @ Best Friends Animal Society

At that scale, the constraint isn’t data. It’s capacity. You can’t treat five million people the same way, and you can’t afford to guess.

This is where the core operating questions show up, whether you call it segmentation or not:

• Who should we focus on?

• Who should we engage right now?

• What should we do next?

Those decisions exist with or without any tool. The real problem is that most teams are forced to answer them with manual work, partial data, and whatever rules they’ve got time to maintain.

Warm prospect mining works best as a focus decision

One of the most practical examples from Best Friends was using AI to mine warm prospect audiences inside their existing file.

That’s a focus decision: deciding who inside the file is worth attention before time and money get spent. It also fits the broader push away from blanket outreach and toward precision, especially when teams feel pressured to “hit everyone.”

Best Friends also called out the importance of behavioral signals:

Dataro has been committed to helping us figure out behavioral triggers to advance our relationships.

Barbara Camick

Director of Annual Giving @ Best Friends Animal Society

The important framing here isn’t “AI segmentation.” It’s turning raw data into a decision a team can act on, with enough clarity that it can be supported internally.

Authenticity stays essential while efficiency improves

The conversation also surfaced a tension that most teams feel immediately: AI can make content production faster, but it can’t be allowed to make content feel generic.

A useful rule of thumb is:

• AI can help you draft, summarize, and repurpose.

• Humans still need to own the truth, the voice, and the judgment.

If AI creates more review work, more approvals, or more “noise,” it won’t stick.

Decisioning replaces segmentation as the operating model

A lot of teams start by talking about segmentation because it’s familiar. But the “better future” isn’t prettier buckets. It’s decisioning.

That’s why the focus should stay on three universal decisions:

1. Focus: who’s actually worth attention.

2. Engage: who should get outreach now, and who can wait.

3. Next: what action fits, not just what you did last year.

When teams can make those decisions with confidence, they reduce waste, protect relationships, and make capacity go further.

The conversation clarified what “good AI” looks like in practice

• AI reduces manual work and produces execution-ready outputs. It’s only useful if it drives action, not just “insight.”

• Warm prospecting improves when it’s treated as precision focus inside the file. It’s about deciding who to prioritize, not increasing volume.

• Retention improves when outreach becomes targeted and timely. The posture is to protect value and reduce preventable loss, not to do more.

• Authenticity stays non-negotiable. AI can support the work, but it can’t replace a human voice donors trust.

A single grounding question keeps AI adoption practical

If you’re exploring AI for segmentation, engagement, or content creation, start with one grounded question:

Where will the output live, and what will the team do with it next week?

If you can answer that clearly, you can evaluate tools and approaches without getting pulled into hype, and you can build alignment across stakeholders earlier in the process.