How to Use Artificial Intelligence in Salesforce to Find Donor Relationships

I’ll be the first to admit that it takes me a few months (and sometimes a few years) to get fully on board with new technology. I don’t miss the irony of that considering we run a tech company to support nonprofits. But I’m a big fan of seeing what tools will stick around and what tools are fads or trends of the moment.

Last week, for the first time ever, I used Artificial Intelligence (AI) to write a social media post that I was struggling with drafting. I had the essence of what I wanted to say and the AI polished it and added fun emojis. The first toe dip in the water of AI was a success.

So, I got even more courageous and used ChatGPT to write eblast content to promote an event. I obviously edited it, as needed, to make sure it was appropriate for the audience, but I was absolutely amazed at the quality of content created in just a few short minutes.

While I think it’s crucial to come up with creative, unique content as humans, there’s no denying the helpfulness AI can provide to those doing multiple jobs or those who don’t excel in writing perhaps.

While I was at the Salesforce Dreamforce conference last September, I watched a session about using Salesforce’s version of AI (called Einstein) to find relationships of those in your database. While I thought it was neat technology, I quickly moved on to the next shiny object at the conference.

Since my two wildly successful AI experiences writing a social media post and eblast, I decided to revisit Einstein a bit. The one service that stands out above all else – for me at least – is the Einstein Relationship Insights tool.

As a fundraising professional, we’ve all Googled contacts a million times to learn more about them, to understand their network and relationships, and their influence throughout the community. This has historically been a time consuming, painstakingly long process to manually search for articles, website listings, etc.

The process has improved slightly with access to wealth management tools, but those tools rely on a lot of public databases and less on relationships buried within articles and newsletters. This is where Einstein Relationship Insights grabbed my attention.

The AI tool will explore interconnected relationships between people and companies on the web and help discover critical relationships within your Salesforce contacts. You can then use these insights to prioritize outreach efforts. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of possibilities – but it’s a big lift for fundraising professionals trying to connect the dots before meeting with a potential or current donor.

Any nonprofit can add-on this service to their current license for $50-$150/user/month depending on what level of features you need. Learn more about pricing and features. Salesforce offers many more Einstein AI features for various platforms across the software. Click here to learn more about the Sales features.

Despite the delay in fully accepting that AI is here to stay, we’re all about working smarter and not harder. Fundraising is a people-first industry, in our opinion, but why not allow AI to manage some of the tedious tasks of your role giving you more time to build relationships, network, and share the mission of your important work?