It’s Wednesday and there’s still a full schedule of communications to get out before Friday. Someone has had an idea, a good one, and now the plan you had for the week has shifted to make room for it. You’ll get it done. You always do. But somewhere between now and Friday afternoon you’ll find yourself wondering whether there’s a smarter way to run this.
If that sounds familiar, you’ve probably already thought about what automation could do for your team. The question most fundraising leaders get stuck on isn’t whether technology could help. It’s where to start, and how to find the time to set it up when you’re already at capacity.
The hardest part isn’t the work. It’s finding the space to step back from it.
When you’re in delivery mode, it’s genuinely difficult to question processes that have always run a certain way. Some of them are running that way because they work. Others are running that way because nobody has had the space to ask whether there’s a better approach. When we sit down with a fundraising team for the first time, that’s usually the first conversation we have.
A good place to start is to spend an hour mapping where your team’s time actually goes. Not the big strategic work, but the daily and weekly tasks that keep the operation running. What gets done manually that could happen automatically? What does someone have to remember to do, or check, or send?
What’s taking the most time right now that doesn’t need to?
For teams earlier in the journey, the most valuable starting point is usually operational. Automating the internal processes that create visibility and save admin time before touching anything supporter-facing. This could look like a ‘daily giving’ summary that arrives without anyone building it, or a task created automatically when a donation comes in above a certain threshold. These feel small but they change what the team can see and how quickly they can act.
From there, you start to surface supporter behaviour more clearly. Knowing when a volunteer makes their first donation, or when a regular giver goes quiet, or when someone who’s only ever given online shows up at an event. Once that visibility exists, the communication automation follows naturally. The right message, to the right supporter, triggered by something that actually means something.
That’s where Agentforce for Nonprofits and Agentforce Marketing start to become useful. Once the foundation is in place, Agentforce for Nonprofits brings intelligent assistance that works alongside your team, handling the manual coordination that currently sits between a supporter action and the right response. It can anticipate, plan, and reason, adapting to new information while operating within the boundaries your organisation defines. Agentforce Marketing goes further across the campaign layer, connecting signals across the supporter journey, orchestrating personalised engagement at scale, and surfacing the moments that need a human response versus the ones the system can handle automatically.
The teams getting the most from both have done the simpler work first. They know their supporter journeys and their data is in reasonable shape.
When the next planning cycle comes
The question you’ll get asked is what the team can deliver. What we want for every fundraising leader we work with is a different answer than the one they gave last year. Less time spent on coordination, more time spent on supporters. Less reacting, more deciding.
The step change doesn’t have to be big. It just has to start.
If you’d like to talk through what that could look like for your team, we’d love to hear from you.
