Good Marketing Brief

Before you add AI to your year-end campaigns, read this

Rachel Burris Rodriguez on Oct 29, 2026, 9:15:00 AM

Most nonprofit marketing teams have added at least one AI tool this year. This week is about using it well before year-end campaigns go live, including practical applications beyond drafting emails, where adoption gaps show up in sector data, and one museum marketing director’s clear-eyed view of where AI belongs in donor communications and where it doesn’t.

The take-home template

Nearly a third of annual giving happens in December, and the teams that get ahead of it are using AI to move faster without losing their voice. Our guide covers eight practical applications beyond writing emails faster, from building your campaign calendar and turning one story into a full asset library, to role-playing as a skeptical donor to stress-test your appeal copy and checking in on campaign performance while it’s still running. It also covers what’s safe to share with AI tools and what isn’t, how to make the case to leadership, and a 40-minute plan to get started before GivingTuesday. 

 

Snackable snippets

The three stages of AI marketing maturity 📖

Most marketing teams that have added AI tools in the past year are somewhere in the middle of the curve HBR describes in this piece. Getting measurable lift requires first making explicit the things experienced marketers have always done implicitly — how your organization sounds, which audiences get which messages, what good looks like for a major campaign. Until you do that work, AI speeds up individual tasks without improving how the whole campaign system performs. 

Where nonprofit AI use stands heading into year-end 📖

Nonprofit Tech for Good’s 2026 AI marketing and fundraising statistics page is worth bookmarking before year-end campaigns go out. AI-powered donation forms average $161 per one-time gift, compared with an industry average of $115. Donors who arrive from an AI chatbot average $250 when they convert. And 76% of donors say nonprofits should disclose when and how they use AI, while only 26% currently do. The full list covers adoption rates, tool preferences, fundraiser sentiment, and foundation grant policies on AI-generated content.

 

What to measure when click rates can’t be trusted 📖

After Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection made open rates unreliable, click rates became the fallback metric. They’re now showing the same problem. Security software that scans email links before a person reads them registers as a click in your platform’s reporting, and bots now account for roughly 16% of consumer email clicks on average. For nonprofits specifically, GlueLetter found that emails sent to .org addresses had a 93% bot click rate.

For your inspiration folder

HBR’s Cold Call podcast recently featured Harvard Art Museums’ marketing director John Connolly on the decision to use AI to animate a canonical artwork for a digital campaign. The goal was to give people a more accessible entry point into art, not just to do something unexpected.

The museum was competing for attention in a crowded market and had recently dropped its admission fee, removing a key membership benefit. Connolly briefed curators in person rather than over email, framed the AI use as transparent and front-facing, and was careful about where to draw the line.

Using AI to write donor emails was off the table. Connolly’s reasoning was straightforward: if donors pick up on AI behind the scenes, they pull back, and museums have spent years trying to close the gap between themselves and their audiences.
Topics: Nonprofits

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