Brazen Solutions · Digital Tools / AI

Is it ethical to use AI on our donors without telling them?

The trust recession is real. AI isn't what's driving it yet — but it's the thing that's going to land it on us. The choice is whether we make it on purpose or get caught.

May 2026 · 2 min read

It's Friday. Four o'clock. A development director sits down to clear her thank-you queue before the weekend. The AI assistant her organization subscribed to last quarter has drafted twelve notes. The director edits two of them. Queues them all. Leaves for the weekend.

The donors get the notes on Monday.

None of them know AI helped write what they read.

Is that okay?

I'm asking because almost every organization I talk to is doing some version of this. ChatGPT in the development office. Claude in the comms team. A "personalization" tool somebody bought on a corporate card and never mentioned to the board. Donor data being pasted into prompts.

Most of it isn't malicious. Most of it is a tired development director trying to clear a queue on a Friday afternoon.

The question nobody has really asked yet is whether the donor would have agreed if we'd told her.

Donors aren't pulling back over AI yet. But there's a broader trust recession underway — they're giving more cautiously, watching the sector more carefully than they used to. The day a donor finds out exactly what's behind her donor-care touches is the day the trust recession lands specifically on us. The organizations that made the choice on purpose will be fine. The ones that didn't will spend a long time explaining.

Two paths.

Path one. Use AI to do more. Run more touchpoints, more personalization at volume, more appeals drafted, more meetings booked, more emails sent. The donor relationship goes through the same machine it always did, just faster and at higher volume.

Path two. Use AI to do less. Hand the AI the repetitive work that was eating your development director's day — the data hygiene, the meeting notes, the templated acknowledgments that always needed editing anyway. Free her up for the thing the AI can't do — a real conversation with the donor whose mother just died, who needs five quiet minutes with the only person at the organization who knows her name.

Neither path is automatically wrong. But the choice gets made one way or the other the day the tool gets installed. Whether you make it on purpose is up to you.

If your largest donor asked you tomorrow whether AI was involved in the last thank-you she received from your organization, what's your answer? And have you decided yet what you want it to be?

If you want a place to work through these questions alongside other nonprofit leaders doing the same thing, Brazen Connections is free and built for exactly this.

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