Fundraising
End-of-year campaigns, donor segmentation, and AI-assisted outreach.
On this page
Where AI has produced some of the chat's most undeniable, time-measurable wins.
Grant writing
A pattern from the chat:
"It has been very inhibiting or time consuming at times to enter grant proposals. AI has been very helpful in filling out grant information."
Workflow:
- Paste the grant's parameters into the model.
- Add the Chabad House description, mission, programs, financials, and recent impact metrics.
- Ask the model to draft answers to each grant question.
- Edit; verify any numbers; submit.
Comet (Perplexity's agentic browser, $200/mo) auto-fills web grant forms; a member tested it for grant-proposal form auto-filling.
Fundraising letters
The Jeff Brooks technique, applied:
- Write your own first draft (or have AI write one from notes).
- Prompt: "Rewrite this at a 6th-grade reading level while keeping my voice and main points."
- Direct mail at lower reading levels historically gets a higher response.
See Letter Writing.
Donor research / prospect lookup
| Goal | Tool |
|---|---|
| Top Jewish philanthropists in a city (public info) | Claude Cowork, which produced a spreadsheet |
| Find emails for a known person | Gemini =AI(...) formula in Google Sheets: concatenate all known fields per row, drag the formula down |
| Background on a baal habayis | Perplexity Spaces with relevant uploads; Hatch.ai (Lubavitch-owned, paid) |
| CRM enrichment (lapsed donors, next-best-action) | Agents on Attio / LGL / Hecher; see CRM Automation |
"It goes through specific lists, researches and updates." (describing an Attio agent)
The group has discussed name-based prospecting; note the legal restrictions on ethnicity-based lists (see CRM Automation).
End-of-year & matching campaigns
Use cases shipped:
- Cypcampaign.lovable.app, an end-of-year volunteer and donor dashboard.
- Campaign-page generation in Claude, then HTML into ChabadOne via the iframe trick. See ChabadOne Integration.
- Donor thank-you letters at scale. AI batches the names; you personalize one line each.
Bookkeeping the donations
"If you have a bunch of Zelle, PayPal, CashApp donations you received and you want to know how much was given by a given person over a span of time (assuming these emails aren't yet logged in your CRM), you can connect Gemini to your Gmail and ask it point blank what you want to know."
Caution: feeding donor financial details and PII into consumer AI tools carries privacy risk; prefer aggregates and strip identifying details where you can.
For real bookkeeping, QuickBooks is the default; Kick.co and Booking.ai are mentioned but unfavorably ("underwhelming, similar to Mint.com"). An AI-for-QuickBooks workflow was mentioned but the details weren't shared.
Maaser / tzedaka tools
Community projects in this space:
- Tenpr.app, a maaser education tool built in Google AI Studio.
- My Charity Box, an offline pledge tracker built by a community member.
- Berel.me/donatext, a quick donation-link and payment-snippet generator.
- Countomer, Sefiras HaOmer with a daily Daf of Sotah and tzeis notifications.
Open problems
- Real-time campaign analytics (donor velocity, segmentation, next best action) without paying Salesforce Einstein or Bloomerang prices.
- Multi-CRM donor view: pulling LGL, ChabadOne, and bank statements into one queryable place.
- Stewardship cadence automation: voice note to CRM follow-up to scheduled phone call to templated email, all in one chain. Hecher has it; it is not yet shippable as a template.