What Could Agentic AI Mean for Nonprofits in 2025?

The fundraising landscape is evolving, and as we look to 2025, the rise of agentic AI has the potential to revolutionize how nonprofits operate. Unlike current AI tools that respond to prompts or analyze data passively, agentic AI could take things a step further—acting proactively on insights, automating lower-level tasks, and enabling nonprofits to achieve more with their existing teams.

While much of this technology is still emerging, 2025 may be the year we begin to see agentic AI make its way into nonprofit workflows. Tools like Xpress Analytics already provide real-time insights, and in the near future, agentic AI could take these analytics and help turn them into action. For nonprofits, this would mean an unprecedented ability to target smaller donor segments, automate repetitive manual tasks, and bridge the staffing gaps that many organizations currently face.

This post explores how agentic AI could reshape nonprofit fundraising by enhancing targeted donor engagement, boosting efficiency, and helping organizations overcome talent shortages.

What is Agentic AI and How Could it Transform Nonprofits?

Agentic AI represents a leap forward from current AI tools. It’s not just about answering prompts or running reports; it’s about proactively acting on goals. For nonprofits, agentic AI could soon take insights generated by analytics tools and use them to perform specific tasks—tasks that today require significant human time and effort.

For example:

• Smarter Donor Segmentation: AI agents could analyze donor insights and automatically create hyper-targeted segments based on giving behavior, engagement history, or campaign responses.
• Task Automation: From drafting follow-up emails to logging gifts, agentic AI could handle lower-level tasks while human fundraisers focus on strategic initiatives and relationships.

Although the technology is still developing, these capabilities could begin appearing in nonprofit workflows as early as 2025, fundamentally changing how fundraising teams operate. There are two areas we believe AI agents are likely to impact first.

1. Personalized Donor Outreach at Scale

In today’s fundraising world, creating personalized campaigns for small donor segments is challenging. It requires significant time and resources, making it impractical for many teams. But looking to the near future, agentic AI could make this level of personalization achievable and scalable.

What Could Change in 2025?

• Dynamic Donor Segmentation: Tools like Xpress Analytics already highlight key donor insights. Agentic AI could act on these insights by breaking donors into smaller, more targeted segments—groups as granular as lapsed donors from last year who attended a specific event or recurring givers who paused their gifts.
• Customized Messaging: AI agents could draft individualized emails, create tailored follow-up sequences, and schedule outreach based on donor preferences and behaviors.

For example, a fundraising team running a year-end campaign might rely on an AI agent to:

1.  Identify a group of mid-level donors who haven’t given this year but opened recent emails.
2. Draft a personalized message highlighting impact stories relevant to their giving history.
3. Schedule the emails and set reminders for human fundraisers to follow up with key donors personally.

By automating these tasks, agentic AI could help nonprofits move beyond “one-size-fits-all” campaigns, enabling teams to deliver meaningful, targeted engagement to every donor segment.

2. Automating Repetitive Tasks to Boost Efficiency

Many nonprofit teams are stretched thin, balancing mission-critical work with repetitive tasks that consume valuable time. In 2025, agentic AI could begin to automate these lower-level processes, helping organizations achieve greater efficiency without expanding their teams.

What Tasks Could Be Automated?

• Gift Processing: AI agents could record donations in the donor database, generate thank-you messages, and trigger follow-up workflows automatically.
• Prospect Research: Instead of manually reviewing data sources to identify new donors, AI agents could scan databases, synthesize insights, and deliver prospect summaries directly to fundraisers.
• Reporting and Analytics: AI agents could pull data from tools like Xpress Analytics, generate real-time campaign performance reports, and flag areas for improvement.

Imagine this scenario: After a fundraising event, an AI agent could:

1. Log all donations into the CRM.
2. Generate personalized thank-you messages for each donor, aligned with their giving level.
3. Trigger a task for fundraisers to call major donors and share specific impact stories.

By handling these repetitive yet essential tasks, agentic AI could free up fundraising professionals to focus on strategy, storytelling, and donor relationships—the areas where human expertise is irreplaceable.

The Future: A Partnership Between AI and Humans

While agentic AI holds immense potential, it’s important to view it as a partner to human fundraisers rather than a replacement. Looking ahead to 2025, nonprofits that successfully adopt this technology will do so by ensuring a balance between automation and human oversight.

For example, while an AI agent might automate donor segmentation and draft personalized emails, a fundraiser would review the messaging to ensure it reflects the organization’s voice and mission before sending it out. While much of this technology is still on the horizon, tools like Xpress Analytics are already helping nonprofits validate strategies and uncover actionable insights. Agentic AI will take this a step further, empowering nonprofits to act on those insights with speed, precision, and efficiency.

The future of fundraising won’t be about replacing human fundraisers but amplifying their impact. By collaborating with agentic AI, nonprofits can scale their efforts, engage donors more effectively, and focus on what matters most: advancing their mission and driving meaningful change.