AI in Fundraising: New Opportunities and Risks

AI in Fundraising: New Opportunities and Risks

AI is already changing the way we work, although adoption by teams and organizations is "lumpy" with different people seeing different costs and benefits. How do we move beyond experimenting with individual tools to improve our own use of AI, assess the growing number of fundraising products, and help our entire teams and organizations define an AI strategy?

Join AFP-NYC friend Rich Leimsider of the AI for Nonprofits Sprint for a session that will share several practical AI in Fundraising demos, discuss board engagement, and address the 8 most pervasive concerns nonprofit staff have about AI at work. AI should help us spend more time on what matters most: relationships and advancing our missions.

SPEAKER:

Rich Leimsider
Founder and Director, AI for Nonprofits Sprint
Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Fund for the City of New York

Rich Leimsider is the founder and director of the AI for Nonprofits Sprint, a national program housed at the Fund for the City of New York that helps everyday nonprofits bring basic AI literacy to their entire staff. Since launching in fall 2024 with 19 nonprofits, the Sprint has grown to serve more than 500 nonprofits in 27 states and DC, which together employ roughly 100,000 people. More than 45,000 nonprofit staff have completed its AI 101 course.

The Sprint's four-step model (an all-staff AI use survey, placeholder AI guidelines, AI 101 training, and five months of peer learning) is tool-agnostic and built for skeptics as well as enthusiasts. In the recently completed Connecticut Cohort, the share of member organizations with written AI guidelines rose from 28% to 92%, and weekly AI use among staff rose from 40% to 70%. The Sprint's April 2026 report, The State of AI in the Nonprofit Sector, draws on 13,593 staff survey responses from 387 organizations, the largest known dataset of its kind.

Rich was named to City & State's Who's Who in Emerging Tech 2025 and is certified in prompt engineering (Vanderbilt) and AI Essentials (Google). Previously, he founded the PSLF.nyc Campaign, helping 70,000 New Yorkers access $4.6 billion in student loan relief, and was Executive Director of Safe Passage Project, quadrupling its size to provide free lawyers to 1,500 child refugees. He also created and led programs at Echoing Green and the Aspen Institute. A graduate of NYC public schools, Williams College, and Harvard Business School, Rich serves on the boards of Nonprofit New York and the human services and foster care agency JCCA, and lives in Brooklyn with his family.