Much of the AI conversation in the business world, for those who have not used AI much, is some version of: kick your feet up, drink the piña colada, watch your revenue shoot up.
I’ve seen that promise up close on the fundraising side of the humanitarian work I do, and on a lot of teams AI is the enemy in the room before it’s anything else. Mallory Erickson started exactly where most of her sector started, nervous, protective, sure AI was going to hollow out the most human work there is, and then she built something that does the opposite. She’s spent her whole career on connection, she’s trained over 100,000 fundraisers, and instead of letting AI replace the fundraiser, she flipped the entire thing and made the donor the robot so the human gets to practice. Watch the full conversation above.
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Outline
(0:31) – Bringing AI into deeply human work without hollowing it out
(1:03) – From accidental fundraiser to founder of Practivated
(2:30) – Why she avoided tech, and the fear that started it
(4:16) – Personalization at scale, but for fundraisers
(9:26) – The rise of “robot fundraisers” and why it broke her
(10:28) – The flip: what if the donor is the robot?
(15:50) – Start with the problem, not the AI
(21:55) – Rolling AI out to a hesitant team: validate the fear
(25:26) – Give your team a stipend to play
(31:42) – The results: 280% more human donor touchpoints
(32:39) – The LeBron test: the best still put in the reps
(38:11) – A charge to practitioners: build what you need
My Takeaways
The flip. Most AI products aimed at fundraisers are built to replace the fundraiser, the autonomous “robot fundraiser” that writes the appeals and works the donors so you don’t have to. Mallory watched that trend and reacted the way I wish more people would, by refusing it:
“If our answer to fundraiser burnout is to replace human fundraisers with robots, we can do so much better than that.” So she flipped it. “What if the fundraiser isn’t the robot? What if the donor is?”
Inside Practivated the AI plays the donor, the human role plays the hard conversation, gets scored, and builds the muscle memory before the real ask. I keep coming back to that flip, because it’s the same move every leader should be making, which is to point AI at the practice and the reps instead of at the people doing the work. It’s the version of AI I argued for in Can AI Make You a More Human Leader?, and she actually built it.
Start with the problem, not the AI. This is the part of the conversation I keep coming back to, because it’s exactly what I tell the executives I coach. Mallory has closed deals lost on purpose, walked away from organizations that came to her wanting “more AI” with no real problem behind it. Her test is simple: what have you been trying to solve that you’ve thrown everything at and still can’t crack, and is there an emerging tool that could finally move it? As she put it,
“AI is not the point. The goal is to solve your challenges.”
Validate the fear before you roll anything out. I asked her how she’d introduce AI to a team that’s all over the map on it, and her first move surprised me, because it had nothing to do with the tool. She said there shouldn’t be AI adoption without first being ready to acknowledge and validate people’s fear, not to agree that AI is scary, just to give the fear a place to exist before it hardens into resistance.
“It’s really important that we’re acknowledging and validating how people feel.”
Then she does something I love, she gives her whole team a monthly stipend to just play, with two rules: have a hypothesis going in, and come back and tell the team what you learned.
The reps don’t stop because you’re good. The skeptic line Mallory hears most is “I’ve been fundraising for twenty years, I don’t need to practice.” Her answer is the one I’m going to start stealing in my own coaching:
“Can you imagine if we said LeBron James is such a good basketball player, he doesn’t need to practice anymore? Simone Biles? Absolutely not. The people at the top of their game are putting in the reps.”
And the numbers are backing her up, a 280% increase in human-driven donor touchpoints, onboarding cut from eight weeks to two, ask effectiveness up 33% in the first 30 days. AI didn’t replace the human in any of that, it gave the human a place to practice so they could show up more present when it actually counted.
One Question to Sit With
Where in your own work are you reaching for AI before you’ve named the problem it’s actually supposed to solve? Mallory’s whole practice is built on refusing to skip that question, and I haven’t stopped chewing on how often the rest of us do.
Watch the full conversation above, and then go follow Mallory’s work at Practivated and her What the Fundraising podcast.
About Mallory Erickson
Mallory Erickson is an executive coach, fundraising consultant, and the host of the What the Fundraising podcast. She has trained over 100,000 fundraisers, co-founded the Fundraising AI initiative, and is the founder of Practivated, an AI practice platform where fundraisers role play donor conversations and get coached on what to do differently next time. Her North Star, in her own words, is improving the lives of fundraisers. You can find her work at practivated.com.
About me
Joel Salinas is an Executive AI Coach for leaders at small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits. 1:1 coaching, team workshops, and AI strategy work built around amplifying what your team is already good at. Creator of the AI Leadership Triad. He writes Leadership in Change. If you want help thinking through your own AI strategy or online presence, start here.
Written by a human, for humans.
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