AI Fundraising Build Pt. 5: Building a Case for Support with AI

 

Episode 11, October 6, 2026

 

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Show Notes:

In this episode, we use Pete AI to begin creating a case for support for St. Jude Catholic Leadership Center.

 

You’ll see how AI can help identify gaps, structure information, surface stronger language, and create a useful first draft. You’ll also see why the fundraiser still needs to provide accurate information, edit for voice, verify details, and make final decisions.

 

A case for support is the source document behind nearly every effective fundraising communication. This episode shows how AI can help you build one faster and more thoughtfully.

 

Episode Transcript:

Jenni: All right. Welcome to the Catholic Tech Table. My name is Jenni. I write and teach classes for Petrus Development, and I am joined by Matt. Matt is a senior consultant with Petrus. Matt, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Matt: Happy to be here.

Jenni: So Matt and I work for Petrus. Petrus is a Catholic consulting company.

Jenni: We help Catholic organizations build sustainable fundraising programs through coaching, consulting, online courses, and practical tools, and we have this brand-new AI tool that we're going to be using during this episode. The goal of Petrus is to teach organizations how they can raise the resources that they need to build the kingdom of heaven.

Jenni: In this particular podcast, we're going to be spending 20 weeks building a real annual giving program for a fictional organization. We created this guinea pig organization, if you will, called the Saint Jude Leadership Center. The idea was that if we worked through all these demonstrations on one organization, we would be able to show people by the end how you can use AI, specifically Pete AI, to go through every single element of an annual giving program more effectively and at a much faster rate than you could before.

Jenni: Pete is grounded in Catholic teaching and has over 20 years of Petrus fundraising experience built into it. It's the only AI that's a Catholic fundraising expert. And Matt, would you share with people how they can get access to Pete?

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. One of the great ways is joining the Harbor. The Harbor comes with Pete. You get the professional level...

Jenni: Free.

Matt: Outside of that, the Harbor is a monthly membership community designed specifically for Catholic fundraising teams. It goes well beyond just Pete. Petrus created it to be a place where Catholic fundraisers can come together and find the guidance, tools, and support they need to successfully advance their mission through fundraising. If you want to know more, petrusdevelopment.com/harbor is the place to find all of the great information. We also host a couple of live Ask a Consultant sessions that come free, where you hop on and ask any of your crazy fundraising questions. Both Jenni and myself attend those at times, so you can get either one.

Jenni: That's right. It's a great resource for all of us fundraisers. This podcast is a demonstration-based show, and it's helpful if you can watch it. If you're just listening right now, that still works, but it's nice to be able to follow along with what we're doing on screen. You can watch the video on YouTube and Spotify.

Jenni: Frankly, most of the podcast platforms now have the ability to watch a video-based version of the podcast. This is week three. If you're just jumping in with us now and want us to start back from the beginning, you're welcome to. Otherwise, you can just hang out with us today, and we're going to learn about how AI can help us build an effective case for supporters. As I mentioned, we're building our case for support for the St. Jude Catholic Leadership Center. It's this fictional organization that we made up to demonstrate all these different cool things that we're going to use AI for. In last week's episode, we used Pete, that's Petrus' Catholic AI, to assess St. Jude's current development infrastructure and to help us figure out what we need to prioritize to move forward with building their annual giving program.

Jenni: One of the foundational aspects of an annual giving program that Pete flagged in the last episode was the fact that we need a case for support. Matt, you've built cases for support before. How do you think of that process?

Matt: Oh, goodness. The case for support process is something else. There's a formulation to do one well. There's a great process to follow, but gosh, there are so many moving pieces to it. Well before AI even came in and whatnot, you had so many data points and pieces you had pulled together, which you still have to pull together, but then you have to formulate how you're going to write it.

Matt: And I, for one, think I write really well, but on the other side, for me to write really well, it's going to take me a week, two weeks to get through two or three of the writing pieces in a case for support. It just takes an extremely long time to put it together, and it's a very challenging process.

Matt: But to have one done well, you need a clear, compelling statement of what your organization is doing, why it matters, and what a donor's gift makes possible. And the source document for all of your fundraising communications is this case for support. It's a crucial piece that many people just kind of look over before they do it...

Jenni: Right, or put one together. You can do fundraising without a case for support, and because we usually approach fundraising out of necessity, out of great need, we're so tempted to skip those first building aspects of it. You can jump right into fundraising and start asking people for money and sending letters, but you are going to be less effective immediately and, in the long run especially, without this central document that is your plan for how you can inspire people, what language is going to inspire people, and help them understand what the impact of your organization really is.

Jenni: So, Matt, you work with a lot of clients. How many organizations do you feel already have a case for support in use, of the people you've worked with?

Matt: Very, very, very few. Maybe 5% of them already have one. Even among those that do have one, how out of date is the case for support? That's something we haven't talked about. A case for support is great, but if it was written 15 years ago, you've likely matured and changed tremendously since then, for updated images at a minimum, let alone wording for your mission.

Jenni: Yeah. It's a living document. So even those that do have it often aren't using it, and then it becomes a waste of time. If it's not built to be effective at doing what it's supposed to do, to be that source document, then whatever effort you put into making it was kind of lost.

Matt: But, Jenni, with a great transition point here, with Pete, he makes writing a case for support tremendously easier to do.

Jenni: Yeah. That's what we're going to explore today, and we'll see how true that is by the end of the episode. The first step of creating a case for support is going to be gathering your information.

Jenni: Let's use Pete to figure out what information we need to compile to make an effective case for support. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen so that you can see exactly what I am doing. The first step, of course, is giving Pete a prompt telling it what to do. The prompt that I have written is, "What information do I need to gather to create a case for support for St. Jude that isn't already in the St. Jude Leadership Center fact sheet that is uploaded in the drafts and letters section?" This is a really important point that I'd like to make while Pete is compiling his answer, and we're going to give him a second. This drafts and letters section right over here is where you can store documents that give Pete an understanding of who your organization is.

Jenni: It's already a Catholic fundraising expert, but it doesn't naturally know anything about you. You can upload all sorts of very helpful information, and we're going to be doing that throughout the course of the show. I uploaded a fact sheet that gave it a sense of basic information: what our budget is, the fact that we have an advisory board, how long we've been operational, things like that.

Jenni: Just basic background information. All right. Now let's see what Pete came up with. So, great question. Thanks, Pete. I appreciate that. The St. Jude fact sheet gives you a solid start, but there are meaningful gaps. It lists what is already covered, and then it tells us what is still needed. So we need main objectives.

Jenni: What is St. Jude trying to accomplish right now? What are its organizational goals, its specific measurable targets? How many participants do you want to form? What new programs do you want to launch? We need a governance structure. Is there a board of directors who provides oversight? We need to talk about the facilities and their condition, and then the deeper financial picture: what the revenue sources are and what trends there are over time.

Jenni: We need fuller program descriptions. What does each program look like in practice? And then, beyond the nine components for a persuasive case, we need to talk about the problem and its urgency. What is the need for a Catholic leadership center in your area? What is our solution, and how much does it cost? And then what are our plans for the future?

Jenni: And finally, the last thing is stories and testimonials. We need real examples of lives changed through the center's programs. These bring the case to life more than any statistic. That's quite a list. What do you think, Matt? How thorough is it?

Matt: I think it's pretty phenomenal. Urgency is a great piece that has to be part of what's going in. It's an important piece, and I love how Pete is able to look into it and just pick out the little things that need to be there.

Matt: Also, I like how you explained the drafts and letters piece, and how it's a great place to put your organization's information, but it's also a great place to make sure that you've got it curated perfectly for you. You don't want to just throw in junk. You want to throw in really good, pertinent information about your ministry.

Jenni: That's right. That's right. I don't know about you, but that's a very long list of things that we need. If I'm working through this in real life, and I have before, at this point I feel like that's a ton of stuff.

Jenni: Where do I get started? Of course, as one person, I can't come up with all this information unless I am starting my own organization from scratch, which of course I'm not. So the first thing I guess we need to do is probably talk to people, have these conversations, and see what...

Jenni: How, where do we get these stories from? Because I don't know everything about the organization and the impact that it's doing. So what if we try to use Pete and see if it can give us some draft interview questions to at least help us get this process started? So: draft interview questions for gathering this information.

Jenni: All right. Pete came up with a whole bunch of different things. Let me read through some high points. The first section it wants us to talk about is the problem and the need. What gap in Catholic leadership formation existed before St. Jude was founded? Are there statistics or trends that illustrate the need for this kind of information?

Jenni: Who else is doing this work in the region, and what makes St. Jude's approach distinct? These are questions that I would be able to bring to local pastors, head volunteers who are running churches in this area, and actually get their specific personal insight on what this problem is. That's going to lead to great quotes, a ton of good stuff there.

Jenni: All right, more questions. Can you share a story of someone whose life or ministry was changed through St. Jude? A lot of the time, fundraising personnel aren't on the front lines of your mission being enacted, so having these conversations is going to give you that frontline experience, those testimonials that you don't already have.

Jenni: All right. There are a ton of questions here. Who currently serves on the board of directors? Where do your programs take place? The diocese has signaled it might reduce its annual support. That's one of the facts on our fact sheet: we've been funded by the diocese for a while, but they're starting to need to put their funding elsewhere, so this is one of our inspirations for creating the entire development program.

Jenni: Let's get some people talking about how significant the loss would be, and what a healthy, sustainable funding mix would look like for St. Jude five years from now. And then vision and urgency. With these questions, from this point, I would go out to the community, talk to all those people, and get their feedback.

Jenni: Now, since we are working for a fictional nonprofit and we wanted to see this process through to the end, I took these types of interview questions that Pete came up with and, using AI, created some fictional interview content just so we could show you what it would look like at the end of this process.

Jenni: Obviously, that's going to speed up this timeline. In real-life implementation, this process would probably take at least a couple of weeks, because it needs to come from those meaningful conversations. So what I did is I came up with this fictional interview content, and I uploaded it here in the drafts and letters section.

Jenni: So Pete now has access to all of the content from those interviews that I fictionally had. Let's give Pete one more prompt: "Using the case for support interview report that I uploaded in the drafts and letters section, create a case for support for the St. Jude Catholic Leadership Center."

Jenni: This is what we've been working toward for this whole episode, right? This is where AI can not only help us get the process started, but significantly reduce that very long editing time. And you can see that it's coming up with a ton of stuff, which is great, because a case for support, to be an effective living document, is going to have a ton of content in it.

Jenni: All right, let's see what we got. Again, I'll just read the highlights here. "The church needs leaders. Catholics are ready to serve, but too few have been formed to lead." Matt, I mean, right off the bat, that sounds different, right? What do you think about that so far?

Matt: Pretty strong right there. "But too few have been formed to lead." That's an interesting start.

Jenni: Do you think that's a little too sensational? What do you think about that? Do you like that?

Matt: I like it. I think a common thing within our church is that the people in leadership, volunteer leadership for sure, have been the same people in volunteer leadership for the past 20 years, which means we haven't formed those individuals to lead. So I think, A, it takes a straight jab at what needs to happen and what you're trying to do from that. And so the leadership, what we're doing with St. Jude is a... I'm a little bit at a loss for words because I like that so much.

Jenni: That's awesome. I didn't expect that, although I was hoping for great stuff. And that's a good point, because most organizations are going to lead with "The St. Jude Catholic Leadership Center began in 2016," or whenever it was started. That says nothing to me. So this language is deliberately emotional.

Jenni: If you feel like maybe it is a little too sensational, that's fine. You can edit it. But the point is that it starts with an emotional draw right away. All right, let me see what I can pull out for you here. What else do we want to talk about? "The gap is not a failure of faith, it's a failure of formation."

Jenni: So again, it's cutting right to the heart. It's taking the interview content that we've had, and it's directly pointing to what the problem is. All right, let me roll through here. "The impact is real, and it multiplies." Now it gives three different stories about three different participants, and these came up in our interviews: Maria, James, and David.

Jenni: It talks about how their lives were changed and their parishes were changed because of the St. Jude Catholic Leadership Center. "Demand is growing faster than resources allow." In this section, it's going to talk about our budget, but it's also going to talk about what we still need to be able to move forward and to be more effective.

Jenni: Here it ties in specifically what the impact of greater funding can be. More participants, and what that means. More scholarships, and what that means. More alumni engagement, and what that means. Then it goes into an invitation: "An investment in St. Jude is an investment not simply in programs, but in the people who will lead, serve, and renew the church."

Jenni: I really feel the Petrus fingerprint on this. All right, and here it wraps it up. "This is a working draft you can use as a narrative backbone of your case." A few recommendations on next steps: add a financial summary, design it and format it, personalize the stories, and then get that quote from the bishop, the retired bishop, which we did not get as part of the interview content.

Jenni: It recognizes that, and it advises us to go out and get it. All right. Well, what are your big takeaways here? I mean, this is a ton of stuff, right?

Matt: Yeah. A ton of stuff to think about. But the big takeaway is: what did that take? Ten to fifteen seconds to produce and pull out all the information. It found out who we were, and it spoke in our language and what we're trying to accomplish very well. I mean, maybe better than what I could have spent two weeks writing and putting together.

Matt: But the openings to the different sections were straight to the point. They were punchy, they were eye-grabbing, and they caught the heart of who we are at St. Jude. Even though it's fictional, I realize that, but...

Jenni: I kind of wish it wasn't fictional after reading St. Jude's case for support.

Matt: Let's put this together, kind of...

Jenni: Yeah, exactly.

Matt: I think it went great.

Jenni: Well, and I'm really big on the idea that the fundraiser should always be the beginning and the end of the writing process. What we did here is all of those interviews that we had were written up in a draft, and that content is where this began.

Jenni: So Pete didn't make this information up. It came from human-to-human interactions, which of course we fictionalized, in those interviews. It doesn't end with this draft. This is just the beginning. You go through and work with your whole team, your leadership board, your pastor, your president, whoever it is, and you take a look section by section and use this as a starting point for your case for support, so that the final touch is completely yours.

Jenni: Pete just kind of helped you get started and organized it in a way that was very effective, and also really elevated the language. You might be tweaking this language to reflect more accurately where you're at in your brand, everything like that. But it set the bar high for this being a donor-centered, impact-driven piece.

Matt: Yeah.

Jenni: 100%. You never really know when you do the demonstrations what's going to happen with AI, but I think that was a pretty big win for Pete.

Matt: Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

Jenni: All right. Well, that's it for today. We are going to be back at it next time. Matt, we're so grateful that you could join us for this conversation. I appreciate your feedback and your insight in this matter.

Matt: I love it. Pete is close to my heart as one of the chief architects behind it. But to see what it produced and what it came up with on the spot, performing for an audience, like you said, always nervous to see exactly what we'll say. And again, I don't know why I'm nervous at this point in time, because it's usually always done a great job of putting all those pieces together. So.

Jenni: Yeah.

Matt: Jenni, thanks for having me on, and we'll chat next time.

Jenni: That sounds great. Thanks, Matt. In our Friday episode, we're going to be doing a deep dive into what makes Pete different from a regular AI.

Jenni: We talked on our last Friday episode about what Pete is and what the impetus was for making it. But we're going to go all the way into what makes it Catholic and what makes it a fundraising expert. So I'll see you then. Thanks, Matt.

Matt: Thank you.

Jenni: Bye.