AI Fundraising Build Pt. 2: Using AI Without Losing the Human Touch

 

Episode 9, September 25, 2026

 

 

Show Notes:

Can Catholic fundraisers use AI responsibly, or does relying on technology compromise the human work of fundracising?

 

In this discussion episode, we explore what responsible AI use can look like for Catholic fundraisers.  We consider the difference between “robot work” and human work, including how AI can help with research, planning, administration, and communication while giving fundraisers more time for donor relationships.  We also discuss what should remain firmly in human hands: discernment, judgment, accountability, personal connection, and the work of inviting someone into generosity.

 

Using examples from fundraising practice and Catholic teaching, we examine the question of where AI belongs in a development program and where it should never take over.  The fundraiser is the architect.  AI is the contractor. 

 

Join us as we establish the principles that will guide the rest of St. Jude’s fundraising build.

 

Episode Transcript:

Intro Snipet

Jenni: We hunger and thirst for humanity, and as nonprofits, it should be authentically human in our communication. And we're just doing it a little bit better and a little bit faster by using AI as a tool.

 

Episode Introduction

Andrew: Well, howdy, and welcome back to another episode of the Catholic Tech Table. We are in our AI series for the next 20 weeks, and this is episode number two, which is our first discussion about AI usage. I'm Andrew Robison, owner and president of Petrus Development, and I'm thrilled you're with us. Jenni, welcome to the show.

Jenni: Hey, Andrew. Thank you so much. I'm very glad to be here with everybody also.

Andrew: Great. If you missed episode one, go back and watch that episode. You're going to want to watch it because we did some screen sharing, and we did a demonstration about good prompting and bad prompting with AI, and then we introduced the premise of this series, which is really about using AI to build a strong and effective annual fund for a Catholic nonprofit.

Andrew: So you'll want to go back and watch that episode. But just before we get started, I wanted to let you know this episode is brought to you by The Harbor. Petrus Development is a Catholic fundraising consulting firm, and we really specialize in education through courses, through coaching, and through capital campaigns.

Andrew: Last year, 2025, we created The Harbor, which is our online community. In The Harbor, you have an online forum, you have access to Pete, our AI tool, and you have access to all of our courses, of which there are over 20 recorded courses you can watch on demand. Jenni, you helped write and create many of those courses.

Andrew: Another feature that I really wanted to highlight today is these great monthly live Q&A sessions. It feels like we add more every month, but we host a live Q&A, and we do a live discussion specifically around AI usage. Those are really great opportunities for you to come together, join with other Catholic fundraisers, ask questions, and do a deep dive into a topic that's important to you.

Andrew: So as we are doing a discussion today, those live Q&A sessions are a great way for you to ask questions, maybe specific tactical questions you're wondering about, or big questions like, "How do I stay motivated doing the work of fundraising?" or "How do I engage my team?"

Andrew: Questions like that are really difficult to find a space to talk about. We want to bring you together through those live Q&As through The Harbor. If you're interested, go to petrusdevelopment.com/harbor to learn more about signing up. Okay, so what is this episode... Actually, let's recap our premise.

Andrew: Just to remind our audience, if this is the first episode you're on, this series is really about using AI to build a development program for a nonprofit. In order to give us the space to build that, we created a fictional nonprofit, St. Jude Catholic Leadership Center, and we're going to spend the next 20 weeks using AI specifically.

Andrew: Moving forward, we're going to use Pete, Petrus' AI tool, to build out the structure of a functional fundraising program. That's what we're going to do over the next 20 weeks. We're going to build it from scratch, step by step, using AI.

Andrew: So that's basically what we're going to be talking about and what this series is built on.

Jenni: Yeah, exactly. The show's going to be twice a week. Tuesday is going to be our demo episode. Friday, today, is going to be our discussion episode, where we explore the theological and ethical elements of using AI. So today, our core question for discussion is: What does responsible AI use look like for a Catholic fundraiser?

Jenni: That's going to lead us into, is there a way where using AI in our work becomes unethical? Of course, we want to do everything Christ-centered in our hearts, and we want to make sure that we are following the promptings of the Holy Spirit and doing everything very well. So this is our grounding beginning Friday discussion episode.

Andrew: Great. I think that's a great place to start. If you did not join us for our AI summit on fundraising, or AI and Catholic fundraising, back in July, we did a three-hour summit and had a great discussion. It was myself and a couple of other members of the Petrus team, and we spent the first hour talking about this question.

Andrew: We won't rehash that conversation. If you want to, go back and watch it. It's on our YouTube channel. It's a great discussion. We talked about Pope Leo's encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. We talked about the Vatican document Antiqua et Nova, and we drew a lot out of those resources.

Andrew: Some of the things Pope Leo really stressed there is that technology is never neutral. Technology is used for good or used for bad, depending on the user. We really talked about how, in Catholic fundraising, a good way to use AI is to let the robot do the robot work so that humans can do more human work.

Andrew: Any technology that allows us to do the relationship-building work of fundraising, we want to find ways to use. So that's the summit. You can go watch that there. But today's discussion, we're really focusing on three, kind of three and a half questions.

Andrew: The first question is, what parts of fundraising are appropriate for AI to handle? Jenni, I'll let you take the first question.

Jenni: So, it's just like what you said. We want to differentiate between robot work and human work. For me, it comes down to AI being here to help me prepare, to think, and to communicate more effectively and efficiently. So the idea is that anything it can do will save me time and help my communication be more effective.

Jenni: Being able to demonstrate impact and reach donors more effectively is great. It's helping me be a better fundraiser. It's unlocking my full potential as a fundraiser. So anything that falls into that category, where it's my robot assistant but it does not replace me, then I'm good with that.

Jenni: So being faster and more effective with things like fundraising best practices, I think that's fair game.

Andrew: Great. I can't remember if Rhen shared this story at the summit, but one of the clearest examples of this, Rhen talked about from his work when he was in fundraising full-time. Rhen's a member of our team. He would plan these long fundraising trips, driving from one city to another city 200 miles away.

Andrew: He would say, "I want to use this trip effectively, so I'm going to look up all the people in our database who live along that trip, either in the starting city, along the trip, or in my ending city." He would spend half a day to a full day looking at his database, exporting, looking at the map, basically creating a list of people that he could then call and say, "I'm going to be passing through.

Andrew: I'm going to be in your area. I'd love to meet with you and talk with you about our nonprofit. Would you have time to meet?" Early on, last year, we did a hackathon where a couple of us got together and played with AI to try to figure out how to use it.

Andrew: One of the tools he built very quickly was one where he could put in his starting address and his ending address, load in a list of donors he thought might meet that criteria, and then say, "Find me everybody who's within 50 miles or within 20 miles of my route." Within about 30 seconds, AI was able to map his route, identify the people, flag them, and tell him exactly out of his list of hundreds, "These are the 18 people that I think meet your criteria."

Andrew: That's an example of spending all day making a list of people you can call, or spending five minutes letting AI identify those people, and then having all day to call them. Anything that makes us more efficient on the administration side of fundraising is a really great way to bring in a tool like AI to help maximize our time, so that we can spend our time doing the activities that are outside of that administrative work, the actual relationship-building side of things.

Jenni: Yeah, that example's perfect. It enabled him, or would have enabled him, to do more relationship-building work, which is ultimately what our job is. So what do you think, Andrew? Are there any parts that should not be handed over to AI?

Andrew: A big area that I think requires... Every human is endowed through God with the ability to discern His will for our lives, and then to discern the direction He's calling us to in that moment. That's how God created us. We are creatures made in the image and likeness of God.

Andrew: We can deliberate about what's good. We can choose what we think is good. We can be accountable for those choices. I think that's an area where, as humans, we have to... It's almost like, at this point, now that this technology is emerging and becoming more prevalent, but also more powerful, we almost have to hold on to that area and say, "We're not going to give up our God-given ability to discern."

Andrew: Catechism paragraph 1704 says, "The human person participates in the light and power of the divine Spirit. By his reason, he is capable of understanding the order of things established by the Creator." You can't substitute "robot" in there for any of that. You can't say, "The robot participates in the light and power of the divine Spirit.

Andrew: By the robot's reason, the robot is capable of understanding the order of things established by the Creator." It doesn't switch. You can't do that. That is a distinctly human ability that God has endowed us with and that God calls us to activate daily, hourly, weekly, monthly, at all times.

Andrew: So you say, "Are there areas that should not be handed over to AI?" That's a very clear area. We can use AI to do the research. We can use Pete to help us draft our correspondence. But we have to hold on to that discernment of, this is good, this is not good, this is what we're ultimately going to use, and how we're going to take the next step. 

Jenni: Yeah, it can help you do that discernment faster, but it can't do it for you. I agree completely.

Andrew: Yeah. I'm glad we're having this discussion. I teach a course at the University of Mary on Catholic fundraising, and it's a great course. I really enjoy it. This summer we did a debate where I had our class of 16 split up. They took two sides of the debate, and they had to argue specific questions about specific uses of AI in the context of Catholic fundraising.

Andrew: It was a really great experience, I think, for everybody to think about, "All right, where is my line? How far am I comfortable going, and what do I feel is a responsible line between the things that I can do, the things that AI can do, and the things that AI cannot?"

Andrew: It was a really great opportunity for discussion. We're not having that discussion on a broad scale right now, but you and I are discussing it, and hopefully our audience is hearing this and saying, "Okay, I agree," or, "Wow, I don't think Andrew's on target right there."

Andrew: But we're creating the space for people to start thinking about where their line is, where they're comfortable, and what is responsible, as opposed to, "Here's a tool. Let's throw the guardrails, throw caution to the wind, and use it however we want." I think this is a good conversation to be having.

Andrew: And as I said, as AI becomes more prevalent and more powerful, we're going to have to keep coming back to this discussion and say, "All right, where are the ethical and moral lines of proper and appropriate AI usage?"

Jenni: Yeah, we're figuring this out together. This is the beginning. There are no best practices right now, and that's what we're working on. We're figuring out how to use it effectively and efficiently to build the kingdom of God.

Andrew: Yep. So I answered the question. How about you? Are there any areas where you personally don't think AI should be used?

Jenni: Definitely. Up to this point, I've primarily been using AI to help me write effectively, because I write these different courses, and I want to make sure that when I'm teaching a class, or whoever is teaching the class, they're able to communicate the concept in the easiest, most understandable way possible, so that anybody who's taking the class, whether they're starting out with zero knowledge of development, can understand the point we're trying to get across.

Jenni: AI has been tremendously helpful for analyzing a concept for me if I say, "Okay, this is what I'm trying to get across, and this is what I have written so far." It can point out some of those cracks in what I've written. It can recommend things. I would never ask AI to write something from start to finish.

Jenni: Last week in the demo episode, we went through using AI to help us write a paragraph for our newsletter. Very simple, right? But even the second one, where we used a good prompt and it came up with a good paragraph, I would never leave it right there. There is a human fingerprint that needs to be in our sentences, because eventually, if people aren't already able to pick up that something was written by AI, they will be able to.

Jenni: So from an authenticity point of view, I would never want AI to write it from scratch. But also from an impact point of view, it should start when you write a good prompt. That's the beginning of you writing the document. It should start with the fundraiser.

Jenni: AI should help you make it more effective, and then you should finish that job of making sure it's purely from a human, just made a little bit better, more effective, and more efficient by AI. So writing things from start to finish, that's my big thing. I hate reading emails now that I can tell have been written from start to finish by AI.

Jenni: I can pick it up immediately, and it just makes me take it less seriously.

Andrew: Mm-hmm. I like the way you said that. That's a very visual way to think about your human footprint, or your human fingerprint, on the document, on the text. That's clear for me to understand. Yeah.

Jenni: Yeah, we hunger and thirst for humanity, and as nonprofits, it should be authentically human in our communication. And we're just doing it a little bit better and a little bit faster by using AI as a tool.

Andrew: Great. So our third question: How can you tell where the line is between using AI as a tool and letting it do the work of the fundraiser?

Jenni: So it's that concept I just started talking about: Am I asking AI to pretend to be human? Am I saying, "Hey, I need to write this appeal letter. It's for our Christmas appeal, and this is our goal, and this is a story we want to tell," and then asking for it to be a human and write that letter?

Jenni: That's a big no for me. Anybody who is around annual fund long enough and works for many different organizations is going to end up writing a letter on behalf of someone else. As the annual fund manager, I'm going to be writing a letter that will ultimately come from the priest, and the priest has other priorities and other things he has to use his time on. So my job is to get that letter drafted, and then his job is to make it be from a priest. I'm not going to pretend to be a priest when I write it. My job is to write that story and help it show the impact of our mission in action.

Jenni: Then I give it to him, and he creates it to be from a priest. He's going to put his own fingerprint on it. It's the same concept when we're using AI. I am starting the story, I'm considering the impact, I'm putting my own language in there, and then I'm using AI to consider the best practices that are going to make it a good fundraising piece.

Jenni: Because even if I know all these best practices in my mind, it's hard to keep them all in one letter. It's hard to keep them all at the front of my mind at the same time. So it's going to be my fundraising genius that makes sure the message is as effective as possible.

Jenni: But even if I were using AI to write that letter from the priest, I'm not going to ask it to be the priest either. That priest is still going to put his own priestly imprint on that letter. So I'm not going to ask AI to do anything that requires it to pretend to be a human. And I have kind of an odd story for this concept, which has been developing over months. I think I've been using AI to help me write for a couple of years now.

Jenni: So this concept developed because my husband wanted to learn more about a Catholic concept, and he's not Catholic. He uses AI a lot with his job, so his natural instinct was to go to AI to help him learn more about this theological concept. AI gave him a very generic, general response that represented a whole broad aspect of humanity.

Jenni: And he said, "All right. Now explain this concept, but from a priest's perspective." And it began with, "Bless you, my son." He was like, "Nope. No. Stop immediately. Just tell me, from the Catholic Church's perspective, how they explain this concept." So it crossed the line there. Pete, Petrus' AI, has these guardrails built in to help it stay within the framework of the Catholic Church, and it's not going to go over there. So it would not have done that, but still, I wouldn't want to ask Pete to do something like that either. It's a great tool, but of course we still need to figure out how we use it effectively, keeping humans made in the image and likeness of Christ and not asking AI to try to do that.

Andrew: Yeah, one of the concepts that came up during the summit was, "Well, what if I really like doing some administrative..." We talked about how there are things we can let AI do that free up our administrative time, and some people were like, "Well, what if I like doing that administrative stuff?"

Andrew: Well, then do it. One of the things we said during the summit a couple of times is you still have agency around where you employ AI and where you don't. Just because the tool is there doesn't mean you have to use it. I still do math in my head all the time.

Andrew: I'm still calculating. I have a calculator on my phone, but I do simple math, and sometimes really complex math, on a piece of paper just because I want to, or for whatever reason. So just because the tool is there, you still have agency about where and when to use it, and when to take what it gives you, throw it in the garbage, and start over.

Andrew: To your point, there are things you use this tool for, and then other ways you don't want to use the tool. You're still the human. You're still the human who gets to decide, "Hey, I'm not going to use this," or "I am going to use this," or "What it gave me is garbage.

Andrew: I'm going to go a completely different direction." But you're still the human who has agency around when to use this tool and how far to let the tool go.

Jenni: Yeah, absolutely. I can't imagine wanting to do administrative tasks, but that's okay. To each his own.

Andrew: My wife is a nerd, and she doesn't mind me saying that. She loves spreadsheets. She loves really tedious tasks because she digs in. It's like her brain escape from all the other responsibilities she has.

Andrew: She was like, "No, give me a list and I want to build a spreadsheet for it." I'm like, "Okay, great." So that's her area. For me, give me a root canal, I'd rather do that. And so,

Jenni: I don't know about that, but...

Andrew: Oh, yeah. But the point is we still have agency around how we employ this tool.

Andrew: There are areas where it is a good place to employ it. There are areas where we want to maintain our human agency, such as discernment, such as speaking in the voice of leadership. I think these are good discussions to be having. That's my takeaway from this.

Jenni: Yeah, absolutely. The fundraiser is the architect, AI is the contractor. That's how we're going to be using it moving forward to help build this development program, to build the annual fund for our fictional St. Jude Catholic Leadership Center. And we're going to be using Pete from now on to do this quickly and effectively.

Andrew: Great. Over the next 20 weeks, or I guess 19 weeks after this, we will be using Pete to build the structure for an effective annual fund. We'll be going through very specific examples over the next 19 weeks. We'll show demos on Tuesday and have discussions on Fridays, and we will be the architects.

Andrew: We'll show you how to be the architect, and we will show you how to employ AI, specifically how to employ Pete, to do the contracting, to actually execute the plans, honestly, in many cases at a much faster rate than you or I could do on our own. I'm excited, and I'm looking forward to where this series is going to go.

Jenni: Yeah, me too. It's going to be fun.

Andrew: Great. So next week, we will be back on Tuesday with another demonstration, and we'll be building a development program from scratch over the next 20 weeks. Hopefully, you'll join us for that. We're just glad you're here and glad you're along this journey with us.

Jenni: Thanks for joining us, everybody.