Fourteen tabs and a dream

Picture this: it’s 10 AM on a Wednesday, and I’m on my third demo call of the day. A development director shares her screen to show me how her team researches donors, and I count the tabs. The CRM. The two wealth screening portals. LinkedIn. Google. A PDF of last year’s annual report. A spreadsheet titled "Gala Seating FINAL v7 (actually final)". Fourteen tabs in total, and every single one of them is holding a little piece of the same donor’s story.

She laughs and says, "I know, it’s a lot."

I laugh too, because a year (and a bit) ago that was my screen. Same tabs, same spreadsheet naming conventions, same quiet hope that I’d remember which tab had the thing I needed.

Out of the rabbit hole, into 2,000 meetings

A year ago, I wrote about why I left fundraising to join an AI prospect research startup. I promised I’d climbed out of the research rabbit hole. What I didn’t mention is that I’d be spending the next year visiting everyone else’s.

Since then, I’ve had roughly 2,000 meetings (mine + Claude’s conservative estimate) with development directors, prospect researchers, annual fund managers and advancement VPs. Schools, universities, hospitals, human service orgs, faith based orgs, and more than a few that I’d never heard of and now can’t stop talking about.

And the best part? Almost nobody I meet is afraid of the tech anymore. They’re just tired. Tired of copy-pasting, tired of logging in to six different places, tired of being the human bridge between tools that refuse to speak to each other. That’s the good news, because tired is very fixable.

Your tech stack is a group project

Remember how in group projects there was always one person who ended up doing everything, quietly stitching together everyone else’s half-finished slides at midnight?

In an enormous amount of development offices, that falls on one person. The CRM holds the giving history, the screening tool holds the wealth data, the gift officer’s notebook holds the fact that the donor just became a grandmother, and someone is manually carrying all of it from one place to another.

Here’s what I wish every team knew: your tools can be good group-project partners. Research can flow straight into your CRM. Meeting notes can land on the right donor record without anyone retyping them. The best-run shops I’ve met this year didn’t buy the most tools. They picked tools that play nicely together and finally let their people stop being the glue.

The teams that win are the most curious

I assumed the organizations getting the most out of AI would be the ones with giant advancement offices and a research department down the hall. Wrong again.

Some of my favorite conversations this year were with one or two-person shops — the folks running the annual fund, planning the gala and wrangling the board all at the same time. They’re the ones who say "Wait, can it do this?" ten minutes into a demo.

A lot of teams spent time trying to build a somewhat amorphous comprehensive plan to tackle all of their problems at once. New CRM, new donation software, new engagement platform. Baby steps, folks!

The good news is that figuring it out doesn’t require a five-year technology roadmap. It requires isolating one problem that’s been eating your Tuesdays and the curiosity to see if something else can eat it instead.

And forgive me for this tangent, but kindly: it’s the end of 2026. If your leadership & IT teams haven’t rolled out an AI policy yet, you’re behind. Use it or don’t use it, but please give your teams the ability to understand what is or isn’t possible so they’re not secretly using a personal ChatGPT account to try and keep up with their workload.

The four jobs your stack actually has to do

People ask me all the time what I’d use if I went back to a development office tomorrow. Instead of handing you a shopping list, let me tell you the four jobs I’d need done, and the tool I happen to use for each. If you find something better, let me know!

Job one: turn a day of research into minutes.

The donor profile that used to cost me a whole day, three LinkedIn rabbit holes and someone’s 1987 wedding announcement should take minutes, and it should arrive in plain language instead of a pile of tabs. I use DonorAtlas for this — and yes, I’m biased. Remember those automatically-created event face sheets I wrote about last year? They exist now!!!

Job two: capture the visit without a napkin.

Every detail from a donor meeting should get written down without you frantically scribbling "granddaughter → Bowdoin??" mid-conversation. I use Fathom to record and summarize my calls, so I’m actually listening instead of transcribing. I know this can be sensitive for donors or more often those interactions are happening in person or by phone; in those cases, brain dump your notes into an open source model and set up a connector with your CRM to automatically import them!

Job three: get the blinking cursor out of your way.

Thank-you letters, appeal copy, board updates can all be written in your own voice & personalized, just without the staring-at-a-blank-page stage. For my own follow-up emails, I use Claude for first drafts, and then the DonorAtlas MCP server so I can pull a shared profile and the follow-up resources I need into one place instead of hunting for them.

Job four: give the whole prospect story one home.

Everything above is worthless if it scatters across six places. You need one system that everything flows into, so the full donor story lives in a single record instead of one tab out of fourteen. Mine is HubSpot — Fathom notes land on the right profile automatically, email tracking is on, and that record becomes the real source of truth. Yours might be something else entirely, and that’s fine. What matters is that it’s one place.

None of these replace the human parts of the job that matter most, they just hand you back the hours to do it.

The Bottom Line

A year ago, I was the fundraiser at the bottom of a rabbit hole reading about a donor’s great-aunt’s art collection. Now I spend my days with people who are exactly where I was, and I get to help them climb out.

Here’s what 2,000 meetings have taught me: development teams are made up of some of the most resourceful people on the planet. They’ve been building relationships and raising millions with fourteen tabs and a spreadsheet called FINAL v7. Imagine what they’ll do with tools that actually work together!

So close a few tabs. Pick the one problem that keeps you at your desk too late. And if you want to swap notes on what’s working, you know where to find me.