Asking Better.AI

Better.AI answers questions about your own records. Not general fundraising advice, and not anything it invents: it looks up your donors, gifts, campaigns and events, and answers from what it finds. Open it with the stars icon in the top navigation bar, and ask in plain words.

What it can look at

Eight areas of your account are open to it. Anything outside them, it will tell you it cannot reach.

Questions that work well

Which donors gave in each of the last three years but nothing this year?
What was our average gift last quarter, and how does that compare with the quarter before?
List everyone who attended the spring gala and has never made a donation.
How many recurring gifts failed in the last 60 days, and what were they worth a month?
Which contacts in Ohio have given more than $1,000 in total and can be emailed?
How much is still outstanding on open pledges, and which are past their end date?

What makes a question work

Be specific about time. "Last quarter" and "since January" are easy to answer. "Recently" is not.
Name the thing you mean. Campaign names, fund names and event names all work.
Ask for what you will do next. A list you can act on is more useful than a number, and Better.AI can give you either.
Follow up. The conversation is kept while you work, so "now only the ones who can be emailed" continues from the last answer.

Questions it will not answer well

Anything outside your account. It cannot tell you what other organizations raised, look up a prospect's wealth on the internet, or read your email.
Opinion presented as fact. Ask it who has lapsed and it will tell you. Ask it who will give next month and it is guessing, the same as anybody.
Anything it cannot reach. Custom fields, attachments and documents are not part of the eight areas above.

It reads, it does not write

Asking a question never changes anything. Better.AI cannot edit a contact, delete a gift, send an email or refund a transaction. The only things it creates are the summaries, plans and recommendations you explicitly ask for, and those are stored as records you can read and remove.

It answers from your records, not from memory

Every answer is built from a lookup against your own data at the moment you ask. If a figure looks wrong, it is worth checking the underlying records, because the number came from them. If Better.AI cannot find what you asked for, it says so rather than filling the gap.

One thing worth knowing about your own data: the donor and volunteer flags on a contact are fields somebody sets by hand, not something calculated from giving. A contact with twenty gifts may not have the donor flag ticked. Ask for your largest donors by total giving rather than by that flag, and you will get everybody.

Who can ask what

Better.AI follows the permissions already set on your account. A user who cannot open a contact record cannot obtain that contact's details by asking, and a question about records they cannot reach comes back empty rather than answered.