Donor Summaries and Plans

Open any contact record and you will find a Better.AI card beside Recent Giving. It does two things: it writes a summary of that donor's history, and it proposes what to do next.

Both read the records you already hold. Neither invents a figure, and every number they quote is one you can check on the record it came from.

The two buttons

Summarize this donor

A short account of who this donor has been to your organization. When they started, how their giving has moved, whether they give at a particular time of year, whether they are recurring, what they have attended, and when anybody last spoke to them.

It is the paragraph a gift officer writes by hand before a call, assembled from the same records in a few seconds.

Build a plan

Goes further and proposes the next moves: what to ask for, roughly when, and on what basis. It states the figures it reasoned from, so you can disagree with the conclusion while keeping the facts.

A plan is the more expensive of the two to produce and the more useful to argue with. Treat it as a first draft from somebody who has read the file, not as an instruction.

What they read

Lifetime giving, gift count, first and last gift, largest gift
Whether the donor gives recurrently, and how much per cycle
Events attended
When anything was last logged with them
Their opportunity and engagement scores, where your account uses them

One donor at a time. Neither button reads your list, another donor's record, or anything outside the account you are working in.

Reading one again is free

This is the part worth knowing, because most people ration themselves unnecessarily.

Once a summary or plan has been generated, it is stored on the contact record. Opening that contact tomorrow, next week, or from another user's login shows it again at no cost. Only generating a new one draws on your monthly count.

It refreshes itself when the donor changes

Each stored summary is tied to the facts it was written from. If the donor gives again, upgrades their recurring gift, attends an event, or has activity logged, those facts no longer match and the summary is regenerated the next time somebody views the record.

So a summary is never quietly out of date, and you do not have to remember to refresh anything. A donor whose record has not moved keeps the summary you already paid for.

Knowing what you have left

The card states your remaining monthly count before you run out, not after, in the form "2 summaries and 1 plan left this month". The count resets on the first of the month.

It is deliberately shown while there is still something left, because somebody who knows they have one plan remaining will spend it on the donor who matters rather than on whoever they happened to open first.

The Better.AI add-on removes the monthly count entirely, for every contact on your list.

A donor with no history

If a contact has no gifts, no event attendance and nothing logged, there is nothing to summarize and the card says so rather than producing a paragraph of padding about an empty record. Add the history, or use the contact record itself.

What they will not do

Predict. A plan proposes based on what this donor has done. It does not know what they will do.
Reach outside your account. No web search, no third party data, nothing about the donor that is not in your records.
Change anything. Generating a summary writes a summary. It never edits the contact, logs an activity or sends anything.
Work around your permissions. A user who cannot open a contact cannot obtain that donor's summary.

What you need

Donor summaries and plans read contact and giving history, so they follow the CRM side of your plan. Better.AI also has to be switched on for your organization: until it is, the card says so and offers to turn it on rather than reporting that there is nothing to say.

Getting good use out of them

Before a call or a visit. The summary is the briefing, and it takes seconds rather than the ten minutes of reading it replaces.
Handing a donor to somebody else. A board member or a new gift officer gets the history without needing to interpret a giving table.
Check the figures once. Not because they are usually wrong, but because knowing they came from your records rather than from a guess is what makes the summary worth trusting the next fifty times.
Spend plans deliberately. Summaries are the everyday tool. A plan is worth saving for a donor where the next move genuinely matters.