The Luddites Were Right: What Every Fundraiser Must Know About AI, Donor Relationships, and the Future of Giving
Why Every Fundraiser Needs to Read This Now
The numbers are not ambiguous. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project, which tracked data from more than 12,500 nonprofit organizations, found that the number of donors declined 4.5 percent in 2024 compared with 2023 — and that figure has declined every single year since 2019. Research compiled by Double the Donation adds the longer view: in 2000, approximately 66 percent of U.S. households gave to charity; by 2024, that figure had dropped to just below 50 percent. NonProfit PRO's 2025 analysis of sector data found that only 19 percent of first-time donors give again. The Chronicle of Philanthropy has reported that the average nonprofit now sends 62 emails per year to its donors — nearly half of them fundraising appeals — while email response rates remain stuck below 1 percent.
Into this already-damaged landscape, artificial intelligence is arriving at speed.
The question before every fundraising professional is not whether to use AI — that debate is over. The question is the same one a group of English textile workers asked in 1811, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when they were given a label that became an insult and has remained one ever since: who does this technology serve, and at whose expense?
They were called Luddites. History got them profoundly wrong. And the error matters now more than it has in two centuries.
The Myth and the Truth: Who the Luddites Really Were
The word "Luddite" has become shorthand for someone who irrationally fears progress — a technophobe, a reactionary, someone standing in the way of the inevitable. That version of history is wrong, and the wrongness is not incidental. It has consistently served the interests of those who benefit most from uncritical adoption of new technology, and it is the version that gets invoked every time a worker raises a legitimate question about what a new technology will actually do to their livelihood and their craft.
The Luddite movement occurred primarily between 1811 and 1816 in the textile centers of Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire, England. Contemporary historical research — including a detailed analysis published in 2025 by NcbArt drawing on decades of labor history scholarship — has established that the Luddites were, contrary to the popular image of uneducated laborers flailing at machinery they did not understand, typically highly skilled artisans: croppers who finished woolen cloth, stockingers who worked the frames, craftspeople whose expertise represented years of training and whose wages reflected that mastery.
They were not against machines. As Brian Merchant documents in his 2023 book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, many of the Luddites were machine experts who welcomed the introduction of new equipment that made their work easier and their craft more precise. What they opposed was a specific and deliberate choice made by a class of factory owners — a choice that was presented to the public as inevitable, as the natural march of progress, but was in fact a decision: to introduce industrial machinery operated by unskilled workers and, frequently, by children, rather than by the trained craftspeople whose skill had made English textiles one of the nation's signature goods for generations.
Historian Adrian Randall has noted that some of the machines the Luddites targeted were not even new inventions — the gig mill, one of their targets, had been in use for more than a century. Their grievance was not with innovation itself. Their grievance was with innovation deployed as a weapon against the people who had built the industry, in order to concentrate its profits among those who owned the machines.
The historian Eric Hobsbawm famously described the Luddites' tactics as "collective bargaining by riot," a phrase that captures the essential nature of the movement: it was a labor negotiation conducted in the only language available to workers who had been stripped of any other. Historical analysis has shown that their machine-breaking was not indiscriminate vandalism — they deliberately targeted the property of manufacturers known for wage-cutting, poor working conditions, and the production of inferior goods, while leaving untouched the equipment of those who dealt fairly with their workers.
The government's response was swift, severe, and revealing. Troops were deployed, the penal code was changed to make machine-breaking a capital offense, and factory owners were empowered to hire militias and defend their machinery with force. As the political journal Current Affairs documented in a 2024 analysis of the Luddite period, this was not simply the market deciding that technology was better — it was the state deciding, through military and legal force, that the interests of factory owners would take precedence over the interests of skilled workers, and enforcing that decision with considerable violence.
E.P. Thompson, in his landmark 1963 work The Making of the English Working Class, argued that the Luddites were not anti-technology per se, but were defending their communities, livelihoods, and values against a new economic system that treated labor as merely another commodity to be exploited. More recently, Brian Merchant drew the line from 1811 to the present with uncomfortable directness, telling TIME magazine in 2023: "We are confronting a series of cases where technology is being used by tech companies and executives in different industries as a means of trying to drive down wages and worsen conditions so that the entrepreneurial class can make more money."
The Luddites were right about what was coming. Friedrich Engels documented the horror of the English factory system a generation after their defeat, and it unfolded precisely as they had feared. Their error was not their diagnosis. It was that they had no alternative to offer — only the hammer.
Fundraisers have something the Luddites did not: the chance to choose deliberately before the moment of crisis arrives — and the institutional authority to enforce that choice.
The Warning in the Data: What Digitization Has Already Cost Donor Relationships
The parallel between the Industrial Revolution and the current AI moment in fundraising is not metaphorical. It is structural, and the damage is already visible in two decades of data.
The Industrial Revolution replaced skilled cloth workers with unskilled machine operators and child labor, producing cheaper goods of inferior quality while concentrating the gains at the top. Digitization in fundraising has, over the past two decades, replaced personal cultivation with mass email, automated acknowledgment sequences, algorithmic donor segmentation, and transactional appeals designed to process donors at scale rather than to know them as individuals. The results are now documented in detail, and they read like a sector in distress.
Woodrow Rosenbaum, chief data officer of GivingTuesday, told the Chronicle of Philanthropy in late 2025 that the long decline in donor participation is not inevitable — it is, in his words, "at least partly, if not largely, a function of our fundraising system not meeting the moment." The system that is not meeting the moment is the digitized, automated, transactional system that the sector built in pursuit of efficiency, and the cost of that efficiency is now arriving in the data every quarter.
The specific damage is documented and granular. The Association of Fundraising Professionals reported in its Q1 2025 analysis that the smallest donor cohort — gifts of one dollar to one hundred dollars — experienced an 11.1 percent year-over-year decline, continuing a long erosion of the donor pipeline from which major gifts have historically grown. The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported in late 2025 that revenue from donor-advised funds increased by 30 percent in 2024, yet the infrastructure for processing DAF payments has outpaced the infrastructure for maintaining the relationships behind them, making donor stewardship of DAF holders, in the Chronicle's words, "extremely cumbersome and in some instances practically impossible." An average of 62 emails per year to donors, with response rates below 1 percent, has not produced retention — it has produced fatigue, and the sector's own data confirms it.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy stated the stakes plainly in its 2026 analysis of AI and fundraising: nonprofits are addicted to the hamster wheel of fundraising, churning out endless solicitations in search of new donors, and the game is a losing one. Email response rates below 1 percent and first-time donor return rates of 19 percent are not donor problems. They are organizational problems, produced by a fundraising culture that chose scale over relationship and is now paying for that choice in declining participation year after year.
AI is arriving into this landscape with the same dual possibility that the power loom carried in 1811: it can be deployed to support the skilled relationship-builder, or it can be deployed to replace them. The Luddite question — who does this technology serve, and at whose expense? — is not rhetorical. It is operational, and every fundraising leader must answer it before making the next technology investment, not after the investment has already locked in the wrong answer.
Protecting the Irreducible Human: What Fundraisers Must Do Now
Understanding what technology cannot replace is the beginning of the answer, and the evidence from two decades of digitized fundraising makes clear what has already been damaged by the assumption that it could be replaced.
The transformational donor — the Bloomberg, the van Ameringen, the June Wink — does not exist at the end of an automated cultivation sequence. They exist at the end of a human relationship built over years by a skilled professional who listened carefully, understood what the donor cared about most deeply, and offered them a genuinely big idea at the right moment. AI can screen a prospect for capacity; it cannot sit across from one and recognize that the moment has arrived. It can draft a stewardship letter; it cannot hold the fuller picture of a donor's life and know when a phone call matters more than any written communication.
The first and most important step for any fundraising organization is an honest audit of what has already been automated, conducted specifically through the lens of the question the Luddites were asking: does this automation serve the relationship, or does it replace it? Automating a gift receipt is not the same as automating a cultivation conversation, but many organizations have drifted toward the latter without naming it as a choice, surrendering relationship touchpoints to efficiency reviews one at a time until the cumulative effect became visible in the retention data. The audit should map every donor touchpoint and identify which have been handed to technology without a deliberate decision to do so, because those are the places where the deskilling has already begun.
The personal phone call is the single most powerful retention tool the sector possesses, and it is the one most consistently sacrificed to cost-cutting. Penelope Burk, whose landmark research in Donor-Centered Fundraising documented the specific drivers of donor loyalty over decades of study, found that a personal thank-you call within 48 hours of a first gift can double the likelihood of a second gift — a finding that has been replicated consistently in subsequent sector research. Many organizations have quietly eliminated outbound personal calls as a budget line item, replacing them with automated email sequences that carry none of the relational weight of a human voice. Restoring the personal call — and protecting it explicitly from future efficiency reviews — is the most direct intervention available to any organization serious about reversing the donor decline that the Fundraising Effectiveness Project has now documented for six consecutive years.
AI and automation should be deployed aggressively in the areas where human skill is not the point: prospect research, gift capacity screening, data hygiene, report generation, grant writing drafts, calendar management, and social media scheduling, among others. Every hour that AI saves on those tasks should be explicitly reinvested in human contact — not banked as a staff reduction — and that reinvestment should be a written organizational policy rather than a hope. The organizations that will benefit most from AI are those that treat it as a means of buying back time for the relationship work that machines cannot do, rather than as a rationale for reducing the headcount doing that work.
Major gift officers in most organizations spend a significant portion of their working hours on CRM data entry, compliance reporting, and administrative tasks that have no connection to donor relationships — a dynamic that is the nonprofit equivalent of putting a skilled craftsperson on a clerical shift and calling it efficiency. AI should absorb those tasks entirely, and the time recovered should be tracked not as an efficiency gain but as a relationship investment, measured in donor visits, phone calls, personal letters, and site tours. The metric that matters is not how many tasks the AI completed; it is how many additional hours the major gift officer spent with donors as a direct result.
The collapse of small donor participation — from 66 percent of U.S. households giving in 2000 to below 50 percent today — cannot be reversed by digital campaigns alone, because digital campaigns were a significant cause of it. Research cited in the 2025 fundraising trends report by Cerini & Associates, drawing on data from GivingTuesday and the Association of Fundraising Professionals, shows that many million-dollar donors began their giving journey with contributions of five hundred dollars or less, often a decade before their transformational gift. Rebuilding the small donor pipeline that feeds that journey requires community-based fundraising, peer-to-peer programs, and authentic human storytelling delivered in physical as well as digital spaces — slower and more labor-intensive than a mass email campaign, and the only approach that has historically produced the kind of donor loyalty that migrates upward into major and transformational gifts over time.
The most consequential decision a fundraising organization can make right now is also the most straightforward: to write down, explicitly, the donor interactions that will never be automated — the first gift acknowledgment call, the major donor check-in after a difficult year, the personal invitation to a site visit, the conversation before a significant ask — and to defend that list against every future argument for efficiency. The Luddites tried to protect their craft without that kind of institutional backing, and they lost. Fundraisers still have the institutional authority to make that protection a matter of organizational policy, and the window for making that choice deliberately, rather than reactively, will not stay open indefinitely.
The Luddites were right about what the machines were going to do, and they were defeated anyway, because they had no alternative to offer and no institutional power to enforce one. Fundraisers are in a different position. The alternative is clear — use AI to serve the relationship, not to replace it — and the institutional authority to enforce it belongs to every leader reading this post. The question is whether that authority will be exercised before the hamster wheel spins fast enough to make the choice for them.
A Note on This Resource
This post is offered as an educational resource for nonprofit development professionals and organizational leaders navigating the intersection of technology and donor relationships. The principles discussed here apply across organizations of every size and mission. For attribution, please cite: Laurence A. Pagnoni, MPA.
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