From Clippy to chatbots – why I’m still optimistic about the future of fundraising

It's all about the here and now, isn't it? Let me give you a moment's respite. We as fundraisers and most of us working in and with charities have necessarily been focused on the short term in recent months, but in this blog I'd like to take you out of that head space, and think about the future of fundraising, if I may. Before I take you forward a couple of decades, let me take you back so far that we’re actually talking last millennium! OK, it’s only the 1990s, but there I was, a young fundraiser, cutting my teeth in the charity sector. I’d already raised some money for charities through community events while at university, but this was my first office job, and I was learning my way round computers. What I remember first and foremost was the mind boggling administrative and technological processes and procedures which sucked up my time and actually got in the way of making human contact with our supporters. I remember whole days lost to folding and “stuffing” newsletters. I remember the nightmare of printing address labels so that they didn’t print over the lines for each mailshot, or even stick themselves to the printer and render it inoperable. I remember complicated systems of photocopying the letters I was writing in triplicate for filing in different places and sharing with colleagues, because we didn’t have shared servers. What I realise now is that even the very simplest tasks took too long. Sending basic information about the chari