We often get asked why boodleAI is available to nonprofits, but not political campaigns.
We receive near weekly inquiries about what it would take for us to make boodle’s powerful AI Assistant available to political fundraisers, who share many of the same challenges (and frustrations) as nonprofit fundraisers.
The answer may be a bit surprising:
boodleAI was actually originally intended to be a political fundraising tool.
The boodleAI founding team has successfully raised money for political campaigns but were frustrated with how inefficient and ineffective the process often is. Because of this experience, the founding team saw the need for a tool that helps “bundlers” (as political fundraisers are called) identify likely donors in their networks and reduce the time and energy to make an effective ask for a donation. We hoped to build a tool that made it easier and faster for a bundler — any bundler – to raise money for the candidates and causes they cared about. We believe that providing candidates the ability to empower their supporters to become better bundlers could improve our democracy by allowing more people (both candidates and supporters) to participate in the political process.
At boodleAI, we believe that connecting people to causes they are likely to care about can make the world a better place.
However, when the boodleAI team began to research political fundraising tools, we discovered that like so many things connected with our political process, even the fundraising tools were viewed through the lens of partisanship. By and large, a fundraising tool is used by one party or another, and never both.
We have little interest in building a tool that is viewed as advancing a particular party’s political agenda. We believe that our Nation grows stronger when there is reasonable discourse on issues between people who care deeply – and can disagree – about those issues.
So, we decided that our vision of connecting people to causes they are likely to care about was better suited to helping nonprofits acquire donors and raise funds in support of their missions.
Still, we would love to find a way to use our technology to positively impact our democracy given that the founding team all served in uniform (including overseas) in hopes of securing that democracy. We hope that we may eventually find a way that AI and data, whether through boodleAI or some other platform, can help reduce the partisanship of our political process and help us find common ground for the common good in the midst of our differences.
We will seek a way to use boodleAI to help our democracy, but only in a non-partisan fashion. For now, we are happy to have our technology empower so many great nonprofits who have a daily impact on people’s lives all around the world.