AI should help nonprofits.
Never at the expense of donors, ethics, or the planet.

What AI does in a TNA engagement.

We use AI to handle the parts of nonprofit operations that are repetitive, high-volume, and benefit from pattern recognition: drafting first versions of content, surfacing relevant grant opportunities, synthesizing public data, routing donor communications to the right segments at the right moment. These are tasks where AI genuinely saves hours every week.

We do not use AI to make decisions about donor relationships, replace human judgment on grant narratives, generate synthetic "impact stories," or simulate personal messages from your Executive Director. Those things are done by people. Always.

Human-in-the-loop, always.

Every piece of content that leaves our engagements is reviewed by a person on our team before it reaches a donor, a funder, or a board. There are no exceptions and there is no "auto-send" feature we quietly flip on when nobody is looking. If you can't point to a human who signed off on a piece of outbound work, we didn't do our job.

Your data stays your data.

Your donor data, program data, and organizational information are held in systems you own or systems we manage specifically for you, under your access controls.

• We never pass donor personally identifiable information (PII) into public AI models (ChatGPT, public Gemini, public Claude, etc.).
• We use enterprise AI tools with contractual commitments that your data is not used to train public models.
• We sign Data Processing Agreements (DPAs) with every client that codify these commitments legally.
• On request, we provide a complete list of every AI tool we use in your engagement, along with their data policies.

On the environmental question.

Some nonprofits, especially environmental and climate organizations, have asked us directly: given the energy and water consumption of large AI models, is using AI in your work consistent with our mission?

It's a fair question and we take it seriously. Our honest position: targeted AI use, done well, tends to reduce waste. One well-researched grant proposal replaces ten scattershot ones. One segmented email replaces a hundred untargeted sends that go to spam. A donor journey that actually lands means fewer printed appeals, fewer wasted phone calls, fewer mailings that end up in recycling.

That said, we're transparent about the tradeoffs. If your organization has a sustainability policy that restricts specific AI tools, we'll work within it. If you want us to document the AI usage and associated footprint of our engagement, we'll provide it. We won't pretend this question doesn't exist.

The things we won't do.

• Generate synthetic testimonials, impact stories, or donor quotes.
• Send AI-written content to donors without human review.
• Scrape donor databases, violate terms of service, or circumvent access controls to gather data.
• Use AI to replace development staff, gift officers, or executive leadership roles.
• Pass donor PII into any AI tool without explicit data-handling guarantees.
• Recommend AI tools we haven't personally vetted against nonprofit sector ethics.

The frameworks we align with.

Our AI practices align with the AFP (Association of Fundraising Professionals) Code of Ethical Standards, the Donor Bill of Rights, and the emerging Fundraising.AI Responsible AI Framework for nonprofit technology. We stay current on state AI regulations (California SB 942, Colorado AI Act, Utah AI Policy Act) and bake compliance into every engagement.

If you ever see something that worries you.

Tell us. Every engagement includes a named point of contact on our team and a direct ethics line to TNA leadership. If something AI-generated goes out under your name that shouldn't have, we fix it, we own it, and we change the process so it can't happen again.

Questions? Email ethics@topnotchacquisitions.com or book a call to talk it through.