I Can Keep Doing This, but I Can't Keep Doing This

In the last session of a long day last week, the room was asked a question. How many of you have said to yourself, I can keep doing this, but I can't keep doing this?

We have heard some version of that sentence on a lot of calls. We had never watched a whole room answer it. Almost everyone raised their hands.

It was the last thing that happened that day, and it made sense of everything we have heard in two years of building BeMo.

The day was Capital Region Fundraising Day, put on by the Hudson-Mohawk chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, and the session was called "Fundraising Is Human." The room was development directors, executive directors and the people who do both, often in organizations where the person raising the money is also writing the newsletter and preparing the board packet. We sponsored a session, I had a few minutes at the podium, and Lee and I spent the rest of the day at a table in the back with BeMo open.

Permission was not the problem

The morning opened with the keynote, a fireside chat on where fundraising is headed. Art Taylor, the president and CEO of AFP, talked about using off-the-shelf AI in his own work, for emails and strategy documents, and encouraged everyone to test the tools for themselves. He pointed the room to the research: most people in nonprofits are using AI now, and very few organizations have made it part of how they work.

Three in four nonprofit staff use AI at least once a week. Fewer than one in five organizations have trained their staff on the tools. NTEN and The Bridgespan Group, State of Nonprofit AI Adoption and Governance, 917 respondents, summer 2026.

In that room, permission was no longer the problem. For a while now the question in rooms like this one has been whether to try these tools at all. On Thursday it was how.

When I spoke later that morning, I didn't have to make the case for trying AI. He had already made it. Thank you, Art. So I asked for something more specific: bring us a problem you are actually working on, a grant to write or funding to find.

What the rest of the day showed us is that being willing to try the tools and knowing how to make them part of the work are two different things.

What came to the table

A development director told us she uses an AI assistant to draft speeches and ads, and it helps. Her frustration is that she starts over every time. Each new conversation, she explains her organization all over again.

A speech and an ad for the same organization, written weeks apart by the same person, and each one begins from nothing. What is missing from that picture is not skill or software. It is the organization itself, which lives in her head and has to be poured back out every time she sits down.

An executive director listened to us describe how we work and said she had never thought about doing it differently. She wasn't disagreeing. It simply had not occurred to her that there was another way.

When you have spent years being the person who remembers the history, connects the decisions and explains how everything fits together, it is hard to imagine that the organization itself could hold more of that. People can't ask for a different way of working if they have never seen one.

We watched that happen at the table more than once. Someone describes the work they are carrying, we show them what it looks like when the organization holds it instead, and their face changes.

Starting over is the tax

Put those next to the show of hands and the pattern is not hard to see.

The tools got easier to use. The work of carrying the organization from one piece of work to the next did not go away. It rarely appears in a job description or a budget. It gets absorbed into someone's crowded day, usually the person who was already holding everything else.

The cost is not only time. It is attention.

That is the problem BeMo is being built around: the next grant, appeal or board update should begin with what the organization already knows, not with someone explaining the organization again.

I had told the room that morning about an executive director who wrote an appeal letter in about thirty minutes instead of a few hours. Three weeks earlier, she had built her annual report in BeMo. When she came back to write the appeal, what BeMo knew about her organization was still there. She didn't have to start over.

The work is still human

Read the program for the day and you can see what the work actually is: intentional donor relationships, an activated community, development, communications and government relations as one three-legged stool, and a closing session on the emotional demands of the job. Only the morning keynote touched on technology. Everything else was about people.

The three-legged stool resonated. In a large organization, those are three departments that have to learn to work together. In many of the organizations in that room, they are three hats on one person, and she is the only place where the three meet.

Something else came up more than once: many people had not planned a career in fundraising. They came from somewhere else, often because they believed in a mission, and learned the job by doing it. The chapter runs a cohort for emerging professionals for exactly that reason, so the people newest to the work have somewhere to learn it and someone to ask. They love their work. That was plain in every conversation we had.

And they leave it. In one of the sessions, someone named the pressures fundraisers carry: high expectations against low resources, burnout, pay, and the culture they work in. Funding cuts came up too. Someone else put the average tenure of a development professional at about eighteen months. The Chronicle of Philanthropy printed the same number in January, and reported that turnover has not eased. No software can fix inadequate pay, an unhealthy culture or expectations that have become unreasonable. Those are leadership and board responsibilities.

But when the person who leaves is the one holding the whole organization in her head, the history, the decisions and the reasons go with her. Starting over is not only a tax on her week. It is what happens to the organization every time she leaves.

That is where the time should go. Into the donor who wants a call, the volunteer who is ready to do more, the board member who needs one honest conversation. Technology should give people more room for that work, not become one more thing to manage.

The hands went up because the people holding them had said it to themselves: I can keep doing this, but I can't keep doing this. Some of that load has to come off. Some of it needs more people. But remembering everything, connecting it, and explaining it all again tomorrow should not be one of the things they carry.