What is an Agent? Meet the VIP Donor Concierge in QSS™

Every Advancement team could use a little extra support, especially when it comes to staying on top of donor communications, event coordination, and scaling personalized stewardship. That’s where AI agents come in. As fundraising organizations explore how agents can increase efficiency and constituent satisfaction, we want to help them understand what exactly this technology does.

Agents are more like digital employees than chatbots. They can talk to your constituents if you’d like them to, but often they take the form of an AI-powered assistant designed to take on specific tasks that support your goals. They help summarize activity and key data points on a constituent record, draft emails, and notify you of key developments.

Agents have a job description. They have a clear role on your team and don’t just “go rogue.” You and your system administrators work together to define what an agent should or shouldn’t do. Over time, agents can become more efficient and insightful as they learn from your data, adjust based on your feedback, and are optimized to support your unique Advancement processes.

Agents start out like rookies and get better over time. When an agent first starts working for you, it’s like onboarding a new team member. It may take a few rounds of adjustments and refinements to get the behavior just right. But as your team continues to shape and train it, the agent becomes more efficient, more accurate, and more insightful.

Your job is to train and refine the agent continuously. Agents are not exactly set-it-and-forget-it tools. They improve as you evolve their job description, monitor their behavior, and adjust their prompts. Over time, they’ll become more confident “employees” who anticipate needs and support strategic goals.

Agents are great at improving operational efficiency. If you’ve ever had a chat bot help you draft an email or summarize a lengthy, complex chunk of text, you probably already have a sense of this. Agents in Salesforce take that further by analyzing your records and providing easy-to-digest kernels of information. Constituent-facing agents, like the VIP Donor Concierge we introduce below, ease the burden on your staff by handling simple requests from your constituents in a personalized way and taking care of the (sometimes tedious) data entry.

Agents are very good at providing new insights and new intelligence. They don’t just automate, they illuminate. Whether it’s surfacing donor engagement trends, highlighting missed opportunities, or helping forecast likely outcomes, agents make it easier to take informed action faster.

What does an external-facing agent look like?

One of the most exciting examples in QSS™ is our VIP Donor Concierge Agent, designed to support donor engagement, event logistics, and membership management. To show what this looks like in action, let’s follow Bobby Jones, a fictional but loyal supporter of QSS™ University’s athletics program.

As a member of the Athletics Club, Bobby receives an alert delivered via email, SMS, or his alumni portal about NCAA tournament tickets, an alumni pregame gathering, and his early access to reserve a fan package. Instead of calling or emailing someone for details, Bobby simply goes to the QSS™ University site and interacts with the VIP Donor Concierge Agent through a friendly, intuitive interface.