Enterprise · Higher Education Advancement
Every donor, understood. Every ask, earned.
Donor AI unifies alumni, parent, and friend data inside your own Google Cloud environment, then uses Google's Gemini and Vertex AI to personalize outreach everywhere a donor shows up: email, your website, ads, and text/SMS.
The stakes
Grow the fund. Guard the record.
Donor AI is the bridge: personalization at the speed the board wants, inside a boundary your CISO signs off on.
Growth
Every advancement function (annual giving, major gifts, planned giving, alumni relations, stewardship) is under pressure to grow revenue and deepen engagement, and generative AI is the fastest lever these teams have found in years.
Stewardship
Alumni, parent, and student records live under institutional policy and donor trust built over decades. One exposed record undoes both.
What advancement teams do with it
Three shifts, from the first campaign onward.
Know your donors, not just their gifts
Donor segmentation strategy
Moves segmentation from simple giving-tier buckets to interest-based donor engagement: grouping by what a donor cares about, not just what they gave last time.
Same segmentation-and-personalization approach already running at Currys in retail: a 3× improvement in add-to-basket rates.
Major-donor look-alikes
Scans donor profiles for the engagement pattern of your known major donors (affinity signals, giving cadence, activity history) and surfaces who else looks like them, before the ask is made.
Running today at a major U.S. research university's advancement office (a Syntasa customer that cannot be named publicly); the same propensity-modeling approach generated millions of dollars in incremental value for Lenovo in retail.
Personalize every touchpoint
Hyper-personalized outreach messages
Gemini and Vertex AI draft the message and a suggested ask amount from the unified donor profile, with multiple versions generated automatically for faster A/B testing.
Preliminary results from higher-education customers who cannot be named publicly yet: +20% open rates, +66% click-throughs, +25% larger donations, +125% campaign revenue.
Anonymous website personalization
Personalizes the on-site experience in-session, before a visitor is even identified, so a prospective donor sees a relevant appeal on your site before they've ever logged in.
Same in-session activation approach behind Currys's 3× improvement in add-to-basket rates.
Personalized impact reporting
Coming soonWill match content from your institution's impact reports to each donor's own giving history and stated interests, so a scholarship donor sees the student it funded and an athletics donor sees the program it built: stewardship that lands individually.
New surfaces for giving
Fund intelligence
Coming soonWill apply the same "customer intelligence" logic Syntasa uses for products to funds: which fund to present to which donor, and how to merchandise it, so advancement teams stop treating every fund the same way.
Giving agent
Coming soonPositions the institution for the agentic-commerce future: as donors increasingly turn to their own AI assistants (ChatGPT and similar) to decide where and how to give, Donor AI is being built agent-ready, aligned with emerging standards like the Unified Commerce Protocol (UCP) for higher ed.
The platform underneath
Syntasa's Data + Agentic AI Platform, framed for advancement.
Five modules, one pipeline: from raw CRM and SIS records to a personalized message a gift officer can send today.
Jordan Ellis '95
Class of 1995 · Electrical Engineering · 30th reunion
- Last gift
- $250
- Total giving
- $12,400
- Consecutive years
- 8
- Propensity
- 86%
“Your 1995 class made this possible. Will you help the next one?”
Representative data, illustrative only.
Step 1: Data Ready
Ingests CRM, website, email, ad, ticketing, and SIS data at scale, and resolves one alumnus's or donor's identity across all of them.
Step 2: Core
Governed processing with access control and a full audit trail over student and donor records, the layer your compliance office will ask about first.
Step 3: AI Models
Propensity-to-give, suggested-ask-amount, and engagement-likelihood models trained on your institution's own history.
Step 4: AI Agents
Drafts and version-tests outreach copy within a declared authority: a human sets the audience and intent, the agent runs the draft-and-test loop.
Step 5: Decisions & Actions
Personalization tokens and donor segments synced back into the CRM, email, website, ad platforms, and text/SMS your gift officers already use.
Proof
In production in advancement, and proven at scale everywhere else.
A leading research university · Higher education · Alumni advancement
Deployed and in production at a major U.S. research university's advancement office.
The institution cannot be named publicly. No quote is attributed here since none has been cleared for external use.
The same models and activation approach, different sector
Lenovo
“Generated millions of dollars in incremental business value.”
Currys
3×improvement in add-to-basket rates from personalized recommendationsSky
+57%increase in transactions from personalization
Deployment & trust
The data never leaves your walls.
Runs inside your institution's own private Google Cloud account, governed by the same zero-trust architecture that clears Syntasa's most regulated deployments.
- Runs inside your institution's own private Google Cloud account; data never leaves it.
- Privacy and access controls, enforced at ingest.
- Syntasa and Google never see or use institutional data.
- Same zero-trust architecture (identity-bound access, auditable data movement) that underpins Syntasa's FedRAMP High deployments.
Your private Google Cloud account
Ecosystem
Keep the stack you already run.
Google Cloud
Five-year partnership; Donor AI runs on the same Vertex AI + BigQuery stack that powers Syntasa's other Google Cloud deployments.
Martech already in your stack
Adtech already in your stack
Resources
Read before you talk to us.
- Guide
The Advancement Journey
A five-stage maturity model — Fragmented to Empowered — for advancement teams navigating AI, plus a self-assessment guide to find where your institution stands today.Read - Webinar· Gated
The Future of Advancement & Donor AI
Google Public Sector, Syntasa, and Carahsoft on an AI-first approach to donor engagement — personalized outreach, intelligent audience building, and fundraising for higher education advancement teams.Read - Compliance
Trust Center
Deployment models, zero-trust principles, and data-handling detail for a compliance review.Visit
FAQ
Questions advancement teams ask us first.
Donor AI runs Google's Gemini and Vertex AI (the same models behind Syntasa's other Google Cloud deployments) inside Syntasa's AI Models and AI Agents modules, trained and served on your institution's own unified donor profile. Propensity scoring, the signals and interests behind it, and generated outreach copy all come from your data, not a shared or pooled model, and nothing is sent to a general-purpose external AI service.
No. Donor AI runs inside your institution's own private Google Cloud account. Syntasa and Google never see or use your data, the same model-custody principle behind Syntasa's other deployments.
Donor AI connects to Blackbaud, Salesforce, Ellucian, and other advancement CRMs through pre-built integrations, and writes personalization tokens back into the CRM your gift officers already use. No rip-and-replace.
Access controls and governance are enforced at ingest through Syntasa's Core module, with privacy handling and a full audit trail over every donor and student record.
Syntasa's Data + Agentic AI Platform is modular by design: start with two integrations (commonly your CRM and email platform) and expand once that pairing proves out, rather than a single big-bang rollout.
Start small. Scale big.
Deliver world-class outcomes for advancement, without your donor data ever leaving your walls.