A note before we get started: We use Fathom at Lake One, I'm an investor, and the Fathom links here are referral links. The category logic holds regardless of which tool you pick.
Your major gift officer just had a 45-minute conversation with a $50,000 donor.
She heard about the donor's daughter starting at Carleton. The frustration with the previous gift not getting acknowledged for six weeks. The casual mention of a liquidity event next spring. The interest in funding scholarships specifically, not general operating, despite what's on the giving history.
That conversation is worth more than most of what's currently in your CRM.
And almost none of it is going to make it back into your database.
Maybe she'll write a call report. Maybe she'll jot three bullets in the notes app on her phone between school pickup and the next Zoom. Most likely, the next person to look at this donor's record in two years sees "Spoke with donor, went well" and has to start from scratch.
This is the single biggest gap I see in CRM usage and for nonprofits it really hurts. It's not a HubSpot problem. It's not a Blackbaud problem. It's a memory problem. Relationship intelligence lives in heads, not systems. When the person leaves, and in development the average tenure is under two years, the relationship walks out with them.
I want to name something before going further. Fundraising is grinding work. It's emotionally heavy, it's constantly context-switching, and most of the people doing it are tired. Nobody who's coming off a cultivation lunch, driving back to the office, has the energy to write a six-paragraph call report by EOD. Every capture gap in every CRM I've ever audited has a tired person at the other end of it. Any honest conversation about this problem has to start there.
Anyone who's been on a Zoom in the last six months has watched one of these bots introduce itself. Gong, Chorus, Fathom, Otter, Fireflies, Granola. The B2B sales world has been using this category for a while, and the pitch there is productivity: coach reps better, close deals faster, spot pipeline risk earlier.
That framing is wrong for fundraising, and it's why I think a lot of development shops have bounced off these tools when they've looked at them.
The cultivation cycle for a major gift varies wildly by organization. At a small shop where a $500 gift qualifies, it can close in one conversation at a signature event. At a well-established institution where a major gift is $50,000, it's more typically three to five moves over six months to three years. Principal gift work and planned giving stretch the range further in both directions. A principal gift can close in two hours or take 30 months. Planned giving conversations can span decades between the first meeting and the realized bequest, two gift officers and an executive director apart.
Most of the nonprofits we work with at Lake One sit squarely in the middle of that range. Major gift thresholds of $10,000 to $50,000, cycles of 18 months to three years, six to twelve moves per donor. That's the sweet spot where capture loss hurts most. Long enough that memory matters, frequent enough turnover that it breaks, not so complex that you have a dedicated research shop backstopping every relationship.
The cost of losing context in that range isn't a slower quarter. It's a donor who quietly moves their giving elsewhere because nobody on the new team remembers that scholarships were the thing, not general operating.
What nonprofits need isn't a productivity layer on top of conversations. It's institutional memory underneath them. That reframing matters, because it changes what you capture, how you talk about it internally, and how donors experience it.
Two things have shifted in the last year that make this category newly viable for nonprofit budgets and nonprofit tech stacks.
The free tiers got real. Take Fathom, our preferred platform for this purpose. Their free plan includes unlimited recording, transcription, and AI summaries, with no minute caps and no trial period. For an organization used to "nonprofit pricing" meaning 10% off enterprise, a genuinely free capture layer is structurally different from anything that's existed before. The budget objection disappears.
The CRM integration got real too. Meeting notes, action items, and summaries now push to the right HubSpot contact record without anyone touching the CRM. That sounds like a small thing. It isn't. Every previous version of this had the same problem. The notes lived somewhere nobody looked. You'd come back to a donor record six months later and there'd be nothing there, because the real intelligence was in a Google Doc, a notetaker app, or somebody's Notion, and nobody had the habit of going to get it. Closing the loop into HubSpot is what makes this usable at a small shop with no dedicated ops person.
A note on what I'm actually recommending. Recording donor conversations isn't standard practice in fundraising right now, and there are real reasons it hasn't been. Consent is genuinely complicated. Donor trust is the most precious asset in the work. And until recently, the tooling wasn't good enough to be worth the friction it introduced.
All three of those things have changed. Consent practices in adjacent professions (therapy, medicine, law, journalism) have given us better models. Donors are increasingly comfortable with recorded interactions in other parts of their lives, from telehealth visits to client calls with their financial advisors. And the tooling, as I argued above, finally works. The question isn't whether recording donor conversations is normal yet. It's whether the reasons it hasn't been are still load-bearing. I think for most shops, in most contexts, with proper consent, they aren't.
Let's look at two use cases that are genuinely nonprofit-specific, meaning a sales-focused version of this tool would not have built for them, and the value is hard to replicate any other way.
Major gift cultivation over multi-year arcs. A cultivation file built from transcripts and AI summaries across five years of conversations is a fundamentally different artifact than a stack of call reports. Wealth signals, family context, giving motivations, the offhand comment about the foundation board she's joining next year, all searchable, all attached to the contact record, all still there when the gift officer moves on. The relationship belongs to the institution, not the individual on staff. That has always been the aspiration. It's never actually been true.
And it's not just about the curation. It's about being able to query it. Five minutes before a call, you can pull up the donor's record and ask, "What did she say about her daughter's college search last time? What did we agree the next step was? What's she most excited about right now?" You walk into the conversation sounding like you just left it yesterday. Because let's be honest, we're not getting any younger and we can all use the assist with our memory. That's not a sales productivity hack. That's how you keep a relationship feeling personal across a decade of cultivation.
The summary itself can also be shaped for fundraising. Out of the box, Fathom generates a generic call summary. Spend 10 minutes customizing the template once, and from then on every cultivation call gets summarized around the things that actually matter for development work: wealth signals, family context, stated philanthropic interests, commitments made on either side, programs the donor leaned into emotionally. The transcript is the raw material. The customized summary is the brief. One honest note: template customization is a Premium feature, not the free tier. So at some point, if you're serious about this as a memory layer for your major gifts work, the math moves from "free" to "worth paying for." Which is, I'd argue, exactly the right shape for a tool you're using on six-figure cultivation conversations.
Planned giving conversations. These are the hardest conversations to remember well and the most expensive ones to lose. They're emotional, they're discursive, and they often span the tenures of multiple staff members. The first meeting might happen when the donor is 68; the bequest realizes when she's 89. Holding the full arc of that relationship, the reasons, the hesitations, the family dynamics, the specific language she used, is the difference between a planned giving program that compounds and one that starts from zero every time there's turnover.
There are other use cases, like board meetings, foundation calls, corporate partnership discussions, and they're fine. But they're not the reason to do this. The reason to do this is that major gifts and planned giving are the two places where losing context is catastrophic and where the gap between what a good gift officer knows and what the CRM knows is the widest.
Donors aren't leads. You know this, but the tool doesn't. And if you're not careful, the language of the tool starts shaping the way your team talks about people. "Pipeline." "Touches." "Qualification." Every one of those words is a small choice to treat a human relationship like a transaction, and donors feel that shift even when you don't mean it.
The framing has to be institutional memory, not surveillance. The intelligence belongs to the relationship, not to a dashboard. Practically, that means a few things:
Recording consent isn't a checkbox exercise, but it also doesn't have to be a friction point in the call itself. U.S. recording laws split between one-party consent states (most of them) and all-party consent states (California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington, and a handful of others). When you operate across state lines, the strictest applicable law typically governs. The simplest defensible practice is to obtain consent from every external party, regardless of where they're sitting. None of that is legal advice. Talk to your own counsel before you set policy.
Fathom (and many other notetakers) makes this easy with an Auto Request Recording Consent setting that handles disclosure before the call starts. The donor gets notice in advance and can opt out before they're ever on with you. Enable it for your whole team, decide as a group how you'll respond if a donor declines, and that's the policy. The tool handles the rest.
The best fundraisers I know take handwritten notes during donor conversations. Not because handwriting is magic, but because the act of writing down what someone says is a form of attention, and donors can feel the difference between being listened to and being recorded. A transcript captures words. A handwritten note captures that you cared enough to write them down. Use the tool, but don't let it replace the thing underneath it.
And the CRM underneath has to be worth capturing to. If your HubSpot is duplicate contacts, no moves management, and three donor properties beyond email and phone, pointing a capture tool at it just means dumping high-quality signal into a low-quality system. Fix the foundation first.
If you're on HubSpot and you want to try this with minimal commitment:
If you're not on HubSpot for nonprofits yet, or you're on Blackbaud and starting to feel the limits, this is one more reason the HubSpot stack is pulling ahead for nonprofit fundraising operations. The capture layer is finally real, and it plugs in cleanly. That's not the whole case for a migration. But it's a real piece of it.
Ryan Ruud is the founder of Lake One, a HubSpot Solutions Partner focused exclusively on nonprofits and purpose-driven organizations. He is an early stage investor in Fathom.