Abstract
Nonprofit CRM architectures should be governed as relational stewardship systems rather than transactional management tools, because long-term donor commitment depends more on identification and trust than on observable giving behavior alone. Current CRM designs privilege measurable indicators such as gift frequency, conversion rates, and donor scoring, while rendering shared identity, symbolic affiliation, and evolving trust largely invisible in organizational decision-making. This creates a governance mismatch in which the relationships fundraisers rely on most are poorly represented within the systems intended to support them. Emerging predictive AI intensifies this tension by optimizing behavioral proxies while further obscuring the relational conditions that sustain philanthropic commitment. The paper argues that CRM schemas encode governance assumptions about which donor relationships organizations can recognize, value, and act upon, and proposes a governance agenda for relationally aware nonprofit information systems that can support stewardship without reducing donor relationships to algorithmic optimization.
Recommended Citation
Baban, Anca Veronica, "When Identification Drives Giving: Toward Relationally Aware Governance Architectures for Nonprofit Information Systems" (2026). AMCIS 2026 TREOs. 71.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/treos_amcis2026/71