Project Overview

At MFStrategies, supporting clients in cultivating strong relationships with prospective donors is core to our mission. These conversations often begin with a single opportunity: a phone call. To make that moment count, candidates need more than just contact details, they need a summary of what motivates that individual to be politically active. We saw an opportunity to transform the prep process using AI, producing sharper, more strategic biographies in a fraction of the time.

The Challenge

Traditionally, crafting donor biographies has been time-consuming and labor-intensive. A compelling paragraph often requires digging through directories, databases, and press coverage, then condense it into a short, informative summary. Staff can spent up to 10 minutes per profile, limiting the volume and quality of preparation, especially when candidates make 20–30 calls per hour. The result is missed opportunities to connect with potential supporters in a meaningful way.

Our Solution

We mapped our entire donor research workflow and identified biography creation as the highest-leverage improvement point. Over the course of a single week, we developed an AI-powered research agent using OpenAI’s models integrated into a custom Python pipeline. The system pulls donor details, searches authoritative online sources, and drafts tailored, persuasive bios within seconds. Human review ensures each output meets campaign needs and quality standards.

Results and Impact

The AI system reduced research time from 10 minutes to just 5 seconds, a 99% improvement. Within the first two months, clients closed over $10,000 in new contributions, all from donors previously outside their reach. 

By maintaining quality across large lists, the agent ensures consistency and scalability without overloading campaign staff. The result is more productive call time, higher conversion rates, and stronger donor relationships.

Future Outlook

All MFStrategies donor lists now include AI-generated bios with human review. As we expand the tool’s capabilities, we continue to reduce preparation time while elevating the quality of insights. This approach demonstrates how AI can augment, not replace, human expertise, enabling more meaningful outreach at scale.

Project Overview

MFStrategies was tasked by a senior member of Pennsylvania’s Democratic leadership to analyze every state-level political contribution in 2024. Our goal was to uncover new fundraising opportunities and deliver strategic insights about donor behavior across more than 100,000 individual contributions.

The Challenge

Campaign finance records are notoriously messy. Each political committee reports donations differently, with varying formats, typos, address discrepancies, and mismatched names. Manually deduplicating and analyzing such a dataset was infeasible. Traditional tools were either cost-prohibitive or too rigid to handle the data’s inconsistencies.

Our Solution

We built a custom AI solution, Super Deduper, in just eight weeks. This proprietary system was designed to standardize and match donor records across all 2024 campaign filings, even when those records contained naming inconsistencies, formatting errors, or typographical mistakes. It also generated unique donor IDs, enabling consistent cross-campaign analysis regardless of how individual records were reported. The result was a dramatic reduction in data preparation time, over 99%, freeing us to focus on delivering high-level strategic insights. With clean, consolidated data in hand, our team was able to conduct comprehensive fundraising analyses that would have otherwise taken months to complete.

Results and Impact

The cleaned dataset allowed us to surface more than $550,000 in untapped donor prospects, representing a potential 20% increase over our client’s total 2023–2024 fundraising. These insights helped our client sharpen their strategy and start the cycle with renewed momentum and new pathways for growth. Internally, Super Deduper has been used to analyze new datasets and can be easily trained on new sets.

Future Outlook

Super Deduper is now a cornerstone of MFStrategies' fundraising services. It has since powered analysis for additional clients, consistently identifying five-figure opportunities. We continue to enhance the system to make sophisticated donor intelligence faster and more accurate.

Project Overview

A municipal client sought to establish a long-term lease for 8 miles of unused, city-owned fiberoptic cable. The city had previously partnered with a major telecom provider, generating several hundred thousand dollars annually while helping expand affordable internet access for residents. However, as the terms of the original agreement aged, annual revenues were declining.

City leaders wanted to leverage their existing fiber asset to replace the lost revenue and create a more stable, long-term funding stream, without compromising public access. They engaged MFStrategies to research similar infrastructure leasing models and determine a fair market valuation ahead of negotiations with a prospective lessee.

Challenges Faced

Unlike private entities or state-owned utilities, most municipalities don’t own fiberoptic infrastructure, making it difficult to identify comparable leasing arrangements. Those that do often structure their agreements in drastically different ways, limiting the usefulness of “apples-to-apples” comparisons. Pricing benchmarks were scarce, varied, or outdated, leaving the city without a reliable starting point for negotiations.

Solution

MFStrategies began by working closely with city officials to understand the physical characteristics of the fiber asset, the policy and budgetary constraints they faced, and their long-term revenue goals. With that input, we developed a tailored research brief that framed the city’s needs clearly and strategically. This brief became the foundation for a structured research process powered by OpenAI’s DeepResearch tool. Using DeepResearch, we generated a comprehensive report that included lease pricing benchmarks from five comparable municipal fiber projects, a comparative analysis of revenue structures and valuation models, and a detailed side-by-side breakdown of how the city’s asset aligned with or diverged from those peer examples. After generating the report, our team conducted a full human review to verify sources, validate assumptions, and ensure the analysis aligned with the city’s priorities. The final result was a polished, defensible valuation framework to support high-stakes negotiations.

Results and Impact

The research determined that the city’s 8-mile fiber asset could command a 20-year valuation of approximately $4.6 million, paid in full up front. This represented a substantial improvement over the declining revenue generated under the previous telecom arrangement and provided the city with new leverage in upcoming negotiations.

Future Outlook

This project demonstrated how even off-the-shelf AI tools, when used thoughtfully, can accelerate complex research. It highlighted the importance of precision at the prompt level, showing that a well-framed research request produces more useful and targeted insights. It also confirmed that while AI can rapidly accelerate information gathering, human oversight remains critical to ensure quality and contextual relevance. Perhaps most importantly, the process we developed is fully repeatable and now integrated into MFStrategies’ broader consulting workflow. We continue to use this hybrid approach to help public sector clients make smarter, faster, and more informed decisions on everything from asset valuation to policy modeling.