On June 2, 2025, Longwood University’s Office of Development launched Ellie, a Virtual Engagement Officer (VEO) powered by AI. The VEO contacts donors and alumni through text messages and email, sends messages about campus events, asks about the recipient’s favorite Longwood memories, wishes them a ‘Happy Birthday’ and thanks donors for their gifts.
Associate Vice President of Development Amy Harris leads the Annual Giving Team, and now Ellie. “We did a ton of research when it came to if a VEO is suitable for Longwood, and in every peer institution that we spoke to, it was a unanimous decision,” she said in an interview with The Rotunda.
Longwood is not the first to utilize a VEO for fundraising communications. William and Mary was in the first cohort to partner with Givzey, the company which created this autonomous fundraising tool. Now, Longwood joins other institutions, notably Virginia Commonwealth University, Baylor University and Kansas State University, that are adding VEOs to their fundraising toolbox.
The founder of Givzey, Adam Martel, is a former gifts officer in the nonprofit world. Givzey’s VEOs are autonomous AI agents that personally engage with donors and supporters, communicating with around a thousand constituents.
“We pride ourselves in Development at Longwood on our ability to be personal,” Harris said. “We don’t want the thought of Ellie to be misconstrued, that we’ve taken our hands off and we’re not personal anymore. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. We are able to get even more personal because we are a small development shop, so we can’t possibly reach out to all of our constituents and find their stories and share their stories, and Ellie does a lot of that for us.”
“It’s like another tool in the toolbox,” Courtney Hodges, vice president for institutional advancement, said in an interview with The Rotunda. “It didn’t swap out a different tool, because if you thought about trying to contact 1,000 people in one day, it would take you a while.”
“There’s a lot of people who are supportive and excited about Longwood,” Hodges said. “So, how can we figure out how to stay in touch with them if there’s almost 40,000 people in the database?”
According to Harris, Ellie currently has around 1,030 people in her communication portfolio. All user data is protected, and the VEO will never collect financial information.
Harris said, “We understand that some people aren’t going to want to communicate with an AI, and that’s fine,” Hodges added. “People opt out of emails, of text messaging. We keep track of all of that, so Ellie will not email or text somebody who has previously told us not to.”
Ellie is still in her “onboarding” phase, according to Harris. Right now, Ellie is learning the culture of Longwood by scouring Longwood websites, Facebook pages and any information provided by the Development team. “She scours information so she can absorb everything that a human employee would absorb, and how we do things and the language that we speak, so we can keep the personality of Longwood,” Harris said.
The Development team first approached the idea of partnering with Givzey in March when thinking about adapting for the next fiscal year. Before the launch in June, Harris sent an email to donors and alumni introducing Ellie as a VEO, providing an option for constituents to opt in or out. At this time, Ellie is not soliciting donations.
“We wanted it to be a very gradual launch and let people get used to this new thing that we have,” Harris said. After a year, the Development team will assess Ellie’s success.
Part of Harris’ new job is to review all communications for Ellie. “Ellie is not sans a human,” she said. “In fact, she has employed several of us at her disposal to take the information that she gathered, because it would be pointless if we just left Ellie on her own and we didn’t do our jobs to follow up.”
“We’re not trying to pretend Ellie’s a human,” Hodges said. “We have a name [for her] because that makes it easy to talk about her.”
“We wanted her to feel Longwood and the name to resonate,” said Harris. “I don’t know that people take that [the name] stems from Elwood. But if Elwood had a virtual partner, it would be Ellie.”
“Our primary role is the care of our donors,” Hodges said. “If they care about Longwood, then we care about taking care of them. And so our job is to make sure we’re doing it in ways that resonate with them. There are plenty of ideas that we see other schools do, and we’re like, no, that’s not for us. This was one idea that we thought, let’s give this a go.”
To meet Ellie and find more information, visit longwooduniversity.ai.
