For as long as anyone can remember, fundraising has run on a calendar. You plan the year in January — the spring appeal, the summer lull, the year-end push — and then spend the next twelve months trying to keep up with a plan you made before you knew what the year would actually hold.
But donors don’t give on your calendar. The lapse forms in March. The second-gift window opens in July. The major donor who gave once and went quiet needs a call now — not in the slot you blocked out six months ago.
Today we’re launching Fundraising Operating System 4 (FOS 4) — the biggest release in Avid’s history, and a real shift in what the software does. FOS 4 stops waiting on your calendar. It looks below the surface of your program, finds the opportunity, builds the audience, and drafts the campaign to act on it — so the work is already started when you log in.
It’s the difference between software that shows you your data and software that does the work. And it’s how a team finally gets ahead of the work, instead of buried under it.
“FOS 4 is a step toward we’ll do it for you,” says Kevin Peters, Avid’s founder. “It was never about consuming more data. It’s about taking action on it — and a human still makes every call.”
What’s new in FOS 4
Suggested Audiences — Avid stops informing and starts acting. This is the headline. Every month, Avid looks across your entire program, finds an opportunity beneath the surface, and builds a ready-made audience waiting for you at login.
It comes complete: who’s in it, the evidence for why it surfaced, and what to say to them. It’s built for your program’s specific need this month — not pulled off a shelf of generic models. Save it, export it, or turn it into a campaign in a click. Act on one, and the next is already building.
Smart Plays — just describe it, and Edna builds it. Avid’s Playbooks catalog is full of proven campaigns you can pick from. But sometimes the moment calls for something that isn’t in the catalog.
Now you don’t go hunting — you just tell Edna what you need. “Build me a reactivation campaign for our lapsed recurring donors, themed around year-end.” She builds the whole thing: the strategy, the audience, and every touchpoint, drafted in your voice and ready for you to review.
A sharper sense of what matters. FOS 4 weighs far more about your program than before — the biggest change over recent months, how fast it’s moving, how much it matters — and, for the first time, it tells you why. Why a metric that moved 1% is your top priority while another that jumped 5% isn’t. That’s the line between “here’s what changed” and “here’s what to do about it.”
Your Dashboard. A home screen that’s actually yours. Pin the charts, audiences, and views you care about — with your filters saved — and they’re there every time you open Avid.
Build up to five boards for different programs or pushes, share them, schedule them to your inbox, or export one to a slide deck for the board meeting. It loads instantly, and it’s built around your role from the first time you log in.
Edna, elevated — and now in your inbox. Edna has her own home in Avid now: one place for the conversation and for everything she does across your program, plus image generation for your campaigns. And she’s no longer only in the app. FOS 4 turns your weekly or monthly digest into a conversation — built around your dashboard, and something you can reply to. Ask Edna a question right from your inbox — “How much did we raise last month, and from how many donors?” — and she answers in minutes, with a secure link to the report behind every number. The email stops being a static report and becomes a way in.
Built on real fundraising
Here’s why all of this can be trusted. Avid isn’t general-purpose AI pointed at fundraising. It’s built on more real fundraising than any single program could ever see — 8,000+ controlled fundraising experiments and 650M+ donor interactions. So it doesn’t just write like a fundraiser. It thinks like one.
And your donors stay protected the whole way. Every recommendation traces back to the data behind it — no made-up stories. Donor details are tokenized before anything reaches the AI, so Edna can answer you by name while the model itself never sees a name. And we never train our models on your data. (Avid is SOC 2 Type II compliant.)
Getting FOS 4
If you’re already an Avid customer, there’s nothing to install — the new Edna and your new dashboard are waiting in your account. Look for them today.
If you’re not a customer yet, book a guided tour and we’ll show you FOS 4 working on your own fundraising — not a canned demo. See for yourself what it looks like to get ahead of the work.