Project hail mary

Raise your eyes 👀

This week: Project Hail Mary (2026)

Last night I was in the BFI bar on the South Bank in London, and I spotted a poster for Project Hail Mary. I watched it recently.

If you haven't seen it, Ryan Gosling plays a science teacher who wakes up alone on a spaceship, light years from home, with a planet-sized problem to solve and nobody to help him solve it. Then he meets an alien. They share no language, no biology, nothing at all in common except the same problem. Slowly, they work out how to talk to each other. And it turns out neither of them can save their world alone.

Standing in front of that poster, I thought about how lonely fundraising can be.

So many people running small charities are that person on the ship. Alone at the kitchen table at 10pm, staring down a deadline, writing another application into the void, with no idea who'll read it or why it'll be turned down. Funders feel it too, on the other side, wading through piles of paper and trying to work out who's really behind it.

What changes the film isn't some clever technology. It's connection: two strangers bothering to understand each other.

That's a big part of why we do Raise your eyes. It's why we're building the Raiserlution. And it's why we think AI should be a chance to make fundraising more human, not less. Not more robotic, with machines writing to machines. More people actually talking to each other.

You don't have to do this alone. Find your people.