Requires: Charitable Pro 1.8.18+ and WordPress 6.9+

Updated: September 17, 2026

If you have not connected an assistant yet, start with Getting started with AI assistants. This page is the complete picture: every operation, how permissions work, and what is deliberately out of reach.

For more detailed documentation, everything about Charitable + AI is here »

How this works

Charitable registers its operations with the WordPress Abilities API, which arrived in WordPress 6.9. That is a core WordPress feature, not a Charitable one: any plugin can describe what it can do, and any connected client can then read that description and act on it.

The practical consequence is that Charitable did not build an integration with any particular assistant. It publishes its operations to WordPress, and whatever client you connect, whether Claude, ChatGPT, or anything else that speaks MCP, reads the same list. When a new client appears, it works with Charitable on day one with nothing for us or you to do.

On WordPress 6.8 or earlier, nothing registers and nothing about your site changes.

What you can do

Each has a description written for the assistant, telling it when the operation is the right choice and what its values mean. You never call these by name. You describe what you want, and the assistant picks.

Diagnostics (3)

Operation	What it does
Get Charitable Plugin Info	Version, licence status and which Charitable add-ons are active.
Get Site Environment	WordPress and PHP versions, active theme, currency and test-mode state.
Get Gateway Status	Which payment gateways are enabled and whether each is configured. Never includes keys or secrets.

These are what let an assistant answer “why aren’t my donations showing up?” with a real diagnosis instead of a guess.

Campaigns (14)

Operation	What it does
List Campaigns	Your campaigns, filterable by status and sortable by date, title, amount raised or goal.
Get Campaign	One campaign’s full details.
Get Campaign Performance	What one campaign has raised, its donation count and progress toward goal.
List Campaign Templates	The Campaign Builder templates available, so a new campaign can use one.
Create Campaign	A new campaign, classic or visual. See Creating campaigns.
Update Campaign	Change a goal, end date, description or suggested donation amounts. Fields you do not mention are left alone.
Set Campaign Status	Publish, unpublish, or move between draft, pending and private.
Trash Campaign	Move a campaign to the trash. Reversible. Refuses a campaign with donations unless you confirm.
Restore Campaign	Bring a trashed campaign back.
Get Campaign Donation Form	The fields on a campaign’s donation form, including the options and default of any dropdown, radio or checkbox.
Update Campaign Donation Form	Change existing fields: labels, placeholders, required state, order within a step.
Add Campaign Donation Form Field	Add a new question to a donation form. See Form fields.
Get Campaign Styles	A campaign’s Design colors, typography and animation settings, as it currently renders.
Update Campaign Styles	Change those colors and settings. Campaign Builder campaigns only.

Donations (4)

Operation	What it does
List Donations	Donations, filterable by campaign, donor, status and date range.
Get Donation	One donation in full, including which campaigns it was split across.
Create Manual Donation	Record a gift that arrived outside your website, such as a check, cash, or a bank transfer.
Get Donation Summary	Totals, counts and averages for a set of donations.

Donors (3)

Operation	What it does
List Donors	Your donors and their totals. Never includes email or postal addresses, whoever asks.
Get Donor	One named donor in full, contact details included. Requires the sensitive-data capability.
Get Donor Donations	Everything one donor has given. Requires the sensitive-data capability.

Reports (5)

Operation	What it does
Get Reports Overview	Totals for any date range: raised, refunded, net, donation and donor counts.
Get Reports Activity	A day-by-day breakdown, optionally for a single campaign. Capped at 732 days per request.
Get Top Campaigns	Your best-performing campaigns. Ranked over all time unless you give dates.
Get Top Donors	Your biggest supporters, with totals. Ranked over all time unless you give dates. Requires the sensitive-data capability.
Get Reports Date Ranges	The named ranges available, and today’s real calendar date, which is how an assistant works out what “the end of next month” actually means.

On a multi-currency site, every figure above is the converted amount, so a report never adds yen to dollars.

Creating campaigns

Two kinds, and the difference matters:

Visual campaigns are built with a Campaign Builder template and are editable afterwards in the drag-and-drop builder. This is what an AI-built fundraiser should be, and the operation’s own description says so. Visual mode sets up the template’s layout and content, its colors, and a ladder of suggested donation amounts.

That ladder is scaled to your goal, so a large campaign gets proportionately larger suggestions rather than amounts a donor would have to give hundreds of times over:

Goal	Suggested amounts
$50,000 and up	100 / 250 / 500 / 1,000
$10,000 to $49,999	50 / 100 / 250 / 500
$2,000 to $9,999	25 / 50 / 100 / 250
$500 to $1,999	10 / 25 / 50 / 100
Under $500, or no goal	5 / 10 / 15 / 20

Ask for your own amounts and you get those instead. Ask for none and you get none.

Visual mode does not set up a payment gateway, and it does not invent a goal or an end date, so supply those if the campaign needs them.

Classic campaigns are bare, edited in the normal WordPress post editor: no template, no colors, no suggested amounts. A classic campaign has no Design styles of its own, so Update Campaign Styles will decline it and explain that its colors come from your theme, and that opening it once in the Campaign Builder is how you convert it.

New campaigns are created as drafts unless you ask for otherwise, so nothing goes live by accident.

Form fields

An assistant can add ten kinds of question to a donation form: single-line text, paragraph text, number, phone, URL, email, date, checkbox, radio buttons and dropdown.

The last three take a set of options and, if you want, a pre-selected default. “Add a dropdown for how they heard about us: Facebook, a friend, our newsletter, default to the newsletter” works as one request. At least one option is required, because a choice field with nothing to choose is not a field.

Two things an assistant deliberately cannot do, because either would stop your form rendering:

• Move a field between steps of a multi-step form. It can reorder fields within a step.
• Remove a field the form needs to work, meaning the donation amount or the payment section.

Design and styles

Get Campaign Styles reports a campaign’s colors, typography and animation settings as it currently renders them. A campaign that has never had its Styles tab saved reports the palette of the template it was built from.

Two honest limitations, both deliberate:

• The body text color is not reported. On a campaign built from a template it cannot be read back reliably, so Charitable does not report a value it might get wrong. Update Campaign Styles can still set it.
• The campaign font family cannot be changed through an assistant. Nothing renders that setting yet, and the Campaign Builder’s own Font Family control has the same limitation, so the request is declined rather than accepted and silently ignored.

Typography sizes and animation presets are checked against the values that actually work. Ask for something that does not exist and you get told what the accepted values are, rather than a success message and no visible change.

Write access is off until you turn it on

Independent of, and on top of, everything in the Permissions section below.

A site that has never touched the setting lets an assistant read its campaigns, donations, donors and reports, and refuses every change. Nine of the twenty-nine operations are changes: the eight campaign ones that create, update, publish, trash, restore or restyle, plus recording a donation. The other twenty are reads and are never affected.

Turn it on under Charitable > Tools > AI MCP. That screen also shows what is registered and whether a client can connect at all.

Three things worth understanding about how it behaves:

• Nothing is hidden. A gated operation still appears to the assistant, so it knows the capability exists. Attempting it returns a refusal that names the screen to go and change, rather than the operation quietly not existing, which would leave an assistant telling you Charitable cannot do something it can.
• A refusal changes nothing at all. The request is turned away before any reading, validating or writing happens.
• Refusals are logged, under Charitable > Tools > Logs filtered to Abilities, so an attempt to change something while writing was off leaves a record.

Developers can override the setting in either direction with the charitable_abilities_allow_write filter, which is useful for forcing it off in a staging environment regardless of what the database says.

Permissions

Nothing is exposed to anyone who could not already do it in your dashboard. Each operation checks a Charitable capability before it runs, and an assistant connected as a Campaign Manager can do strictly less than one connected as an administrator.

To do this	You need to be able to
Read diagnostics	Manage Charitable settings
Read or list campaigns	Edit campaigns, plus read that particular campaign
Create or edit a campaign	Edit that specific campaign, not merely campaigns in general
Publish or unpublish a campaign	Publish campaigns
Trash a campaign	Delete published campaigns
Read donations, or list donors	Edit donations
Record a manual donation	Edit others’ donations
See a named donor’s contact details, or your top donors	View Charitable sensitive data
Read reports	Export Charitable reports

Note the third row. Editing a campaign is checked against that campaign, not against campaigns as a category, so on a multi-author site one campaign creator cannot reach another’s work through an assistant.

What is deliberately out of reach

• Every change, until write access is turned on. See above. This is the one limit on this list that you control rather than us.
• Payment credentials. Your gateway keys and secrets are not included in anything an assistant can read, at any permission level.
• Donor email and postal addresses in bulk. Donor lists never carry them, whoever is asking, so one permitted read cannot become an export of your donor file.
• Permanently deleting a campaign. Its donation records point at it, and destroying it would orphan money real people gave. The trash is reversible; permanent deletion is not offered.
• Trashing a campaign that has donations, unless you explicitly confirm it.
• Turning test mode off, enabling a gateway, or changing a donation’s status. These are dashboard work, on purpose.

Seeing what an assistant did

• Charitable » Tools » Logs, filtered to Abilities, records every change. If several people use assistants on your site, give each their own application password and this log tells you who did what.
• Charitable » Tools » System Info has an Abilities API section: whether the operations are registered, whether they are visible over the REST API, and what your WordPress version supports. Start here when a client connects but sees nothing.

Troubleshooting

The site connects, but no Charitable operations appear. 

Not an authentication problem. Check WordPress is 6.9 or later and Charitable Pro is 1.8.18 or later, then look at Tools > System Info.

Your assistant says it cannot change anything. 

Write access is off, which is the default. Turn it on under Charitable > Tools > AI MCP. Reading is unaffected either way.

Your assistant reports a permissions error. 

The account you connected lacks the capability that operation needs, so check the table above and connect as a user who has it. This is a different thing from write access being off, and the message says which.

A day-by-day report over several years fails. 

Get Reports Activity is capped at 732 days per request, and it names the operation to use for a longer span. Ask for totals rather than a daily breakdown, or narrow the range.

“Which campaign is doing best?” gives an answer you did not expect. 

Top Campaigns and Top Donors rank over all time by default and report the period they used. If a figure looks wrong, check the period in the reply first.

No Application Passwords section in your profile. 

It only appears on sites served over HTTPS.