### [How to Raise Funds Using AI: The Ultimate Nonprofit Guide to Tools, Prompts and Workflows (2026)](https://www.wpcharitable.com/how-to-raise-funds-using-ai/)

**Published:** October 7, 2026
**Author:** Melinda Bartley

**Content:**

Imagine typing one sentence to ChatGPT and watching it build your next fundraising campaign on your own website.

There’s no developer and no code involved. You just chat.

![](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/wpvibe-integration-feature.gif)This already works today with Charitable and a free plugin called WPVibe. The same chat can record a check, pull your top donors or tell you what you raised last month.

Almost every nonprofit I speak to is somewhere in the middle on AI. They are not refusing it, and they are not really using it either.

Usually somebody on the team has a ChatGPT tab open for writing. Everybody quietly suspects it could do more than that, but nobody has a spare afternoon to find out.

I understand the hesitation. There is a lot of noise about AI, most of it written by people selling something, and a fair amount of it is about tools that cost money you do not have.

So this guide is the version I wish somebody had handed me. I co-founded a nonprofit, I use AI in my own fundraising work, and I have spent the past few months testing what AI can really do inside a live fundraising system.

Something real changed in the past year. AI has stopped being only a writing helper, and it can now do the work itself.

By the end of this guide you will know what AI is, where it is heading, and which parts of your fundraising it is good at. You will also have the prompts I use and a full walkthrough for running your fundraising with Charitable and WPVibe. You don’t need a developer for any of it.

Take what fits your organization and ignore the rest. Nobody does all of this at once.

## What This Guide Covers

- [Start Here With 3 Tasks for This Week](#first-week)
- [What AI Actually Is, in Plain English](#what-is-ai)
- [What AI Can and Cannot Do for Fundraising Right Now](#can-cannot)
- [Why Nonprofits Should Use AI](#why-use-ai)
- [Where AI Is Actually Going](#where-going)
- [Getting Past the Fear](#fear)
- [Why Start Investing in AI Now](#invest)
- [How to Use AI Efficiently](#efficient)
- [Step 1. Plan the Campaign Before You Build It](#step-1)
- [Step 2. Write the Appeal](#step-2)
- [Step 3. Build and Launch the Campaign Itself](#step-3)
- [Step 4. Keep the Donation Records Straight](#step-4)
- [Step 5. Report to Your Board and Thank Your Donors](#step-5)
- [Step 6. Get Found by Donors Who Search With AI](#step-6)
- [Grant Writing and Funder Research With AI](#grants)
- [How to Run Your Fundraising With Charitable and WPVibe](#charitable)
- [AI Fundraising Recipes for Charitable and WPVibe](#recipes)
- [Where AI Will Cost You Money If You Are Careless](#risks)
- [FAQs on Raising Funds Using AI](#faqs)

## Start Here With 3 Tasks for This Week

Before the long explanations, here is something you can do today. These 3 tasks take under an hour between them, and each one leaves you with something you will keep using.

I’ll show you exactly how to do each one. The rest of the guide explains why they work.

![raise-funds-ai-3-tasks](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/raise-funds-ai-3-tasks-1-960x600.png)### Task 1. Write Your Organization’s AI Brief

This takes about 15 minutes, and it is the single habit that improves every answer you get from AI afterwards.

An AI brief is one page about your organization that you give the assistant before you ask it for anything. Without it, AI writes for an imaginary average nonprofit. With it, AI writes for you.

Open a blank document and answer these questions in plain sentences.

- What does your organization do, where, and for whom?
- Who are your donors, roughly? Think about age, location, and how they first found you.
- What did you raise last year, from how many donors, and what was the average gift?
- What are the 2 or 3 things you are raising money for this year?
- Which words do you always use, and which words do you never use?
- What should AI never say on your behalf? For example, a promise about how a gift will be used, or a detail about a beneficiary.

Then paste in 2 or 3 pieces of your own writing that you are proud of, like a past appeal, a thank-you letter, or your About page. These show the assistant your voice better than any description can.

Most assistants let you save this so you don’t paste it every time. In ChatGPT and Claude, create a Project and add the brief to it, and every chat inside that Project starts with your brief already loaded.

### Task 2. Rewrite Your Donation Receipt

This takes about 20 minutes. Your donation receipt is the email donors are most likely to open, because it arrives seconds after they give, and most nonprofits leave it as the default text.

To get started, head over to **Charitable » Settings » Emails** and open the Donation Receipt email. Copy the current text, then open a chat in your Project and paste it in with this prompt.

> This is the receipt email donors get right after they give. Rewrite it so it sounds like a real person from our organization wrote it. Keep every tag in curly brackets exactly as it is, because those fill in the donor’s name and gift.
> 
> Open by thanking them, then tell them in 1 or 2 sentences what their gift will do. Keep it under 120 words. Give me 3 versions with different openings.

Pick the version that sounds most like you and change anything that doesn’t. Read it out loud once, then paste it back into the email settings and send yourself a test donation receipt before you save.

That line about keeping the tags matters. Charitable uses email tags like the donor’s first name and the donation amount, and if AI “tidies” them, your receipts will go out with blank gaps.

Our guide on [the donation thank-you email](https://www.wpcharitable.com/donation-thank-you-email/) has more ideas for what to put in it.

### Task 3. Connect Your Assistant to Your Fundraising, Read-Only

This takes about 20 minutes, and it is the task that changes what AI can do for you.

First take a backup of your site. Then follow the setup steps in [the Charitable and WPVibe tutorial](#charitable) further down, and stop before the step that turns on write access.

With write access off, your assistant can read your fundraising data but it cannot change anything. Ask it these 5 questions about your own fundraising.

1. What did we raise last month compared to the month before?
2. Which campaign has raised the most?
3. How many donors gave more than once this year?
4. Which payment gateways are set up?
5. Is my site still in test mode?

Check each answer against what you see in your own dashboard. Once you have watched it answer correctly about your own donations, turning on write access later will feel like a small step.

This task needs the Charitable Pro plugin. If you are not on a paid plan yet, do Tasks 1 and 2 this week and come back to this one later.

## What AI Actually Is, in Plain English

When people say AI today, they almost always mean a chat assistant like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot. Under the hood, each one runs on what is called a large language model.

A large language model is a program that has read an enormous amount of text, including books, websites and articles. From all that reading it learned how words usually follow each other, and it uses that to write a likely answer to whatever you type.

That is why it is so good with words. It has seen millions of appeal letters, grant applications and thank-you notes, so it knows what they usually look like.

It is also why it does not know anything about your organization unless you tell it. It has never seen your donor list, your budget or last year’s results.

### Why It Sounds Sure Even When It Is Wrong

Because AI writes the most likely answer, it writes in the same confident tone whether it knows the answer or not. When it makes up a fact, a number or a source, this is called a hallucination.

Hallucinations happen most when you ask about something the assistant has no information on. “How much did our spring appeal raise?” with no data attached will often get you a confident, believable, made-up number.

The fix is to give it the real information, either by pasting it in or by connecting it to your real data. Once it is working from your actual figures, it arranges them very reliably.

### The 2 Ways Nonprofits Use AI, and Why the Second One Is New

The first way is the one you already know. You open ChatGPT or Claude, describe what you need, and it gives you words back, which you then copy into your email tool, your website or your grant application.

In this way the AI never touches your systems. It is a very capable intern who works entirely on paper.

The second way is newer, and most nonprofits have not caught up with it yet. Your assistant connects directly to your website, and then it can do things rather than describe them.

Two pieces of WordPress plumbing made that possible. In December 2025, WordPress 6.9 shipped the [WordPress Abilities API](https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2025/11/introducing-the-wordpress-abilities-api/), a standard way for a plugin to describe exactly what it can do in a form an AI assistant can read.

Then in February 2026 the WordPress project released the [WordPress MCP Adapter](https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2026/02/from-abilities-to-ai-agents-introducing-the-wordpress-mcp-adapter/), which makes those abilities available to AI assistants over an open standard called MCP.

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It is an agreed way for an AI assistant to connect to an outside tool and use it, in the same way a plug has an agreed shape so it fits any socket.

The practical difference for you is large. In the first way, you ask for a campaign description and then go and build the campaign yourself. In the second way, you ask for the campaign and it is built, sitting as a draft in your dashboard for you to look over.

![Comparison of the 2 ways nonprofits use AI, where AI writes words you copy into your site, or where your assistant connects through WPVibe and leaves a draft campaign in Charitable](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/raise-funds-ai-two-ways-960x600.png)Steps 1, 2 and 6 in this guide work with any AI, today, for free. Steps 3, 4 and 5 need that connection, and I show you how to set it up in [the Charitable and WPVibe tutorial](#charitable).

## What AI Can and Cannot Do for Fundraising Right Now

Let me start with the honest boundary, because getting this wrong is what makes people give up on AI after 2 weeks.

AI is good at first drafts, at spotting patterns across a lot of data, and at turning messy notes into something structured. It is also good at repetitive tasks that follow a clear rule.

AI is bad at knowing your donors and at making judgement calls. It is also bad at any job where a confident wrong answer causes damage, and at numbers it has not actually been given.

Everything in this guide sits on the good side of that line, or it comes with a warning.

![Infographic titled What AI can and cannot do for fundraising, showing two columns: Good at vs Keep it away from, with listed tips on each side.](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/raise-funds-ai-can-cannot-1-960x600.png)### The 4 Jobs I Would Keep AI Away From

This is a short list, and I would treat it as firm.

- **Anything that sends without you reading it.** An appeal email, a push notification or a text message can’t be unsent, and a tone-deaf message to your whole list on the wrong day is expensive.
- **Writing about a beneficiary’s circumstances.** If AI fills in details about a real person’s situation because they sound right, you have published something untrue about somebody vulnerable.
- **Numbers for a board paper or a funder report, unless AI has actually read them.** An assistant that has not been given your real figures will produce believable ones. I explain this more in [the risks section](#risks).
- **Anything involving a major donor relationship.** Use AI to prepare, never to correspond. People can tell, and the people who fund the largest share of your work deserve your own words.

## Why Nonprofits Should Use AI

Most nonprofits are small. Many have 1 or 2 paid staff, and a lot of fundraising is done by volunteers in the evenings.

For a team that size, the problem is rarely ideas. The problem is time, because the same few people write the appeals, update the website, record the checks and prepare the board report.

AI gives that time back in 3 ways.

- **It removes the blank page.** A first draft in 30 seconds means you spend your time improving words, which is faster than starting them.
- **It does the admin you keep putting off.** Recording offline gifts, pulling a donor list or checking a campaign’s settings are all small jobs that pile up, and a connected assistant can do them from 1 sentence.
- **It answers questions about your own data.** “Who gave more than once this year?” used to mean exporting a spreadsheet and sorting it by hand. Now it is a question you can ask.

None of this replaces the part of fundraising that matters most, which is people trusting people. It frees up more of your week for that part.

## Where AI Is Actually Going

Nobody can promise where AI will be in 5 years, and I would be wary of anybody who says they can. What I can do is point at the changes that have already happened and that I expect to continue.

![Infographic timeline showing AI progress: From writing to doing, with milestones Before, Dec 2025, Feb 2026, and Sep 2026, and Charitable logo bottom right.](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/raise-funds-ai-timeline-1-960x600.png)### From Writing to Doing

The biggest change is the one I described above. Assistants are moving from producing words to carrying out tasks inside the tools you already use.

An assistant that can do things is often called an AI agent. You will hear that term a lot over the next year, and in practice it means an assistant that is connected to your tools and allowed to use them.

### Open Standards Instead of One Company

The connection is being built on open standards, the Abilities API on the WordPress side and MCP on the AI side. This means your website is not tied to one AI company.

If you connect Charitable to ChatGPT today and decide next year that Claude suits you better, you can switch without changing anything on your site. Other WordPress plugins are publishing their abilities too, including All in One SEO, WPForms, Sugar Calendar and Duplicator, so one assistant can work across more of your site over time.

### Donors Finding Causes Through AI

More people now ask an AI assistant a question instead of searching and clicking through to a website. A donor might ask “which charities provide clean water in Karnataka?” and read the answer without ever visiting a site.

If AI cannot understand what your organization does, you will not appear in that answer. I cover what to do about this in [Step 6](#step-6).

### What I Don’t Expect to Change

People give to people and to causes they trust. A donor who has met your volunteers, read a real story or received a handwritten note is giving because of a relationship, and AI cannot build that relationship for you.

My honest view is that AI will take over more of the admin around fundraising and very little of the fundraising itself. The organizations that do well will use the time it saves to spend more of it with donors.

## Getting Past the Fear

A lot of what you read about AI is designed to scare you, either into buying something or into avoiding it completely. Here are the fears I hear most from nonprofit teams, and my honest answer to each.

### “AI Will Replace Our Fundraisers”

AI replaces tasks, and fundraising is much more than a list of tasks. It can draft the appeal and record the check, but it cannot sit with a major donor, read a room at a gala or decide what your organization stands for.

On a small team, the tasks AI takes over are usually the ones nobody had time for anyway.

### “AI Will Leak Our Donor Data”

This is a fair worry, and the answer depends on how you use it. Anything you paste into a chat, or anything a connected assistant reads, is sent to the AI company as part of that chat.

So check your AI account’s data settings, which control whether your chats can be used to train its models. Connect on a WordPress account that only has the permissions the job needs, and keep donor contact details out of chats where you don’t need them. I explain exactly what Charitable shares in [the risks section](#risks).

### “AI Makes Things Up”

It does, when it has nothing real to work from. Give it real information and check anything important, and this stops being a problem.

With a connected assistant there is a second safety net. Charitable keeps write access off until you turn it on, saves new campaigns as drafts and logs every change, so you can see what happened.

### “Our Donors Will Hate It”

Donors don’t object to you saving time on admin. What they notice is writing that sounds generic or a thank-you that clearly came from a machine.

If you use your AI brief, edit every draft and write personal notes yourself, your donors will only notice that you reply faster.

### “We Can’t Afford It”

ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini all have free plans, and everything in Steps 1, 2 and 6 works on them. Paid plans for one person cost around $20 a month at the time of writing, and WPVibe is free.

The real cost is the hour or 2 it takes to learn. That is why this guide starts with 3 small tasks.

### “It’s Too Technical for Us”

If you can write an email, you can use AI. You talk to it in plain English, and the setup in this guide uses buttons in your WordPress dashboard rather than code.

## Why Start Investing in AI Now

For a nonprofit, investing in AI mostly means investing time, not money. The organizations that start small now will be in a much better place in a year or 2, for 4 reasons.

- **Skill builds slowly.** Knowing what to ask, and what not to trust, comes from use. Teams that start now will be fluent by the time AI is a normal part of every tool.
- **Your data becomes more useful.** A connected assistant can only answer from the records you keep. Recording every offline gift and keeping donor records clean today means better answers later.
- **Your prompts become a library.** Every prompt that works is one you can save and reuse. After a few months you will have a set built for your own organization.
- **Your website gets found.** Clear pages that AI can understand will keep sending you donors as more people search with AI.

One more thing to look for when you choose tools is whether they use open standards. Your fundraising data should stay on your own site and work with whichever assistant you choose, so you are never stuck with one company.

## How to Use AI Efficiently

Most disappointment with AI comes from short, vague prompts. The assistant can only work with what you give it.

### A Simple Formula for Any Prompt

A good prompt has 5 parts. You don’t need all of them every time, but the more you include, the better the answer.

1. **Context.** Who you are and what the situation is. Your AI brief covers most of this.
2. **Task.** Exactly what you want it to do, such as “write”, “check”, “compare” or “list”.
3. **Real information.** The numbers, notes or past writing it should work from.
4. **Format.** How long it should be, and whether you want a list, a table, an email or 3 versions.
5. **Limits.** What it must not do, such as inventing numbers or promising a specific use of funds.

Here is the difference in practice. “Write a fundraising email” gives you something generic, while this prompt gives you something you can use.

> We are raising $12,000 to provide holiday meals for 200 families, and $60 covers one family. Write the launch email for our list of 900 past donors.
> 
> Use the voice from the 2 past appeals I’ve pasted below. Keep it under 200 words with 1 clear donate button. Don’t invent any family’s story.

![Infographic titled 'The 5 parts of a good prompt' showing five categories (Context, Task, Real information, Format, Limits) and an example prompt with highlighted sections; charity logo bottom right.](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/raise-funds-ai-prompt-formula-1-960x600.png)### 6 Habits That Save the Most Time

- **Ask it to ask you questions first.** End a big request with “Before you start, ask me anything you need to know.” You will get far fewer wrong guesses.
- **Ask for 3 versions, not 1.** Choosing between options is much faster than fixing a single draft.
- **Reply with changes instead of starting again.** “Shorter”, “warmer” or “remove the second paragraph” works better than a whole new prompt.
- **Start a new chat for a new task.** Long chats get slower and the assistant starts mixing up details from earlier requests.
- **Save every prompt that works.** Keep a shared document of your best prompts so the whole team can reuse them.
- **Check anything that matters.** Read every draft before it goes out, and compare important numbers with your dashboard.

## Step 1. Plan the Campaign Before You Build It

This is where I get the most value. It is free, and almost nobody does it.

Most campaigns get planned in a meeting where 3 tired people agree on a number and a date. AI is useful as the fourth person in that room, the one who asks the awkward questions.

### Pressure-Testing the Goal

Give your assistant the real context and ask it to argue with you. Here is roughly what I type.

> We are a small charity providing clean water in rural Karnataka. Last year our December appeal raised $18,000 from 140 donors, with an average gift of about $128.
> 
> We want to raise $40,000 this December for 4 borewells. Tell me honestly whether that is realistic, what would have to be true for it to work, and what I am likely to be underestimating.

The answer you get back will not be a decision. It will be a list of assumptions you had not written down, which is exactly what you want at this stage.

Notice that I gave it real numbers. That one habit is the difference between a useful answer and a guess.

### Breaking the Goal Into Gift Levels

Ask for a gift table, which shows how many donations at each size add up to your target, based on what your donors have given before.

This is arithmetic, so AI is reliable at it, and the result changes how you run the campaign. A goal that needs 4 gifts of $5,000 is a completely different campaign from one that needs 400 gifts of $50, and teams often discover they were planning the wrong one.

When you set your suggested donation amounts later, base them on that table. If you are not sure what to put on the form, our guide to [donation forms that convert](https://www.wpcharitable.com/features/donation-forms/) covers suggested amounts in more detail.

### Building the Calendar Backwards

Give it your launch date and your closing date and ask for a working calendar, including who needs to have written what by when.

Ask it to leave room for the follow-up after the campaign closes, because that is the part that always gets forgotten. If you are running something at year end, our [year-end fundraising playbook](https://www.wpcharitable.com/ultimate-nonprofit-year-end-fundraising-playbook/) has the calendar I use, and [our Giving Tuesday ideas](https://www.wpcharitable.com/giving-tuesday-ideas/) cover that specific push.

## Step 2. Write the Appeal

This is the part everybody already does, so I’ll focus on the mistakes rather than the basics.

The mistake almost everybody makes is asking for the finished thing. “Write me a donation appeal email for our water project” gives you something that reads like a donation appeal email and nothing like your organization.

Give it your own material first. That is what the AI brief from Task 1 is for, and the difference is easy to see.

### The Appeal Email

Ask for 3 versions with different openings. One leads on a single person’s story, one leads on the practical problem, and one leads on what happens if the goal is not met.

> Write 3 versions of our December appeal email using my brief. Version 1 opens on Ravi’s story from the notes below, version 2 opens on the problem of unsafe water, and version 3 opens on what happens if we don’t reach $40,000. Keep each under 250 words.

You will know within 10 seconds of reading which one is right for your list. That judgement is the part you cannot hand to AI.

Then ask it to cut 30%. AI writes long, and appeal emails that convert are short.

### The Campaign Page Copy

A campaign page has a different job from an email. The email persuades somebody to click, and the page has to convince them to give.

Ask for the headline, the first paragraph, and a description of what each suggested amount pays for. That last one matters more than people expect, because “$50 buys a hand pump filter” gives a donor a reason to choose $50 over $20.

If your campaign has a deadline or a goal, say so in the copy and show it on the page. A [fundraising progress bar](https://www.wpcharitable.com/features/fundraising-progress-bar/) does more work than another paragraph.

### Social Posts and Captions

This is where AI saves the most time for the least risk, because a social caption is low stakes and you need a lot of them.

Give it your campaign page and ask for 10 posts spread across the campaign. Ask for a launch post, 3 mid-campaign updates, a halfway milestone, a last-48-hours push and a thank you.

Ask it to keep every post under 200 characters and to ask for money in no more than 3 of the 10. A feed that only ever asks is a feed people mute.

### Thank-You Messages

If you did Task 2, your receipt is already done. Set it once and let it run.

For the setup itself, [automated donation receipts](https://www.wpcharitable.com/how-to-set-automated-nonprofit-donation-receipts-in-an-hour/) walks through it. For the yearly version that many donors need for their taxes, [annual donation summaries](https://www.wpcharitable.com/how-to-send-annual-donation-summaries-to-donors/) is the guide.

## Step 3. Build and Launch the Campaign Itself

This is where this guide stops looking like every other article about AI for nonprofits.

Once your assistant is connected to your website, you don’t take the copy it wrote and go and build the page. You ask for the campaign and the campaign appears.

![A short request typed into ChatGPT asking it to create a fundraising campaign with a goal and a deadline](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/chatgpt-prompt-768x393.png)I asked for a borewell fundraiser with a $100,000 goal and a September 30 deadline. I gave it a description and pointed it at a folder of images.

What came back was a finished campaign in the [visual campaign builder](https://www.wpcharitable.com/features/visual-drag-and-drop-campaign-builder/). It was laid out from a real template and styled, with the headline, description and image already in place.

![A finished fundraising campaign in the Charitable visual builder, built from a single plain English request](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/sample-campaign-created-with-wpvibe-1-768x374.png)The numbers were really set, not just mentioned in the text. The goal and the end date were filled in on the campaign’s own settings panel, and the suggested donation amounts were scaled to the goal I had named.

It arrives as a draft, credited to the assistant that made it, so a person still decides what goes live.

### Editing a Campaign You Already Have

Building a new campaign is the eye-catching part. Changing an existing one is what you will actually do most weeks.

On a live campaign I asked for a required dropdown on the donation form with 3 choices. It took about 36 seconds and told me exactly where it had put the field.

It was not quite where I wanted it, so I asked it to move the question to just before the email address field. The donation form on the front end showed the change straight away.

![A donation form on the front end showing the required dropdown question an AI assistant added and then moved](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/add-a-donation-form-with-ai-added-dropdown-768x727.png)For a small team this is the change that matters. Donation forms go years without being improved because opening the builder for a 1-field change never feels like a good use of an afternoon.

### Creating Several Campaigns at Once

If you run a chapter network, a multi-school appeal or the same campaign in 5 regions, this is where you save hours.

Describe the pattern once and ask for all of them, each with its own name, goal and description. You get drafts to review instead of an afternoon of duplicating and renaming.

If your supporters run their own fundraisers for you, that is a different feature. [Peer-to-peer fundraising](https://www.wpcharitable.com/features/peer-to-peer-fundraising/) covers it, and our [beginner’s guide to peer-to-peer fundraising](https://www.wpcharitable.com/beginners-guide-peer-to-peer-fundraising/) is the place to start.

## Step 4. Keep the Donation Records Straight

This is the least exciting section in this guide, and I think it is the most valuable.

Every nonprofit has a pile of gifts that did not arrive through the website. There is the check in the mail, the cash handed over at an event, and the bank transfer somebody mentions by text.

Each one normally means opening your dashboard, finding the campaign, creating the donor if they are new and filling in a form. That is 4 minutes of work nobody enjoys, repeated 40 times after a gala.

![Asking an AI assistant to record an offline donation with a donor name, amount, date and payment method](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/add-donation-record-with-ai-768x270.png)One sentence with a donor name, an amount, a date and how it was paid did 2 jobs at once for me. It created the donor with their giving total already calculated, and it created the donation against the right campaign, marked as paid manually on the date I asked for.

![A complete donation record created by an AI assistant showing donor, email, campaign, subtotal, processing fee and payment method](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/charitable-donation-record-created-768x355.png)When I opened it, the record was complete. It had the donor, email, campaign, subtotal, processing fee and payment method, and nothing needed a second pass.

If this is a real part of your week, [offline donation management](https://www.wpcharitable.com/features/offline-donations/) and our guide on [how to track offline donations in WordPress](https://www.wpcharitable.com/how-to-track-offline-donations-in-wordpress/) cover the manual route as well.

### Looking Up a Donor Without Hunting for Them

Donor records work the same way. You can ask for one person’s full giving history, ask who has given more than once, or ask for your biggest supporters ranked by total given.

![An AI assistant returning a donor record with giving history from a WordPress donor database](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/chatgpt-donor-record-768x330.png)That last one surprised me most. It is the question every board member asks, and it normally means exporting a spreadsheet and sorting it by hand.

Donor contact details follow your WordPress permissions rather than sitting open, and I explain how in [the risks section](#risks). For the manual side, [donor management](https://www.wpcharitable.com/features/donor-management/) and [the best donor management software](https://www.wpcharitable.com/best-donor-management-software/) are both useful.

## Step 5. Report to Your Board and Thank Your Donors

Reporting is the job AI changes most for the smallest organizations, because it is the job they most often skip.

![ChatGPT returning a monthly fundraising report with total raised, donation count and donor count](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/chatgpt-may-fundraising-report-768x330.png)Everything on your [fundraising reports](https://www.wpcharitable.com/features/reports/) screens is available by asking. That includes your overview figures, recent donations, how one campaign is tracking against its goal, and which campaigns are performing best.

It understands date ranges the way you would say them. A question about last quarter gives you last quarter, not a running total of everything you have ever raised.

Because the answer lands in your chat, you can keep going from there. Ask it to compare 2 campaigns, or to pull the 10 donors who gave the most last month, without leaving the conversation.

### The Board Meeting Question

Somebody asks which campaign is performing best, and you want the answer before the meeting moves on.

That used to mean “I’ll follow up after the meeting”, which usually meant a week later when it no longer mattered. Now you can answer while the item is still open.

If you are not sure which figures your board should see, I listed [10 fundraising reports every nonprofit needs](https://www.wpcharitable.com/fundraising-reports-every-nonprofit-needs/).

### The Thank-You List

Ask for your top supporters over a period and you get real names with real totals, ranked.

That is the starting point for the thank-you calls and notes most small teams plan every year and manage every third year. The list now takes seconds, so the hardest part is done.

AI can draft a starting point for each note, mentioning what that person gave to. For your largest donors, I would rewrite those notes in your own words before they go out.

## Step 6. Get Found by Donors Who Search With AI

How people find causes has changed, and most nonprofit websites have not caught up yet.

A growing share of searches now get answered on the results page, or inside ChatGPT, without anybody clicking through to a website. If an AI assistant cannot understand what your organization does and who it serves, you will not appear in its answer.

The practical fixes are simple.

- Say plainly on your site what you do, where you do it, and who you help.
- Answer the questions a donor would ask, in your own words, on your own pages.
- Keep your program pages current, with this year’s numbers and dates.

I have written this up properly in [AI SEO, GEO and zero-click searches for nonprofits](https://www.wpcharitable.com/ai-seo-geo-and-zero-click-searches-for-non-profits/), which goes with this section.

On the tooling side, All in One SEO has published its own abilities covering posts, settings, redirects and audits. That means the same assistant can find the pages on your site that are missing a focus keyword and fix them in one sitting.

## Grant Writing and Funder Research With AI

Grants need their own section because the risk is different. A grant application is a document that a funder will hold you to.

### What AI Is Good At Here

- **Reading the guidelines properly.** Paste in a 30-page funder document and ask for the eligibility criteria, the deadlines and what they say they will not fund. It will not miss a line the way a tired person does at 11pm.
- **Reusing your own past applications.** Give it 3 previous submissions and ask it to draft the organizational background section for a new one. That section barely changes, and rewriting it each time wastes hours.
- **Answering the same question in a different word count.** Every funder asks about your impact in a different number of words, and trimming to fit is a mechanical job AI handles well.
- **Checking you actually answered the question.** Give it your draft and the question and ask whether the draft answers it. The answer is humbling more often than you would expect.

### What Will Get You in Trouble

Never let AI supply a number, an outcome, a beneficiary count or a partner name. It will produce something believable, because that is what it is built to do, and a believable wrong number in a funded application is a serious problem.

Give it your real figures and let it arrange them. That is the whole rule.

I also would not use AI to check whether a specific foundation funds your kind of work, unless it can browse and cite the foundation’s own current page. Funder priorities change, and older training data will confidently tell you about a program that closed 2 years ago.

## How to Run Your Fundraising With Charitable and WPVibe

I work on Charitable, so treat this section as an interested party talking and check what I say.

Charitable is a WordPress plugin that turns your own website into a full fundraising system. Donors stay on your site, the donor list belongs to you, and there are no caps on campaigns or donations.

More than 10,000 nonprofits use it, and the free version has passed 1 million downloads. Charitable has also published its abilities, which is what lets an assistant do Steps 3, 4 and 5 rather than only talk about them.

WPVibe is the free connector that links your assistant to your site. It is made by the team at SeedProd, and it works with ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor and other assistants that support MCP.

### What You Need Before You Start

- WordPress 6.9 or later, because that is where the Abilities API arrived.
- The Charitable Pro plugin, version 1.8.18 or later. Spreadsheet exports and repeat donor totals need version 1.8.19.
- A site that loads over HTTPS, so the connection is secure.
- An account with ChatGPT, Claude or another assistant that supports MCP.
- A fresh backup of your site. Our guide on [backing up a nonprofit website](https://www.wpcharitable.com/how-to-backup-your-nonprofit-website/) covers this if you don’t have a routine yet.

### Setting It Up in About 10 Minutes

![Five-step infographic guiding how to connect Charitable to your AI assistant, from install to enabling write access (steps 1–5).](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/raise-funds-ai-setup-steps-1-960x600.png)To get started, head over to **Charitable » Tools » AI MCP** and choose Install & Activate WPVibe. This button installs the connector without sending you anywhere else.

Next, choose Open WPVibe Setup and work through the short checklist. It starts by testing that your site can be reached from outside, which is the step that trips people up most often, and it never asks for your WordPress password.

![The Install and Activate WPVibe button on the Charitable AI MCP screen in the WordPress dashboard](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/how-to-install-wpvibe-768x210.png)Now add the connector to your assistant. In ChatGPT it is a listed app, so open Plugins, find WPVibe by SeedProd and choose Install plugin. In Claude, Cursor or Windsurf, you paste the server URL instead.

Then ask a few read-only questions, like the 5 in [Task 3](#task-3). Your assistant finds Charitable on your site on its own, so there is nothing else to set up.

When you are ready for the assistant to make changes, go back to **Charitable » Tools » AI MCP** and turn on Enable AI Write Access.

The AI MCP screen is also where you can check whether write access is on, and turn it back off at any time.

![The Charitable AI MCP screen with the WPVibe setup button and the Enable AI Write Access setting](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/ai-01-mcp-wpvibe-setup.jpg)The full walkthrough with every screen is in [getting started with AI assistants](https://www.wpcharitable.com/documentation/getting-started-with-ai-assistants/). If you want the technical detail, the [full AI reference](https://www.wpcharitable.com/documentation/ai-assistants-in-charitable-the-full-reference/) covers it, and [our AI page](https://www.wpcharitable.com/ai/) has every example prompt in one place.

### What Your Assistant Can Reach

Charitable lists everything an assistant can do on a screen in your own dashboard, so you can read it before you agree to anything. It is grouped into 5 areas.

- **Campaigns.** It can build a whole fundraiser from a plain-English brief using a built-in template, add a question to a donation form, change a campaign’s colors, and publish, unpublish or trash a campaign.
- **Donations.** It can record a gift that came by check, cash or bank transfer, look up one donation, add up totals by campaign, status or date range, and export your donations as a spreadsheet.
- **Donors.** It can list your donors with their totals and read one donor’s full history, where your permissions allow it.
- **Reports.** It can tell you what you raised over any period, show a day-by-day breakdown, rank your top campaigns and top donors, and show how much came from repeat donors.
- **Diagnostics.** It can check your plugin and license details, your site setup and which payment gateways are active.

The screen’s own summary says it best. Nothing is available to anyone who could not already do it in your dashboard.

In version 1.8.19 you can also ask for a spreadsheet and get a download link back in the chat, or ask how much of a period came from repeat donors. Our [AI write access announcement](https://www.wpcharitable.com/introducing-ai-write-access/) covers both.

![An AI assistant exporting this year's donations as a spreadsheet, splitting last quarter between repeat and first-time donors, and the Charitable setting for which roles may let an assistant see donor data](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/ai-assistant-demo.gif)### The Safety Settings Built In

![The safety settings built into Charitable, write access starts off, new campaigns are drafts, campaigns go to the trash instead of being deleted, every change is logged, and payment keys stay hidden](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/raise-funds-ai-safety-960x600.png)- **Write access starts off.** Your assistant can read everything but change nothing until an administrator turns write access on.
- **New campaigns are drafts.** A campaign an assistant creates waits for you to review and publish it.
- **Nothing is permanently deleted.** A campaign can only be moved to the trash, and the assistant asks before trashing one that already has donations.
- **Every change is logged.** You can see what your assistant did at **Charitable » Tools » Logs**, filtered to Abilities.
- **Payment keys stay hidden.** Your Stripe, PayPal and Square credentials are never readable by an assistant.

### What It Costs

To be straight with you, the AI abilities are part of the Charitable Pro plugin, so the free version does not include them today. WPVibe itself is free.

If you are not fundraising on WordPress yet, I would still [start with Charitable Lite](https://wordpress.org/plugins/charitable/ "start with Charitable Lite"). It gives you unlimited campaigns and unlimited donations, and it keeps donors on your own site. Get your fundraising working first, then add AI when it will save you time.

The paid version of Charitable has 4 plans. The Basic plan is $69 a year on sale, down from $149, and the Plus plan at $99 adds [recurring donations](https://www.wpcharitable.com/features/recurring-donations/), [fee relief](https://www.wpcharitable.com/features/fee-relief/) and [annual receipts](https://www.wpcharitable.com/features/annual-receipts/).

The Pro plan at $199 adds peer-to-peer fundraising and the automation tools, and the Elite plan at $299 covers 5 sites. Every plan comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee, 100% no-risk, no questions asked.

On a paid plan you pay the annual license and nothing else to us, and Charitable takes no percentage of any donation. Standard payment processor fees from Stripe, PayPal and others go to the processor directly. You can compare [Charitable Lite against the paid plans](https://www.wpcharitable.com/charitable-lite-vs-pro/) to see the split.

[**See every Charitable feature, risk-free for 14 days »**](https://www.wpcharitable.com/features/)

## AI Fundraising Recipes for Charitable and WPVibe

A recipe is a tested prompt for a job you do often. These 6 come from the [Charitable recipes on WPVibe](https://wpvibe.ai/works-with/charitable/), and each one takes 5 to 10 minutes.

Change the names, amounts and dates to your own, and paste them into your connected assistant.

![6 AI fundraising recipes for Charitable and WPVibe, launch a campaign, run a pre-launch check, match your brand colors, record offline donations, get a fundraising report, and thank your top donors](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/raise-funds-ai-recipes-960x600.png)Here are 3 of them in action, a pre-launch check, a check recorded in 1 sentence and a ranked list of top donors.

![An AI assistant checking a Charitable site before Giving Tuesday, recording a $250 check from a donor, and listing the top 3 donors since July, all with example figures](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/raise-funds-ai-chat-demo-800.gif)### Launch a Fundraising Campaign

Describe your fundraiser in a few sentences, and you get a complete campaign built from a template and saved as a draft.

> Create a campaign for holiday meals for 200 families. The goal is $12,000, it ends December 24, and $60 covers one family. Save it as a draft.

If you are not sure which layout to use, ask “What campaign templates can I choose from?” first.

### Run a Pre-Launch Check

Before Giving Tuesday or any big push, get a plain-English check of your payment gateways, test mode, campaign end dates and donation forms.

> We launch our Giving Tuesday campaign next week. Check my Charitable setup and tell me which payment gateways are active, whether test mode is on, which campaigns have an end date that has already passed, and anything on our donation forms that looks wrong.

This one is read-only, so you can run it before you turn on write access.

### Match a Campaign to Your Brand Colors

Give the assistant your brand colors, and your campaign’s buttons, progress bar, tabs and headings are restyled to match.

> Our brand colors are navy #1F3A5F and gold #F2A900. Restyle the Winter Coat Drive campaign so the donate button and progress bar are gold and the headings and tabs are navy.

### Record Offline Donations

Hand over the list of checks, cash and bank transfers from your event, and every gift gets recorded.

> Record these offline donations from our gala against the Winter Coat Drive, and flag anything that looks like a duplicate first.

Paste the list underneath the prompt with a name, amount, date and payment method on each line. Asking it to flag duplicates first means you review anything doubtful before it is saved.

### Get a Fundraising Report

Ask how the fundraising is going, and you get totals, donor counts, your top campaigns and progress against each goal.

> Give me a fundraising report for the last 30 days with my top campaigns and progress against each goal.

### Find Top Donors and Draft Thank-Yous

Get your top donors for any period with their giving history, plus a personal thank-you drafted for each.

> Who are my top 5 donors since July? Draft a short thank-you for each that mentions what they gave to.

Use these drafts as a starting point. Add something only you would know about each person before you send them.

### More Prompts to Try

These shorter prompts come from [our AI page](https://www.wpcharitable.com/ai/) and cover the jobs that come up most weeks.

**For building campaigns**

- “Set up a fundraiser for the animal shelter, $5,000 goal, ending at the end of next month.”
- “Create a campaign for our winter coat drive with a $2,500 goal.”

**For changing donation forms**

- “Add a question asking how they heard about us.”
- “Make that a dropdown instead with Facebook, a friend, or our newsletter. Default it to our newsletter.”
- “Make that campaign’s donate button green.”
- “Move the phone number field above the payment section.”

**For recording offline gifts**

- “Someone posted a check for $250 from Jane Smith, record it.”
- “Record a $1,000 cash donation to the winter coat drive.”

**For reports**

- “Who are our biggest supporters?”
- “What did we raise last month compared to the month before?”
- “How many donors gave more than once this year?”
- “Show me a day by day breakdown for the winter coat drive.”
- “Export this year’s donations as a spreadsheet.”
- “How much of last quarter came from repeat donors?”

**For fixing problems**

- “Why aren’t my donations showing up?”
- “Is my site still in test mode?”
- “What can my Charitable site do?”

## Where AI Will Cost You Money If You Are Careless

If you only read one section of this guide closely, make it this one.

### Donor Data

The honest version is a permission model, not a blanket promise, and I would rather explain it properly than simply reassure you.

With Charitable, a list of donors never includes email addresses, phone numbers or postal addresses, whatever permissions the connected account has. Reading one named donor in full, or pulling a ranked thank-you list, does include an email address, and both need an account that is allowed to see sensitive data.

So connect on an account with only the permissions the job needs. If all you want is reports, don’t connect as your full administrator.

From version 1.8.19 you can also choose which roles may let an assistant see donor data. To set it, head over to **Charitable » Tools » AI MCP** and find the AI Access to Donor Data setting.

This setting covers donor emails and addresses, plus spreadsheet exports of donations or donors. Donor names, donation counts and lifetime totals stay available either way.

![The Charitable AI Access to Donor Data setting, asking which roles may let an assistant see donor data, with Administrator and Campaign Manager switched on](https://www.wpcharitable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/ai-02-donor-data-role-controls.png)Your payment gateway keys are never readable, whatever the permissions. Your fundraising data stays in your own WordPress database on your own hosting, and only the details your assistant reads during a chat are sent to the AI company you use.

### Numbers That Look Right and Are Not

This is the mistake I see most, and it is the one that ends up in a board paper.

An assistant that has not been given your figures will produce figures anyway, and they will look reasonable. The fix is that either the assistant is connected to your real data, or you paste your real numbers in.

Before anything goes in front of a funder or a board, check the numbers against your own dashboard. Do it every time.

### Losing Your Own Voice

AI writing has a particular sound, and donors are getting quicker at spotting it.

Your protection is the AI brief from Task 1. Read every draft out loud before it goes near a donor, and if it doesn’t sound like someone from your organization, rewrite the opening and the closing yourself.

### Skipping the Backup

Before you turn on write access anywhere, take a backup. It takes 5 minutes, and it means any change can be undone.

Our guide on [backing up a nonprofit website](https://www.wpcharitable.com/how-to-backup-your-nonprofit-website/) covers the routine.

## FAQs on Raising Funds Using AI

#### Do I need to pay for a second AI subscription?

No. This runs on the AI you already use, so there are no API keys to paste and no extra AI account to buy. It works with ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Windsurf and other assistants that support MCP.

#### Is it safe to let AI touch a live fundraising site?

It can be, with 3 habits. Take a backup first, connect on an account with only the permissions the job needs, and leave write access off until you have spent a day asking read-only questions.

#### Can AI publish a campaign without me seeing it?

Not with Charitable. Write access is off until you turn it on, and campaigns an assistant creates arrive as drafts for you to review.

#### Will donors be able to tell I used AI?

They will if you send the first draft. Give the assistant your own past writing first, then read the draft out loud and rewrite anything that doesn’t sound like you.

#### Should I tell donors that AI helped write something?

There is no settled answer yet, and reasonable people disagree. My own line is that AI helping me draft an appeal needs no disclosure, the same as a colleague editing it, but anything presented as a beneficiary’s own words or a personal note from a named person should be written by that person.

#### What if my nonprofit does not use WordPress?

Steps 1, 2 and 6, plus Tasks 1 and 2, work for you today with no setup at all. Steps 3, 4 and 5 rely on your fundraising system publishing abilities, which is a WordPress standard, so you would need to ask your own provider what they support.

#### Which version of WordPress do I need?

You need WordPress 6.9 or later, because that is where the Abilities API arrived, and 7.0 or later is recommended. On the Charitable side you need the Charitable Pro plugin, version 1.8.18 or later.

#### How do I disconnect it if I change my mind?

Turn **write access** off to stop any changes straight away. To cut the connection completely, revoke the Application Password in your WordPress admin or deactivate the connector, and your fundraising keeps working normally either way.

If you want the wider view on AI beyond fundraising, our [ultimate guide to AI for nonprofits](https://www.wpcharitable.com/ultimate-guide-to-ai-for-nonprofits/) covers free courses, and [10 AI tools for nonprofits](https://www.wpcharitable.com/best-ai-tools-for-non-profits/) covers the tools themselves. [The nonprofit task automation guide](https://www.wpcharitable.com/the-ultimate-nonprofit-task-automation-guide/) covers the workflows around all of this.

Your donors are not waiting for you to have a perfect AI strategy. Pick 1 of the 3 tasks at the top of this guide, do it this week, and let the rest follow.

## Charitable Has 1.2+ Million Downloads!

Trusted by millions to power successful fundraising campaigns. Try Charitable risk-free today.

[**Get Charitable Now →**](https://www.wpcharitable.com/pricing/?ref=int-million-downloads-blog-2)

✅ 14-day money-back guarantee

 ✅ Transparent pricing

✅ Code-free setup

## Stay Connected for More Nonprofit Resources

For more tutorials and videos tailored to nonprofits, subscribe to our YouTube channel. We regularly publish expert tips, step-by-step guides on online donations, fundraising strategies, and practical resources to help your organization succeed.

🗞️ **Get weekly tips and exclusive guides in your inbox**
[Join our newsletter → ](https://www.wpcharitable.com/newsletter/?ref=int-stay-connected-newsletter)

🎥 **Watch step-by-step tutorials and success stories**
[Subscribe to our YouTube channel →](https://www.youtube.com/@wpCharitable?utm_source=website&utm_medium=pattern&utm_campaign=stay-connected&utm_content=youtube)

👩🏽‍💻 **Connect with our community and get daily nonprofit insights**
[Follow us on LinkedIn →](https://www.linkedin.com/company/104739526/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=pattern&utm_campaign=stay-connected&utm_content=linkedin)

🥳 **Fun reels and non-profit insights**
[Follow us on Instagram →](https://www.instagram.com/wpcharitable/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=pattern&utm_campaign=stay-connected&utm_content=instagram)

👀 **Insightful & fun videos to help you grow your cause**
[Follow us on TikTok→ ](https://www.tiktok.com/@wpcharitable/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=pattern&utm_campaign=stay-connected&utm_content=tiktok-charitable)

🌎 **Subscribe and follow for general fundraiser tips**
[Get Fundraiser Tips on TikTok →](https://www.tiktok.com/@fundraisertips/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=pattern&utm_campaign=stay-connected&utm_content=fundraiser-tips)

## Powerful Fundraising Resources

🤖 **Use Charitable with Your AI Assistant**

[See Charitable + AI →](https://www.wpcharitable.com/ai/?ref=int-stay-connected-ai "See Charitable + AI →")

⬇️ **Download proven strategies, campaign ideas, and expert tools**
[Get the Fundraising Kit ](https://www.wpcharitable.com/fundraising-kit/?ref=int-stay-connected-fundraising-kit)→

💸 **Get Free Fundraising Resources** 
[Head to the Charitable Fundraising Hub](https://www.wpcharitable.com/resources/fundraising-hub/?ref=int-stay-connected-fundraising-hub) [→](https://www.youtube.com/@wpCharitable)

**🤔 Got questions about Charitable?**
[Charitable FAQs](https://www.wpcharitable.com/charitable-faqs/?ref=int-stay-connected-charitable-faqs "Charitable FAQs") [→](https://www.youtube.com/@wpCharitable)

🏎️ **Take Charitable for a spin**
[Create your Charitable Demo ](https://demo.new/charitable/ "Create your Charitable Demo ")[→](https://www.youtube.com/@wpCharitable)

**Understand non-profit terms and jargon**
[Non-Profit Glossary ](https://www.wpcharitable.com/the-ultimate-nonprofit-glossary/?ref=int-stay-connected-non-profit-glossary)[→](https://www.youtube.com/@wpCharitable)

% **Looking for non-profit deals and discounts?**
[Best Non-Profit Deals and Discounts →](https://www.wpcharitable.com/best-non-profit-deals-and-discounts/?ref=int-stay-connected-non-profit-deals-and-discounts)

**Categories:** Non-Profit Advice

**Tags:** ai assistant, ai for non profits, ai write access, wpvibe

---