Every person who currently gives to your nonprofit organization was introduced to you by a friend, an acquaintance, an event, or a simple internet search. Maybe they gave in response to a disaster, an advertisement, or simply because they were looking for someone who aligned with their values.
Whatever the reason for giving, they sought you out. And as AI assistants begin to replace standard online searches, people will continue seeking you out. AI already knows how to compare organizations, summarize their missions, and point someone toward a place to give.
What it hasn't been able to do is complete the task of giving.
Until now.
After years of leveraging AI to help nonprofits raise money, we have turned all of our learnings into a powerful new tool called Agentic Giving.
Read on to get the full picture of what Agentic Giving is, why it's happening now, how it actually works, what we've built to keep it safe, and what — if anything — you need to do about it.
What Agentic Giving actually is
Agentic Giving from Fundraise Up makes sure that when an AI assistant acts on a donor's behalf, the gift still flows through your organization's official, authorized giving route.
Agentic Giving is made up of three parts:
The AI Visibility Assessment: We developed this free tool to show you exactly how AI systems currently describe your organization — and where the gaps are. You can run it in a couple of minutes, even if you're not currently a Fundraise Up customer.
Your agent profile: This is a simple plain-text file, generated and maintained automatically, that acts as an instruction manual for AI systems. It tells them who you are, your active campaigns and their approved descriptions, the amounts and frequencies you accept, and an explicit statement authorizing Fundraise Up as your official donation route. It updates automatically every 15 minutes, so it's never far out of date.
The Agent Donation Gateway: The mechanism that turns a recommendation into a completed gift. When an AI assistant matches a donor's intent to one of your campaigns, the Gateway opens an official donation session through your own Fundraise Up checkout — the same one you already use today.
In practice, this shows up as one of three experiences for a donor: the assistant recommends your organization and opens the right campaign (assisted giving), it fills in the donor's choices and asks them to review before handing off to your checkout (prepared giving), or — where a donor has already set up an agent-based payment method — it completes the gift directly on their behalf (agent-completed giving). All three end the same way: the gift lands in your Fundraise Up account, not somewhere else.
Why is this happening now?
Donor discovery has already started moving. Organic search traffic to nonprofit websites is down 35% year over year, and AI-referred traffic to those same sites is up roughly 1,000% since 2024. Donors are still curious, still generous, still looking for causes to support — they're just increasingly starting that search in a conversation with ChatGPT, Perplexity, or another assistant instead of a search engine.
That shift matters for two reasons. First, if an AI assistant can't find or accurately describe your organization, you're invisible at the exact moment someone was ready to look for you — regardless of how good your website is. Second, once an assistant is recommending you, it's effectively speaking on your behalf, using whatever information it can find. If that information is outdated or comes from a third party you don't control, a donor may hear the wrong version of your story right when they're deciding whether to trust you with a gift.
Neither of these is a reason to panic. AI-driven giving is still small relative to overall donor traffic — but the direction is clear, and getting ready early costs very little.
Built for safety and trust, not just speed
We built Agentic Giving the way we'd want it built if it were our own organization's donor data on the line.
We cover safety questions in more detail here in this blog, but here are the basics:
Is the donor in control of the Agentic Giving transaction?
- A human always confirms the gift. There's no scenario where an AI system independently decides to give on someone's behalf.
- No donation completes without the donor explicitly confirming the nonprofit, campaign, amount, currency, frequency, payment method, and consent.
Is a donor’s payment information safe?
- AI will never touch card numbers and will never ask for the donor’s personal information.
- Payment runs exclusively through your existing hosted checkout or through tokenized, wallet-based payment methods — the same kind of technology behind Apple Pay.
- No raw payment credentials are ever visible to an AI assistant.
Will this make changes to our standard donation process?
- No. Nothing about your existing checkout changes.
Does this create new fraud risk?
- No new door opens for classic payment fraud, because the agent never touches card numbers. The donor pays and confirms the amount inside their own wallet.
Is it secure?
- Agentic Giving is covered by the certifications you already trust us for.
- Fundraise Up is SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001 certified, and enabling Agentic Giving doesn't change your existing Data Processing Agreement — it adds a feature-specific addendum on top of it.
- From a data-handling standpoint, an agent-initiated gift is treated exactly like any other donation moving through your existing checkout — same infrastructure, same storage.
Does Agentic Giving recommend some nonprofits over others?
- No. We're not building a charity marketplace, and we never rank nonprofits or make claims about which cause is "best."
Can we turn Agentic Giving off?
- Yes. You're always in control. Agentic Giving is off by default.
- An administrator has to review and enable it, and it can be turned off at any time.
For more technical information about Agentic Giving, please refer to this guide.
What Agentic Giving is not
We want to be precise when talking about what this tool is and what it is not.
Today, the most common path to a digital donation is still a donor being guided to a prefilled version of your existing donation page, where they complete the gift themselves — recurring giving, fee coverage prompts, and all.
Fully in-chat completion, where an AI assistant finishes a one-time gift without the donor ever leaving the conversation is real and live, but it's early, and it depends on donor-side technology that is still gaining adoption.
We will always be up front and share honestly about which donor experience applies where, rather than implying every gift completes itself in a chat window. That's a promise we're making on purpose: as this space matures quickly, we'd rather be the source you can trust to tell you what's actually true right now.
What are you actually turning on?
Enabling Agentic Giving does not mean your organization is "using AI" or deploying some new AI feature on your site that goes out and actively recruits new donors on your behalf.
In fact, it's closer to the opposite.
Your organization isn't the one doing anything agentic — AI assistants are already out there and being asked about causes like yours, whether you've done anything about it or not. Your agent profile is simply a small, static piece of code that makes sure those assistants can find you and describe you correctly when that conversation happens.
Think of it less like adding an AI feature, and more like opening a door people are already knocking on.
Nothing starts running on your behalf. Nothing gets smarter or more automated over time. It's a fixed, plain-text file that publishes information you'd happily share anyway, and it only ever responds to a question someone else has already asked. Choosing not to be part of that conversation doesn't reduce anyone's AI use. It just means the answer a donor gets about your cause is less likely to be accurate.
How to optimize for Agentic Giving (without overhauling anything)
If you're already a Fundraise Up customer, getting ready doesn't require any new content, new integrations, or a development sprint. It mostly comes down to two things that are already true of good fundraising: keeping your campaign information clear and current, and making sure your organization is described consistently everywhere an AI system might look, like your site and campaign pages.
If a campaign description reads like an internal note rather than something a donor would understand, an AI assistant will repeat it verbatim. That's usually the only real "fix" involved: writing for the reader who's about to ask a question, not the one who already knows your organization inside and out.
Beyond that, enabling Agentic Giving itself is just one setting to turn on and one link to add to your site.
Can AI assistants find you?
Our free AI Visibility Assessment shows you exactly what AI systems currently know (and don't know) about your organization, and gives you a specific, prioritized list of what to fix first, if anything needs fixing at all.
It takes about two minutes, it's free whether or not you're a Fundraise Up customer today, and there's no commitment attached to running it. It’s worth considering a look in the mirror before the AI shift picks up speed.
People will always find you at events and through your connections. But as more and more of that discovery moves into AI, our work is focused on making sure people will always be able to support your work.