A donor in Colorado goes hiking with their friends over the weekend. As they summit, they see smoke rising from wildfires impacting thousands of acres across the state.
Compelled to help, and not knowing where to start, they open an AI assistant and ask, “I want to help the local efforts to support those impacted by wildfires. What can I do?”
The assistant answers, names a few nonprofits, and the donor chooses an organization to donate to. No website visited. No search results page. No form. A donor experience that lives in AI an chat window.
That’s the future donor experience. And it’s here.
Organic search traffic to nonprofit websites fell 35% in the last year, and AI-referred traffic grew roughly 1,000%. Donors are still giving to the causes they care about — they're just doing it inside a chat window before they ever reach your site.
Are those donors able to find you?
For the first time ever, Agentic Giving from Fundraise Up helps donors discover and support their favorite nonprofits in AI.
The future donor experience is here
The web taught donors to navigate: type a query, scan results, click through, fill out a form.
With Agentic Giving, donors state what they want and an AI assistant handles the research, the comparison, and increasingly, the transaction itself.
The shift is from navigation to delegation.
That changes what nonprofits are actually competing for.
"Nonprofits will no longer only compete for a click. They will compete to be correctly understood." — Peter Byrnes, CEO and co-founder of Fundraise Up
A donor who used to land on your homepage now can learn about your organization through an AI assistant who can pull information from your site, your campaign pages, your CRM-facing content, and third-party sources like Charity Navigator.
Agentic Giving from Fundraise Up is built around three things to help a nonprofit drive more revenue:
- Be discovered
- Be understood
- Be ready to accept donations
Be discovered: help AI find your organization
Most nonprofit websites weren't built for AI to read them. They were built for human visitors — which means the campaign details, the mission language, and the giving options an AI needs to make a confident recommendation are often scattered, outdated, or missing entirely.
Faced with that gap, an AI assistant does one of two things: recommends you inaccurately, or skips you for an organization it can read more easily.
To show nonprofits exactly where they stand, we launched the AI Visibility Assessment — a free tool that shows you how AI assistants currently describe your organization, where the gaps are, and what to fix first. Just enter your URL and our tool will show you what AI is already telling donors about you.
Be understood: help AI understand your mission
Once an AI assistant is recommending you, it's speaking on your behalf — and it's working from whatever it can find, whether that's your site, a ratings page, or a directory you don't control. Just one outdated source is enough to hand a donor the wrong story.
Agentic Giving from Fundraise Up provides a structured, source-of-truth file that gives AI systems a clean, authoritative read on your organization: who you are, what your campaigns fund, and how a gift should be completed. Get it right once, and every AI assistant that reads it afterward tells your real story instead of piecing one together.
Be ready: AI Assistants donate on behalf of the donor
This is the part nonprofits ask about first, and it's the most important guardrail in the whole system: an AI-initiated gift doesn't route through a third-party checkout, and it doesn't hand your donor relationship to someone else. Agentic Giving lets an AI assistant build a pre-filled donation link straight to your existing Fundraise Up checkout — the same page, the same receipts, the same recurring-gift handling, the same CRM sync your team already relies on. The donor still completes the gift on your official page; the AI just gets them there with the right campaign already selected, instead of leaving them to search for it themselves.
Recurring gifts started this way are managed exactly like any other Fundraise Up subscription. Consent, receipts, and CRM sync all happen automatically. Nothing about the donor experience your team built changes — Agentic Giving just makes sure AI can find the front door.
What Agentic Giving is not: a charity marketplace. Fundraise Up doesn't rank nonprofits or decide which cause is "best." We're the infrastructure behind your official giving route — you keep the relationship, the brand, and the donor.
“Before an AI assistant can help someone give to your organization, it has to be able to find you, understand you, and trust the information it finds.” — Peter Byrnes, CEO and co-founder of Fundraise Up
Built on years of work
Fundraise Up has spent years using AI to help nonprofits create better donor experiences that drive more revenue and impact.
Our Agentic Giving solution is the next chapter of that work.
The direction is already clear, even while the shift is still early: fewer donors starting on a homepage, more of them starting a conversation. The work to be ready for that doesn't start when the shift finishes — it starts now, with the same discipline nonprofits already apply to their websites: clear information, one source of truth per campaign, and a giving path that holds up no matter who — or what — brings the donor to it.