AI for charities, built around your charity CRM

• Supporter care

  Address changes, cancelled direct debits, opt-outs and complaints arrive by email, phone and post, to be keyed into the CRM. Outside Scotland, Fundraising Preference Service requests come by email alert and must be acted on within 21 days. Since 19 June 2026, data protection complaints must be acknowledged within 30 days.

• Gift Aid

  A valid declaration gives the donor's name and home address, names the charity, identifies the gifts and confirms them as Gift Aid, with the tax explained. An oral one needs an audible recording or a written record giving 30 days to cancel. Each donation must be claimed within four years of the end of the financial period it came in; on Charities Online a spreadsheet takes up to 1,000 donations, more need software.

• Grant bids and funder reports

  Each funder has its own form, word limits and timetable; reports draw on service records, outcomes and the accounts. In the same report, 45% of charities used AI for grant fundraising and 31% for monitoring and evaluation, though respondents said AI-drafted bids often need heavy rewriting.

• Volunteers and safeguarding

  Trustees risk-assess each role for DBS eligibility and level, review safeguarding policies at least yearly and after any serious incident, and record concerns. In England and Wales, serious incidents, including a significant data breach, go to the Charity Commission promptly.

• Beacon

  Beacon AI turns plain-English questions into filters, drafts emails and builds formulas; Beacon says data never leaves the UK and never trains public AI models. It has a RESTful API and Zapier.

• Donorfy

  Its API, on Professional plans, covers constituents, transactions, Gift Aid declarations and purpose and channel preferences, with signed webhooks when records change. Dataro's predictive scores connect to it.

• Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT

  Prospect Insights prioritises major gift candidates and Chat for Blackbaud AI drafts donor summaries, with generative AI off until an admin opts in. It connects to Anthropic Claude and Microsoft Copilot; SKY APIs reach constituents, gifts and memberships.

• Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud

  Fundraising, programme and outcome management, volunteer management and grantmaking, with Agentforce for AI agents. Salesforce documents REST, SOAP, Bulk and Pub/Sub APIs.

• Microsoft for Nonprofits

  Fundraising and Volunteer Management apps on the Power Platform; Volunteer Management runs in Dataverse, which has a Web API. Microsoft ends product engineering support for it and some other nonprofit solutions from 1 February 2027.

• Access Charity CRM

  The upgraded Access thankQ CRM, part of Access Evo, whose Copilot drafts and summarises from your charity's own data. Access publishes an API reference covering contacts, consent, Gift Aid declarations and payments, with change subscriptions.

• A supporter care inbox

  Reads emails and scanned letters into CRM changes, drafts each reply for a supporter care officer to approve, logs each data protection complaint with its 30-day acknowledgement date, and dates each FPS suppression.

• Gift Aid checks before each claim

  Matches each donation to a valid declaration, flags gaps and cancelled declarations, sends the written record for unrecorded oral declarations, warns as the four-year limit nears, and keeps the audit trail for at least six years.

• Consent records that know the date

  Records for each supporter when and how their details were collected, the opt-out offered, and whether consent or the soft opt-in applies. Details from before 5 February 2026 or from a third party stay consent-only, and every email is checked for an opt-out.

• Funder reports from your records

  Drafts each bid or report in the funder's form from service records, outcomes and accounts, with every figure traced to its source. The grants lead edits and signs off; the system logs what AI drafted and who checked it.

• PECR regulation 22(3A): the charitable purposes soft opt-in

  In force since 5 February 2026. A charity may email or text people without consent if it collected their details itself while they showed interest in or supported its purposes, the marketing solely furthers those purposes, and a free, simple opt-out is offered at collection and in every message.

• Code of Fundraising Practice

  In effect since 1 November 2025. Databases must be accurate, people who asked not to be contacted or have died are suppressed, and contacts without specific permission are checked against the FPS, MPS and TPS. A donation from someone you have reason to believe cannot make an informed decision is refused, or returned if found later.

• HMRC Gift Aid rules

  Records must give an audit trail linking each donation to an identifiable donor with a valid declaration, kept by a charitable company until six years after the end of the accounting period. Inadequate records can mean repaying the tax with interest, plus a penalty.

• Fundraising Regulator: using AI in fundraising (December 2025)

  Agree an AI policy before using AI for fundraising; the regulator recommends publishing it. Risk-assess each tool first. A person checks AI content for accuracy, fairness and legality, with checks recorded where proportionate. Non-public information stays out of publicly available AI tools.

• AI automation
• Business automation and integrations
• Bespoke software development

Other industries: Care homes, HR teams, Accountants.

Sources

Every rule, date and figure on this page comes from the sources below, checked on 31 October 2026. Rules change: check anything that matters with the source or your adviser.