Describe the fundraiser. Charitable builds it.
Connect the ChatGPT or Claude you already use. Ask for a campaign, a receipt for a check that came in the mail, a report on your biggest supporters. It runs on your own site, against your own donor records, and nothing changes until you say so.
- No add-on to buy
- Works on free AI plans
- Read-only until you allow writes
- WordPress 6.9+
- Charitable Pro 1.8.18+
New To AI? Start Here.
If you have used ChatGPT, you already know most of this. Here is what is new, and how to start.
Nothing to buy, nothing to install, and no setup inside Charitable.
No code, and nothing to set up.
You type what you want, the way you would ask a coworker to do it.
What Is An AI Assistant?
A chat window. You describe what you want in plain language and it answers. ChatGPT and Claude both work this way.
What Changed?
Before, an assistant could only give advice about your site. Now it does the work inside Charitable while you watch.
Why Does It Matter Here?
Small teams rarely have a developer on call. Whoever knows what the fundraiser should say can now just describe it.
Five steps, about ten minutes. You only do this once.
Check Your Versions
WordPress 6.9 or later, Charitable Pro 1.8.18 or later. On WordPress 6.8 nothing registers and nothing about your site changes.
Add A Connector
Your assistant reaches your site through a small bridge. WPVibe is a free one that works with Charitable out of the box.
Create An Application Password
In WordPress go to Users > Profile and scroll to Application Passwords. Name it after your assistant and copy it straight away, because WordPress shows it once. This section only appears on sites served over HTTPS.
Connect Your Site
Give your assistant your site address, your username and that password. If your connector offers a one-click approval link instead, take it, and you never type the password at all.
Turn Write Access On
Go to Charitable > Tools > AI MCP and turn on Enable AI write access. Leave it off and you still get a genuinely useful read-only assistant for reporting.
“Set up a fundraiser for the animal shelter, $5,000 goal.”
That is the whole job. There is no form to fill in, and you never name an operation.
Full Instructions
The five steps above are the whole setup. These guides go deeper, and cover every operation in full.
Getting started with AI assistants
Connect an assistant in five steps, with write access off until you turn it on.
AI assistants in Charitable: the full reference
Every operation, how permissions map to roles, and what is deliberately out of reach.
All Charitable documentation
Every guide for the plugin and its add-ons, in one place.
Prompts To Try
Copy any of these and change the details to match your own fundraising. Ask in your own words if you prefer, because you never need to name an operation or fill in a form.
Build a campaign
Set up a fundraiser for the animal shelter, $5,000 goal, ending at the end of next month
You get a real campaign in the Campaign Builder, from a template the assistant picks from your words, with suggested amounts scaled to your goal. It arrives as a draft.
Create a campaign for our winter coat drive with a $2,500 goal
What campaign templates can I choose from?
Customize the donation form
Add a question asking how they heard about us
Make that a dropdown instead: Facebook, a friend, or our newsletter. Default it to our newsletter.
Choice fields can carry their own options and a pre-selected default, in one request.
Make that campaign’s donate button green
Only the button changes. Nothing else moves.
Move the phone number field above the payment section
Record a gift that came in offline
Someone posted a check for $250 from Jane Smith, record it
It will ask for the donor's email address, and it should, because donors are matched on email and inventing one would split or merge real records.
Record a $1,000 cash donation to the winter coat drive
Ask about your fundraising
Who are our biggest supporters?
Ranked over your whole history. Never includes an email or postal address.
Which campaign has raised the most?
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
Diagnose a problem
Why aren’t my donations showing up?
It reads your gateway and test-mode status, so you get a real diagnosis instead of a guess.
Is my site still in test mode?
Which payment gateways are set up?
What can my Charitable site do?
Safe By Design
Nothing is exposed to anyone who could not already do it in your dashboard. Every operation checks a Charitable capability before it runs.
Changes are off until you turn them on
A connected assistant reads immediately and cannot change anything until an administrator enables write access under Charitable > Tools > AI MCP. Ask it to build something with the gate off and it refuses, then tells you the exact switch to flip.
Payment credentials are never readable
Your Stripe, PayPal and Square keys are not in anything an assistant can see, whoever is asking.
Donor lists never include email or postal addresses
Reading a named donor’s contact details needs the sensitive-data capability, so one permitted read cannot become a bulk export of your donor file.
There is no permanent delete for a campaign
An assistant can move one to the trash, which is reversible, and nothing more. It also refuses to trash a campaign that already has donations unless you confirm.
New campaigns are drafts
Unless you ask for otherwise, so nothing goes live by accident.
Every change is logged
Charitable > Tools > Logs, filtered to Abilities, records what an assistant did. Charitable > Tools > System Info has an Abilities API section, the first place to look if a client connects but cannot see your data.
What You Can Do With AI
In Charitable Right Now
Most of them read, a handful write, and every one is registered with the core WordPress Abilities API.
Charitable registers over 25 operations, most of them read-only. Writes stay off until an administrator turns them on.
| Group | What it covers | Reads | Writes | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Diagnostics | Plugin and licence info, site environment, and gateway status. Never keys or secrets. | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Campaigns | List, read, create, update, status, trash and restore, plus donation form fields and Design styles. | 6 | 8 | 14 |
| Donations | List, read, record a gift that came in offline, and summarise totals. | 3 | 1 | 4 |
| Donors | List donors and totals, and read one donor in full where permitted. | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Reports | Overview, day-by-day activity, top campaigns, top donors, and named date ranges. | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| All groups | Everything registered today. | 20 | 9 | 29 |
Each operation carries a description written for the assistant, telling it when that operation is the right choice and what its values mean. The complete list, how permissions map to roles, and what is deliberately out of reach are all in the full reference.
Watch And Learn
Short walkthroughs of Charitable and AI. Click any thumbnail to play it here.
Visit Our YouTube ChannelFrequently Asked Questions
The things people ask before connecting an assistant to a live fundraising site.
Do I need to install a Charitable add-on for this?
No. There is no add-on to buy, nothing to install, and no setup inside Charitable at all. If you are running Charitable Pro 1.8.18 or later on WordPress 6.9 or later, the operations are already registered and waiting for a client to connect.
Which AI assistants work with Charitable?
Any assistant that reads the WordPress Abilities API. Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor are the ones we have used. Charitable did not build an integration with one company’s AI, so when a new client appears it works with Charitable on day one with nothing for you or us to do.
Can an assistant see my donors’ email addresses?
Donor lists never include email or postal addresses, whoever is asking. Reading one named donor’s contact details requires the sensitive-data capability, so a single permitted read cannot become a bulk export of your donor file.
Could an assistant reach my payment keys or move money?
No. Your Stripe, PayPal and Square credentials are not included in anything an assistant can see. It can tell you which gateways are enabled and whether each is configured, and nothing more.
Can an assistant delete one of my campaigns?
There is no permanent delete. An assistant can move a campaign to the trash, which is reversible, and that is all. It will also refuse to trash a campaign that already has donations unless you confirm.
How do I stop an assistant making changes?
Changes are off until you switch them on. A newly connected assistant can read everything and change nothing until an administrator enables write access under Charitable > Tools > AI MCP. You can turn it back off whenever you like, and reads keep working either way.
How do I see what an assistant actually did?
Go to Charitable > Tools > Logs and filter to Abilities. Every change an assistant makes is recorded there. Charitable > Tools > System Info also has an Abilities API section, which is the first place to look if a client connects but cannot see your data.
What happens if I am still on WordPress 6.8?
Nothing registers and nothing about your site changes. The Abilities API arrived in WordPress 6.9, so 6.9 is the floor for any of this to work.
For Developers
An AI assistant is only one consumer of the Abilities API.
Everything here is reachable from your own code.
None of this is Charitable-specific plumbing. Charitable registers its operations with the WordPress Abilities API, which landed in core in WordPress 6.9. Any plugin can describe what it can do, and any connected client reads the same description.
An AI assistant is only one consumer
Every operation is equally reachable from your own PHP, from WP-CLI, or from any HTTP client. If you have been writing custom queries against Charitable’s tables to build a report, an ability is a supported alternative that fires the plugin’s own validation and capability checks.
The write gate is a filter
It defaults to the ai_mcp_write_enabled setting, which is off on a site that has never set it, and you can override it in code. This is the clean way to guarantee an assistant can never write on production while leaving it on in staging.
add_filter(
'charitable_abilities_allow_write',
function ( $enabled ) {
if ( function_exists( 'wp_get_environment_type' ) && 'production' === wp_get_environment_type() ) {
return false;
}
return $enabled;
}
);The gate keys off each operation’s own readonly annotation rather than a list of operation names, so a write operation added in a later release is covered by that filter automatically. Permission checks are separate and always run: every operation tests a Charitable capability before it does anything, so the gate sits on top of your role setup rather than replacing it.
This Is Just The Start
Charitable Pro 1.8.18 covers campaigns, donations, donors and reports. Support for the add-ons is next, and this page is where each one gets documented as it lands.
Machine-readable: this page as Markdown · site index
A lot of peer-to-peer fundraising happens away from a screen: at the finish line of a 5K, on a school noticeboard, in an office kitchen. Charitable Ambassadors 3.4.7 adds 2 printables, a fundraiser flier carrying each fundraiser’s own story and QR code, and a recruitment poster that signs new fundraisers up. Both open as a normal web page and print straight from the browser. Why this is important:
- 🏁 A flier for every fundraiser: Each one carries that fundraiser’s own photo, story and goal, with a QR code that opens their page rather than your main campaign.
- 📌 A poster that recruits: It shows “Now Recruiting” above your campaign name with a large QR code that opens your sign-up form, so someone can start fundraising without waiting on a link from you.
- 🪄 No design tool needed: Both printables render as a normal web page and print from the browser, with no PDF plugin and no designer.
- 📄 2 flier layouts: Hand out carries the full story for giving to friends and family, and Post up carries a short hook with 5 tear-off tabs for a noticeboard.
- 🛡️ Off until you switch it on: Fliers stay off after the update until you enable them under
Charitable » Ambassadors » Other » Fliers, and only the owner or an administrator can open one.
Fee Relief asks your donors one short question at checkout: would you like to cover the processing fee on this gift? Until now that question used a single rate for every donation on a gateway, so a $10 gift and a $500 gift were asked for the same percentage. Fee Relief 1.3.0 lets you set as many donation bands as you like, each carrying its own rate. Why this is important:
- 🪙 Gentler on small gifts: A fixed transaction cost is a far bigger share of a $10 donation than a $500 one, so bands let you ask for less at the bottom.
- 🎚️ As many bands as you need: Each band carries its own percentage and its own fixed amount, and the top band runs on with no upper limit.
- 🛑 An optional ceiling: A Maximum fee field stops any donor being asked for more than a number you choose, however large the gift.
- 🔌 Set per payment gateway: Stripe can run on four bands while Windcave and Payfast stay on a single rate, because bands belong to a gateway and not to your whole site.
- 🛡️ Nothing changes until you say so: Your current rates stay exactly as they are until you switch Use Tiered Rates on under
Charitable » Settings » Advanced » Fee Relief.
Most fundraising dashboards only tell you how much you have raised. Charitable Pro 1.8.19 rebuilds the dashboard and the Reports Overview around the harder questions: whether anything is broken, whether this period beat the last one, and which single change would make the most difference today. Why this is important:
- 📈 Every figure has a trend: Pick a period and the tiles and the chart move together, with each total shown against the previous period.
- 🗓️ Charts that stay readable: Short ranges group donations day by day, while longer ranges group by week or month, so a full year reads as a curve instead of a flat line.
- 🔀 Compare any 2 periods: Not just consecutive ones, so you can ask how this December did against last December. That matters because fundraising is seasonal.
- 📤 Export the whole summary: Send the full overview out as CSV or PDF, ready for a board pack or a funder report.
- 🎯 Score your setup for free: Have your fundraising setup scored, so the one change worth making next is the one you can see.
Most nonprofits sell event tickets in one tool and collect donations in another, which leaves two sets of reports and a manual match at the end of the year. Charitable Events brings both together, selling tickets through the same donation forms and payment gateways you already run in Charitable. Why this is important:
- 🎟️ Every ticket is a donation: Ticket sales run through the gateway you already use and count toward the campaign goal, with everything managed under
Charitable » Events. - 📱 QR check-in from any phone: Each attendee gets their own QR code on the receipt, and volunteers scan at the door through a check-in link that needs no WordPress account.
- 🧾 Receipts ready for tax time: Give each ticket type a fair market value, and Charitable puts the correct tax-deductible amount on every donor receipt.
- 📋 Attendee details at checkout: Ask every guest for a meal choice, shirt size, or access needs, with a separate attendee record created for each ticket.
- 🗓️ Blocks and calendars included: Three editor blocks plus Sugar Calendar and The Events Calendar support put your events where supporters already look.
Your AI assistant can now build, edit, and manage your Charitable fundraising campaigns directly — just by asking. With Charitable Pro adding write support for the WordPress Abilities API, tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor can handle full administrative actions safely through MCP. Why this is important:
- 🤖 Campaign creation in plain language: Prompt your assistant with a goal like “Set up a fundraiser for the shelter with a $5,000 goal”, and it builds a real draft campaign complete with suggested donation tiers.
- 🎨 Instant donation form tweaks: Add custom fields, change button colors, or reorder elements without diving into form settings.
- 📝 Offline gift logging: Tell your assistant about cash or check gifts, and it will match donor emails and record transactions into your history.
- 🛡️ Safety and control by default: Write access stays strictly off until turned on in
Charitable » Tools » AI MCP, keeping read-only reporting safe by default. - 📜 Full audit logging: Every change made by an AI assistant is tracked under
Charitable » Tools » Logs, so you always know who (or what) updated your site.
