AI for Non Profits Network: Weekly Briefing 05/19
The weekly digest from a network of non-profits interested in AI. In this week's briefing: AI search is reducing organic traffic; where to use AI in your donor strategy; and lots of great resources.
In The Briefing this week:
👀 What's Caught our Eye: AI search is eating nonprofit organic traffic - and that may not be all bad
💭 Thought for the Week: The boring half of the donor file is where the AI math actually compounds
⭐ Interesting News and Funding Calls
🌐 From Across the Network
This newsletter is supported by Whitelabel.ai - helping nonprofits cut through the AI noise with practical tools built for mission-driven teams. Find out more at whitelabel.ai - They’re giving $50k in technical services to run fundraising pilots - sign up!
1) 👀 What Caught Our Eye: AI search is eating nonprofit organic traffic - and that may not be all bad
The 2026 M+R Benchmarks Study, published last month, shows that organic search traffic to US nonprofit websites fell steadily through 2025. M+R points to AI Overviews on Google and the migration of search queries into Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini.
Organic search still accounts for 39% of all visits, so the channel is some distance from crisis. The line has bent, though, and every monthly slice in the data tells the same story. Read alongside the Blackbaud Institute’s finding that digital fundraising revenue grew about 11% across the year, the picture becomes harder to read than the headline allows: traffic falling, money holding.
At AWS Imagine in London last week, more than one communications lead told us that the visits they were losing had been the wrong visits all along - informational lookups, school assignments, casual readers who were never going to give. AI tools, on this reading, are stripping out an audience that always cost more in server time than it yielded. The interpretation is generous, and lines up uncomfortably with a second strand in the Blackbaud data: gifts under $1,000 fell by 1.1% in 2025, while gifts of $1,000 or more rose by 4.7%. The visitors a generic AI chat answer would always have satisfied are the ones disappearing first.
Why it matters for nonprofits. The acquisition funnel is shifting before the gift conversation is. If fewer prospects reach the page at all, the trust signals on the pages they do reach carry more weight, and the share of new donor relationships beginning in organic search becomes a quarterly board question.
What to do this week. Pull eighteen months of organic-search traffic to your donation pages and read the trend rather than the total. Then run three honest questions about your organization through an AI Overview and a chatbot. Few teams have looked.
2) 💭 Thought for the Week: The boring half of the donor file is where the AI math actually compounds
Monthly Giving Awareness Week ran from May 11 through 15, coordinated by RKD Group, GivingTuesday, and Positive Equation. Its second outing drew a fraction of the press that the agentic-AI platform launches at AFP ICON pulled the week before. Given the numbers underneath, the proportions are upside down.
The 2026 M+R Benchmarks shows that monthly giving accounted for 27% of all online revenue across the US sector in 2025. Many organizations now take a third or more of their revenue from sustainers. Recurring giving is the largest and most reliable growth lever in the fundraising stack, and it has very little to do with AI.
Most of the AI-in-fundraising conversation right now sits at the top of the funnel - prospecting, list-building, outreach to people who have never heard of the organization. Very little of it sits with the sustainer who is about to lapse. The vendor opportunity is at the top of the funnel, and the discourse follows.
Whilst there has been a few big announcements of AI donor management tools - they usually point at acquisition and major-gift cultivation. The math lives further down the file. For a mid-sized US nonprofit, a five-point lift in monthly-giving retention compounds across years at flat cost-to-serve, and tends to be worth more than a fifty-point lift in acquisition that has to be re-earned every quarter. Retention is still handled in most teams as a hygiene function, passed to whoever is junior enough that no one fights over the brief.
What AI contributes here is real, and quieter than the vendor brochures suggest. A model can spot a sustainer whose engagement pattern has shifted six weeks before they cancel. It can draft a reactivation email that references the actual program a lapsed donor used to support, rather than an all-purpose ‘we miss you’. It can sit on top of a CRM export and tell a fundraiser which 12% of sustainers will probably upgrade if asked, and which 4% will resent the ask. Several of those things move the numbers more reliably than anything in the agentic catalog.
We are writing with skin in the game. The five $50,000 technical services pilot grants we announced last month are aimed precisely here. Retention, reactivation and the middle of the donor file are what the cohort will be testing AI against, with real numbers and external evaluation. Acquisition is a genuine problem; we think the leverage on the other side of the file is larger.
Five lessons worth taking back to your team:
Look at sustainer retention before acquisition tools. A point of retention compounds across years; a point of acquisition has to be re-won every quarter.
Treat reactivation as a strategic project rather than a year-end campaign. AI moves the math here more than anywhere else.
Audit where your AI vendor budget actually goes. If it all sits at the top of the funnel, you are paying to chase strangers while the people who already love you quietly drift.
Ask your CRM provider what they can show you about sustainer churn signals. A vague answer is a strategic gap with a software face.
Be honest about whose problem you are solving. Sustainer retention is invisible from a board slide; that is why the AI conversation skips it.
3) ⭐ Interesting News and Funding Calls
OpenAI Foundation: Wave 2 of the People-First AI Fund - $9.5M in board-directed grants for nonprofits in health, education, and community resilience, expected to be announced shortly. Wave 1 sent $40.5M to 208 US nonprofits. Worth reading the Wave 1 grantee list before pitching.
Blackbaud Institute 2025 Trends in Giving — total giving up 4.3% in 2025, but gifts under $1,000 fell while gifts above $1,000 grew. The midlevel donor squeeze is real. Resource page.
2026 M+R Benchmarks Study — the annual reference data on digital fundraising for the US sector. Read it.
4) 🌐 From Across the Network
Have an event, case study, gathering or interesting insight you would like to share with the network? Drop us a note by replying to this email.
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