🗞️ AI for Non Profits Network Welcome & Weekly Briefing 11/04

The new weekly digest from non-profits interested in AI. What's in this week's Briefing: Does conversation end the online donation form? How to appear in LLM answers. And plenty of relevant stories.

Nov 04, 2025

In The Briefing this week:

💭 Thought for the Week: The End of the Donation Form? What OpenAI’s new Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) means for giving
👀 What’s Caught our Eye: Answer Engine Optimization
🌟 Interesting new stuff

1) 💭 Thought for the Week: The End of the Donation Form: Why I Think the Future of Giving Will Be a Conversation 💸

I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed filling out a donation form. Those endless boxes. The clunky drop-down menus. The sense that, once I’d clicked “Submit,” my connection to the cause stopped there. For years, that’s been the standard shape of online giving. But lately, something feels like it’s shifting.

I’ve started noticing how much of my digital life now happens through conversation. I ask ChatGPT to summarise the news, order groceries through a chat window, or get customer support from a bot that sounds remarkably polite. Increasingly, I’m not browsing, I’m just asking and getting answers. It made me wonder: if shopping, banking, and learning can all happen inside a chat, why not giving?

This idea - that giving could happen through an AI conversation - is no longer hypothetical. OpenAI’s new Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which powers its “Buy it in ChatGPT” feature, makes it possible to complete a purchase (or donation) without ever leaving the chat. Retailers like Walmart are already on board. You can imagine where this goes next: someone asks “What’s the best way to help families after the hurricane in Jamaica?” and an AI explains verified options, shows evidence, and offers to process the donation then and there.

That flow, from question to action, feels far more human than the static donation form ever did. No redirects. No retyping your details. No dropping out of the moment. Just a conversation that knows what you care about and helps you act on it.

The technology underneath is quietly powerful. Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite, for example, uses AI to reorder payment methods and remove unnecessary friction. It’s been shown to lift conversion rates significantly. The “machine” now knows when to step aside and let generosity through. And discovery itself is changing. As “answer engines” like ChatGPT and Perplexity replace Google search, visibility isn’t about keywords anymore, it’s about being cited in AI answers. And traffic from conversational answers converts 6x more than traditional web search.

But what excites me most is continuity. Imagine coming back months later, to a charity’s website, or to an in-chat reminder and picking up right where you left off. Your previous donation, your reason for giving, your Gift Aid settings, even your memorial dedication: all remembered. The conversation never breaks. Giving becomes part of an ongoing relationship, not a one-off task.

So maybe the donation form isn’t disappearing after all. It’s just becoming invisible, absorbed into the flow of conversation. And perhaps, in that shift, we’re finally rediscovering what giving was always meant to feel like: simple, personal, and deeply human.

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What is AEO?

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the practice of structuring your content so that it can be directly referenced, recommended or cited by AI-powered “answer engines” (such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, and others) rather than simply ranked via a traditional search engine page. Instead of relying on people finding you via keyword search results, AEO aims for your website or content to be the answer when someone asks a question conversationally.

Key stats & trends

A study found that 13.1% of all U.S. desktop queries triggered Google’s AI-generated overviews as of March 2025 (up from 6.5% earlier). Content Marketing Institute
According to research cited by Exploding Topics, traffic and value from LLM-search are projected to surpass traditional organic search by 2028. Exploding Topics
In a case study, content optimized for answer engines saw +92% in SERP visibility, +84% growth in organic traffic, and +345% increase in traffic from AI answer mentions. enaks

I listened to a fascinating podcast this week (Lenny’s Podcast with Ethan Smith) that outlines it all, along with a practical framework for implementing AEO for your organisation.

Why this matters for non-profits

For non-profit organisations, the shift means the way people discover your work is changing, from typing keywords into Google, to asking a chat or assistant a question like “How can I support cancer research charities using AI?” or “What non-profits use AI for parental support?” When your content is built to answer those questions directly (with clarity, authority, structured layout), you stand a stronger chance of being the organisation that the AI recommends - which means more meaningful visits, engagement and donor/supporter interest.