Here’s a quick experiment you can run in about two minutes. Open an AI chatbot and ask it to describe your organization’s mission, who you serve, and your impact. Then read the answer closely.
For some organizations, the answer is accurate and current. For others, it’s a few years out of date, blends details from a similar-sounding nonprofit, or hedges in ways that don’t quite reflect the work. Either way, that answer is increasingly what donors and funders see first.
3 places people are finding your nonprofit
Search used to mean one thing. Now it happens in at least three places at once: traditional search engines, AI tools, and third-party nonprofit platforms like Candid, Charity Navigator, and Giving Compass. A little over one-third of people start all searches with AI tools, and that number is expected to grow.
There’s a shift in nonprofit due diligence, too. Many foundations have seen application volume rise sharply, and some have responded by pivoting to invitation-only or referral-based processes. That means program officers are often looking you up online before you ever hear from them. Individual donors, meanwhile, tend to check more than one source before giving.
Much of your information doesn’t start with you
The information that feeds today’s nonprofit discovery takes a path you may not know much about. Every year, if your organization is a certain size, it files a 990, which is then cataloged in a publicly available IRS database. That database feeds third-party profiles. Those profiles, along with your website and any media mentions, are what AI tools read when they answer a question about you.
What all this means is that a funder may or may not see the mission statement on your website before making a funding decision.
Consistency matters more than volume
AI search works differently from SEO. It looks for phrases and answers rather than keywords, and it strongly prefers information that it can verify across multiple sources. If your mission appears four different ways across eight different sites, an AI tool may describe you unevenly or leave you out of an answer altogether.
A few places you can start:
- Audit. Ask AI tools and search engines the questions a donor or funder would ask about you.
- Align. Check that your mission language matches across your website, your 990, and your third-party profiles.
- Structure. Give each program its own clearly titled page. Impact and FAQ pages are becoming especially useful.
The harder questions
Running the audit is the straightforward part. Deciding what to do with it is where most small teams get stuck: Which platforms actually matter for an organization your size? Where does your data originate, and what can you realistically change? Who owns updates and on what schedule? And how would you know whether any of it is working?
Nonprofit Digital Visibility in the Age of AI, developed by Giving Compass and Spur Local, walks through those questions across eight short sessions. It’s free, self-paced, and built for teams without a dedicated communications staff.
Explore the course and sign up