AI for charities: what UK charities can automate in 2026

Supporter emails are the first build for most charities, because the questions repeat and the answers sit in the CRM. The build reads each email, finds the supporter's record and drafts a reply about their gift, direct debit, event or change of address. A fundraiser approves it, and the build logs it against the record. Thank-you emails can go out within a day of each gift.

The Fundraising Regulator's AI guidance, last updated 8 December 2025, sets out three points that shape these builds:

• Have "a process in place for a human(s) to check the accuracy, fairness and legality of any content generated by AI".
• "Be transparent with your donors about your use of AI", and be more transparent the greater the risk of misleading donors.
• Monitor and audit chatbots and voicebots where no person is overseeing them in real time.

Email marketing rules also changed in 2026. The charitable purpose soft opt-in, introduced by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, took effect on 5 February 2026. It lets a charity email or text people who have expressed interest in or offered support to it without prior consent, provided it meets the conditions and gives a clear opt-out. Charities can keep a consent-based approach instead.

Which donor CRMs an AI build works with

• Beacon costs from £33.50 a month billed annually (£37 monthly) for Starter with 3 users, and from £114 a month annually (£127 monthly) for Standard with 10 users, as of 7 November 2026. It publishes API documentation.
• Donorfy includes its HMRC Gift Aid integration on Starter, Professional and Enterprise, and lists a REST API on Professional. Its prices depend on the number of constituents.
• Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud gives eligible nonprofits 10 Core licences at no cost through its Power of Us programme. Paid UK editions start at £50 a user a month, billed annually.

Gift Aid admin suits automation because the rules are exact and most of the work is chasing missing details, but HMRC's audit trail rules decide how the build must store evidence. A charity can claim back 25p every time an individual donates £1, if the donor has made a valid declaration.

What HMRC requires

• Declaration contents. The declaration must include a description of the gift, the charity's name, the donor's full name and full home address with postcode, and confirm the donor has paid enough Income Tax or Capital Gains Tax in the tax year.
• Format. HMRC's detailed guidance, updated 20 October 2026, says declarations "can be given in writing (including by email, fax, or text message) or orally (in person or by telephone)".
• Audit trail. A charity must keep records that link each donation to an identifiable donor with a valid declaration. HMRC says "The transcribing of declarations given by donors into a database will not satisfy the requirements to have an auditable record".
• Time limits. Keep a record of declarations for 6 years after the most recent donation claimed on, and claim within 4 years of the end of the financial period the donation was received in.
• Claims. Charities claim online through Charities Online, and "For claims of over 1,000 donations you must use software." HMRC says payment should arrive within 5 weeks.

What the build does

The build finds donations with no declaration or with a missing postcode or house number, and emails the donor a short online declaration form. It stores the donor's own submission as the record, never an AI summary of it. It checks each claim line before the claim file is built, flags duplicates and cancelled declarations, and a finance person submits the claim. Donorfy and some other CRMs already file claims to HMRC, so the build feeds the CRM instead of replacing it.

Worked example for Gift Aid

These figures are assumptions, so swap in your own.

1. Assume a charity receives 4,000 donations a year averaging £20.
2. Assume 1,000 of those come from donors who could Gift Aid but have no valid declaration on file.
3. Those donations total 1,000 × £20 = £20,000, so the unclaimed Gift Aid at 25p per £1 is £20,000 × 0.25 = £5,000 a year.
4. If a chaser recovers valid declarations for 40% of them, the charity claims £2,000 a year more.

The Charity Commission has not written AI-specific guidance and expects trustees to apply its existing guidance. Its blog of 2 April 2024 says "We don't currently anticipate producing specific new guidance on the use of AI", "Trustees remain responsible for decision making", and that "it is vital this process is not delegated to AI or based on AI generated content alone". It suggests charities consider whether an internal AI policy would help.

Most charities have not written one yet. The Charity Digital Skills Report 2026 found 51% of charities have no AI policy and 18% have a formal one. It also found 43% worry about data privacy, GDPR and security, 40% about the accuracy of AI answers and 35% lack trust in AI tools, up from 15% a year earlier.

Data protection rules for a charity AI build

• Use paid AI tiers whose terms keep supporter data out of model training.
• Say in the privacy policy how AI processes personal data, as the Fundraising Regulator's guidance asks.
• Keep a person on any decision about a beneficiary, a safeguarding concern or a complaint.
• Keep consent and opt-out changes with people, and log every change.

Yarigai is a done-for-you AI agency in London. It builds support agents that answer from a client's own documents, inbox triage, document reading and filing, CRMs built around a client's process and internal tools that replace spreadsheets. For a charity, it builds them inside the charity's own CRM, inboxes and accounts. The charity owns the code, the data and the accounts from day one, and there is nothing to sign up for.

A project starts with a free 30-minute scope call on Google Meet, and the charity keeps the notes whether it hires Yarigai or not. A blueprint of about a week, credited to the build, sets out a written plan, a clickable prototype, the monthly running cost, a fixed price and the payback maths. The build takes 2 to 6 weeks with a demo of working software every week. A single workflow, such as supporter email replies, can go live in about two weeks.

A person approves anything that sends money, emails a customer or deletes data. AI and hosting bills are paid by the charity at cost, and the monthly running cost is on the quote. Yarigai's guarantee is one sentence: "If the build isn't profitable for you, we won't build it."

Yarigai has no published charity case study. Its customer support and operations work is described on the services pages.