Agentic Giving: Building a Trusted Path from Generosity to Action

By Jerry Needel, chief of product innovation, Blackbaud

People are innately generous. Every day, people encounter stories, causes, and needs that inspire them to act. Acting on that impulse has never existed in a vacuum, but today’s donors live in a world where information arrives continuously: news cycles move quickly; communities rally around emerging needs in real time; new technologies are reshaping how people discover information, evaluate options, and make decisions.

As artificial intelligence becomes a more common part of everyday life and evolves from providing information to helping facilitate actions, important questions are emerging. What role should AI play in charitable giving? What responsibilities should come with that role? And what safeguards are necessary when generosity is involved?

At Blackbaud, we’re actively exploring these questions and what they could mean for the future of giving.

From AI-Discovery to True Agentic Giving

Six in ten social impact organizations cite revenue as a top concern over the next three years, with nonprofits especially anxious about their ability to sustain income, highlighting the importance of meeting donors where they are to capture intent to give. AI has the potential to reduce the distance between generosity and impact. But realizing that potential requires moving beyond AI that simply answers questions or recommends organizations to engage with. It requires creating a trusted path through which a donor’s decision to give can become a completed gift. And, most importantly, it requires an in-depth understanding of the unique context of charitable giving and the safeguards that must be in place to protect and strengthen the relationship between the donor and the charity.

This is where we see the potential for agentic giving—helping people discover causes, explore options, make informed decisions, and, when appropriate and authorized, take action, without losing the trust and human agency that make giving meaningful.

In our current state, popular AI models can surface information about nonprofits and causes, and that’s a valuable use case. Most nonprofits have donation information readily available on their websites, but combing through dozens of websites and choosing the next best action takes time. The example most commonly cited is supporting disaster relief. A donor can ask an LLM, “Can you give me the information for three charities that are providing direct, local relief for this event?”. The LLM can quickly give her an answer that has analyzed local news coverage, social media updates, and rapidly changing information to decipher which local organizations are providing which services. After reviewing the options and understanding how the charities will use the funds, she selects a local food bank and gives $200 to them.

Agentic giving can go even further, though. The agent does not merely suggest where the donor might go next. With the donor’s permission, it connects an informed decision to a trusted system capable of processing a donation to put generosity into motion.

The Possibilities of Agentic Giving

Imagine a scenario where a donor wants to support childhood literacy in his community. He has set aside $1,200 for the year, but there are multiple ways he could allocate those funds, whether supporting access to books, tutoring, family literacy or classroom resources. He asks an AI assistant: “Create a plan to use this money to improve reading opportunities for elementary school students in my area.”

The agent could then ask questions to understand his priorities and draw from current, permissioned and verifiable information about organizations addressing those specific needs. It could explain how their programs differ, identify active funding opportunities and surface whether his employer offers a matching-gift program to help his generosity go further.

The donor might decide to direct $600 to an after-school tutoring program and $50 a month to an initiative expanding access to books. Before any action was taken, he would be shown the verified recipients, amounts, gift purposes, relevant disclosures, privacy choices and payment details. He could revise any element or stop the process. And then, with his explicit authorization, the agent could initiate the donations through the appropriate donation platforms without him having to leave the AI conversation.

Alternatively, an agent could be directed to donate $25 a month to various local causes supporting animal welfare. The agent could go to multiple nonprofit websites, even engage with chat bots on those sites to gather information, and once a month surface a qualified donation opportunity to the donor. With one click, the donor can approve the donation, and the agent executes the gift.

These examples show the meaningful progression from AI-assisted discovery to agentic giving. This creates an entirely new way to give that has the potential to simplify the end-to-end donor journey and speed the transaction, making it faster and easier to move from intent to donation.

Could a donor just go to a website and donate? Of course. But for a donor who wants a customized plan to meet specific goals to put the money into action quickly, without spending days or weeks researching various options, and without having to go to multiple places to transact, agentic giving is an exciting option. Donors are already interacting with LLM’s across various facets of their life, and we have to be ready to meet donors where they are to provide seamless giving experiences.

We’re only on the precipice of what’s possible, and Blackbaud is excited to continue exploring this new method of helping nonprofits raise funds.

Bringing Agentic Infrastructure to Giving

Agentic giving must pair the convenience and capacity emerging in agentic commerce with the context, accountability and care that generosity demands. The retail sector is already rolling out agentic commerce experiences, where a consumer can express a need to an AI agent, consider available options, and authorize a purchase.

If agentic commerce can reduce the distance between a consumer’s request and a completed purchase, agentic giving can reduce the distance between a person’s desire to help and resources reaching a mission. Donors are already interfacing with AI in commercial experiences, and Blackbaud Institute research shows that 71% of donors are either more comfortable or equally comfortable with the social sector using AI than for-profit companies. As everyday consumers become more and more accustomed to these types of fast and easy AI-enabled transactions, those expectations will transfer over to their giving preferences as well, not unlike the link between subscription streaming services and the increased popularity of monthly recurring giving.

However, when it comes to charitable giving, there is an increased level of trust and transparency that’s required in order to preserve the relationship between the donor and the nonprofit that is so critically important in the social impact landscape. A charitable contribution is an expression of purpose and trust. The donor may care not only about the recipient, but also about the program supported, the conditions attached to the gift and the information shared with the organization.

The Elements of a Trusted Agentic Giving Experience

The central question for agentic giving is not merely whether an AI system can facilitate an action. It is whether donors, nonprofits and the communities they serve can trust how that action is informed, authorized and governed. An agentic donation should feel simple to the donor, but responsibly enabling it requires a true connected ecosystem and human agency must remain central throughout.

Creating a reliable agentic giving experience requires:

• Verified information: Donors should know which organizations they are supporting, how much they are giving, what purpose their gifts will serve and what information they are choosing to share.

• Fraud protection and trusted disbursement of funds: The payment processor’s role is to protect the donation against fraud, verify the agent initiating the donation, verify the legitimacy of the organization receiving the donation, confirm the donation matches the donor’s intent, deliver the funds swiftly, and give charities full transparency on the payment and evidence.

• Clear authorization: The recipient, designation, amount and terms must be presented clearly. The donor must give affirmative authorization, always keeping the act of giving in the donor’s hands.

• Appropriate donor consent and disclosures: Nonprofits need confidence that the gift is being completed through infrastructure that preserves relevant consent, transaction and disclosure information, and that those details will flow accurately into the systems they rely on. The nonprofit must be able to reconcile, acknowledge and steward the donation to build the relationship with the donor.

If done well and responsibly, the technology improves the giving experience by reducing friction or speeding the transaction. But it requires the right technology partner.

Blackbaud’s Role in Connecting the Giving Ecosystem

Blackbaud’s vision is to be the world’s most trusted and powerful AI engine for social impact. As the only dedicated social impact technology provider that sits across every touchpoint of the social impact ecosystem, Blackbaud has decades of experience—across giving, fundraising, engagement, financial management, grantmaking and corporate impact—that give us a distinctive perspective on what needs to happen behind the scenes for an expression of generosity to become a trusted, traceable gift. As the capability for true agentic giving emerges, we’re committed to being part of the discussion and helping represent the needs of the nonprofits we serve.

AI will soon become capable of moving money on a person’s behalf. We believe that generosity should be included in that transformation and that the philanthropic community should have a voice in the process. We must ensure that the technology is designed to an appropriately higher standard, with trust, transparency and human agency as foundational elements of the giving experiences being built.

Done responsibly, agentic giving could help more people turn intention into action, help social impact organizations connect with supporters in the moments they are moved to give, and help resources move at the speed of need.

Let’s Shape the Future Together

The decisions being made today about AI, trust, transparency, consent, and accountability will help shape how generosity is expressed in the years ahead.

That’s why we’re beginning this conversation now. We believe AI has the potential to help more people connect their values with action. But realizing that potential requires thoughtful collaboration and a deep understanding of what makes giving different from every other kind of transaction.

The future of agentic giving remains unwritten. Together, we have an opportunity to shape it in a way that strengthens trust, expands generosity, and helps resources reach communities more effectively.

We’re actively seeking perspectives from nonprofit leaders, fundraisers, and others who are interested in exploring these questions with us.

If you’d like to participate in ongoing discovery and help inform the future of agentic giving, we’d welcome the conversation.

Please sign up here to engage with us and learn more.