September brought the UK’s first charity donation set up entirely inside an AI chat, a funder shutting its doors because of AI-written applications, and the clearest evidence yet that AI search is eating into charity website traffic. Underneath the headlines sits a quieter theme: regulators and sector bodies are now asking whether the governance around AI has kept pace with its use. If you work in a charity, a CIC or any purpose-led organisation and are trying to make sense of all this without a digital team to hand, this round-up is for you. For each story we have tried to answer the question that matters most: what, if anything, should you do about it?
The first donation made entirely by an AI agent
On 22 September, GoCardless and the anti-poverty charity Trussell announced the UK’s first agentic account-to-account payment: a monthly Direct Debit donation set up entirely within an AI chat. The donor asks the agent about Trussell’s work, picks £5, £10 or £15 a month, and enters bank details without ever visiting a donation page. The project ran under the FCA’s AI Live Testing programme, and GoCardless cites research suggesting 64% of UK consumers are open to AI managing recurring payments provided they keep control over limits or approval.
Trussell’s head of individual giving, Christianne McKenzie, called it “a genuine win for everyone” if it makes committing to a regular gift simpler. The Chartered Institute of Fundraising struck a more cautious note, with Claire Stanley pointing out that “donors need to know when they are interacting with AI, understand what they are agreeing to.”
So what does it mean for an ordinary charity? Honestly, not much this year. This was a proof of concept inside a regulatory sandbox, and the technology depends on something that has not happened yet: large numbers of people becoming comfortable letting software move their money. not just a software release, and plenty of technologies that were once touted as imminent (VR, AR, voice commerce) have sat in abeyance for years. It is quite possible agentic payments join them.
But what makes it worth your attention anyway is the problem it is aimed at. Regular giving is where most charities most need growth, the donation form is where they lose people, and younger donors are the ones most at ease with conversational interfaces. If this does catch on, it has the potential to close that gap, first through a charity’s own assistant on its website or WhatsApp, and later through the donor’s own assistant in their bank app or phone, which would decide which charity to suggest and relay your case for you. The sensible response is not to build anything, but to make sure you would be ready if the moment arrives: a regular-giving proposition clear enough for a machine to explain accurately, a payment provider that is building for this (Blackbaud announced its own “Agents for Good” the same month), and a line in your AI policy about agents, since the regulator’s rules on transparency and human oversight apply whether the agent is yours or someone else’s. Charity Digital’s explainer on the risks of agentic AI is a sober companion read, with its reminder that trustees remain responsible for any decision an agent takes on the charity’s behalf.
Read the GoCardless announcement or Civil Society’s coverage.
The regulator wants your AI advisers to read its guidance too
If, like us, you advise charities on AI, whether as a consultant, an agency, a software vendor or a well-meaning trustee’s nephew, the Fundraising Regulator now expects them to know its rules. In a 7 September blog, policy director Paul Winyard said providers of AI advice are “strongly encouraged to reflect our guidance in their resources”, warning that advice which ignores the regulator’s position “may be incomplete, or even incompatible with the Code”. There is no enforcement mechanism for third parties, but the direction of travel is plain.
For a charity, the practical value here is that it gives you a simple test to apply to anyone selling you AI help. The regulator’s guidance asks four things: agree an AI policy before you adopt tools, risk assess first, be transparent with donors about where AI is used, and keep a human checking anything AI produces before it goes out. If a supplier’s pitch does not touch those points, you are entitled to ask why. The same week, Andrew Harper of Epworth Investment Management told the Faith Charities Forum that “a policy nobody has read is not governance; it is insulation.” Given the Charity Digital Skills Report found only 7% of boards review AI use regularly, the most pressing action for most trustees is not writing a new policy but checking whether anyone has bothered to read, and adhere to, the one they already have.
Read the Fundraising Regulator’s blog, its AI fundraising guidance, and Civil Society’s report from the Faith Charities Forum.
What the public actually thinks about digital giving
The Fundraising Regulator also published its second wave of public perceptions research, run by Opinium with 3,018 UK adults in May 2026. It is the best fresh evidence we have seen this year on how people feel about the ways charities ask them for money online, and it is worth ten minutes of any fundraiser’s time.
The headline is that 52% of people are comfortable with online fundraising platforms, but that figure hides a steep age gradient: 61% of 16 to 24s against just 31% of over-65s. Contactless “tap to donate” sits at 43% comfortable with 50% reporting a positive experience, text giving at 38% and 41%, and round-ups at 48% and 48%. Charity advertising and direct marketing, including social and email, is at 46% comfortable.
What this means in practice depends on who your supporters are. If your donor base skews older, the data is a caution against pushing everyone towards an online platform or a QR code; keeping a phone number and a paper option may seem old-fashioned, but it is responsive to your donors’ situation. If you are trying to reach under-35s, the same data says digital channels are where comfort already lives. Two findings apply to everyone. A quarter of people look at a charity’s website before giving, so the donate page is doing more persuasion than most charities credit it with. And while only 17% said they had seen the Fundraising Regulator Badge in the past year, 45% said seeing it would make them more likely to donate. If the badge is not on your donation page and in your email footer, that is an easy, free fix you can make now.
Read the research summary or the full report (PDF).
A funder closes its doors, was AI is really to blame?
On 3 September Civil Society reported that the GC Gibson Charitable Trust, a £16m Cardiff-based funder, had stopped accepting online applications after receiving more than 600 in a year against the ten or so grants it typically makes that way. The trust said AI had made it “too easy to find us and write a submission”. Its website now reads: “There is no point contacting us unless we have already given you money.”
If you write funding bids, this story probably made your stomach drop, so it is worth reading the follow-up. Civil Society’s in-depth piece later in the month cited an Association of Charitable Foundations survey of around 400 members in which only 22% saw AI-generated applications as a moderate challenge and 7% a significant one, while 84% named beneficiary need as their main concern and 54% the sheer demand for funding. Post-Covid need and falling statutory income are driving application volumes; AI is amplifying a problem, not creating it.
There are two lessons for a small charity. The first is that funders can now spot generic, AI-drafted applications, and some will penalise them. Using AI to tidy a draft or check it against the criteria is fine; using it to generate the bid from scratch is increasingly a false economy, because what funders say they want is specificity about your community and your evidence, which is exactly what a model cannot supply. The second is more or a problem. If more funders retreat behind “by invitation only”, the charities that lose are the ones without networks, and the Charity Excellence Framework’s new autumn PESTLE names the AI divide between large and small charities as one of the biggest sector risks of the next five years. Relationships with funders, built before you need the money, are becoming a digital-era survival skill.
Read the GC Gibson story and the in-depth analysis.
AI search is cutting traffic to charity and arts websites
It’s probably not news that your website visits may have been drifting down this year, and you had already assumed you knew why, but September provided an evidence-based explanation. Digital agency One Further updated its study of AI Overviews in the cultural sector, tracking the same 100 UK cultural organisations against the previous year. Search traffic was down 18% year on year, with 79 of the 100 organisations seeing a fall. Visibility inside Google’s AI Overviews went up, but that visibility did not turn into visits, because Google now answers the question on the results page. Hannah Barton, head of digital media at National Museums Scotland, made the same argument in Museums Journal, citing Ahrefs data that click-through rates have fallen by as much as 58% since AI Overviews launched.
The pages being hit hardest are informational ones: opening hours, “what is” explainers, condition guides, how-to content. For a health charity whose traffic has historically come from people searching symptoms, or an advice charity whose most-visited pages explain benefits rules, the same mechanism applies. Charity Digital’s freshly updated guide to charity websites now opens with this problem, noting Semrush data that referrals from tools like ChatGPT grew 66% but still make up just 0.14% of web visits. In other words, the traffic AI takes away is not coming back through AI.
What should you do?
First, stop treating total visits as the measure of your website’s health and look instead at the things AI cannot do for you: donations, sign-ups, enquiries, service referrals.
Second, accept that your website’s job is shifting from being found to being trusted. Someone who arrives after an AI summary is further down the path and wants proof you are real and effective: impact, people, registration number, the Fundraising Badge.
Third, make your factual content easy for machines to read accurately (clear headings, plain answers, structured data), because if AI is going to summarise you anyway, you want it to get it right.
The bigger point is about trajectory. We can’t change what’s happening with increasing use of AI tools that scrape content, but we can exploit the opportunities. So consider wether website visits are as important to your objectives as helping your beneficiaries find what they need, even if that means they find it somewhere else.
Where information lives online is changing faster than at any time since the arrival of smartphones, and the organisations that will cope best are those that understand their audience well enough to meet them wherever that turns out to be.
Read One Further’s 2026 update and Hannah Barton in Museums Journal.
The Audience Agency closes, leaving a data gap in the arts
The biggest structural story for arts organisations was the voluntary liquidation of The Audience Agency on 10 September after 14 years. The operator of Audience Finder and Audience Spectrum blamed “sustained financial pressures”; its last filed accounts showed income of £2.65m, down 22%, and a deficit of nearly £475,000. Chief executive Anne Torreggiani said the model of “affordable and free support is just not sustainable”.
If you run a theatre, gallery, museum or festival, this matters in two immediate ways. The first is practical: if your organisation has been relying on Audience Finder for box office benchmarking or on Audience Spectrum segments for marketing, you need a plan for what replaces them. Arts Council England says organisations can still download their historic data, so do that now, before it becomes harder. The second is about timing. ACE opened guidance for the 2028 to 2033 National Portfolio round the same month, with applications running from 20 October to 15 December and funding terms extended from three to five years. Applicants will be asked to evidence who their audiences are just as the sector’s shared tool for doing so has disappeared, so whatever audience data you hold in your own CRM and ticketing system has just become considerably more valuable.
There is a wider lesson here for every charity that relies on a shared piece of sector infrastructure, whether a benchmarking service, a free platform or a membership body’s toolkit. Infrastructure funded on goodwill can vanish quickly, and it is worth knowing which external services your organisation could not easily do without. On a more hopeful note, ACE launched an executive AI leadership programme for cultural leaders, and the Museums Association opened the first UK-wide survey of museum AI use, with results due in December. ACE’s own Museums Overview 2026 observes that “digital technologies and AI are yet to become fully embedded in museum strategies”, which, read generously, means the field is still wide open.
Read The Audience Agency’s statement, Arts Professional’s reaction piece, the ACE NPO guidance coverage and the Museums Journal AI survey.
Digital exclusion, in numbers
It is easy, in a round-up full of AI, to forget that a large part of the population is not online at all, and that charities serve a disproportionate share of them. Two September publications put hard figures on this. Family Fund’s “Digitally Excluded” report, based on 660 families on low incomes raising disabled or seriously ill children, found 93% are digitally excluded or at risk of exclusion, 89% struggle to afford internet access and devices, and 32% are cutting back their own internet use to save money, in some cases alongside food and heating. Good Things Foundation’s Digital Nation 2026 figures, quoted by Charity Digital, put the UK’s offline population at 2.2 million, two-thirds of them over 65, with 1.6 million adults unable to access the services they need online.
For service-delivery charities the implication is direct: every time a referral form, a booking system or a benefits application moves online, some of the people you exist to help fall out of it. That argues for keeping phone and in-person routes open and for treating digital inclusion (devices, data, confidence) as part of the service rather than a side project. For fundraisers and comms teams it is a reminder that the people who read your Instagram are not the people in your case studies, and that supporters respond to this gap when it is explained plainly. There is also a new policy hook. Vicky Foxcroft was confirmed as Minister for Civil Society on 15 September, almost two months after the reshuffle, with a brief that puts civil society and digital inclusion in the same portfolio. If your charity works on either, that is a door worth knocking on.
Read Family Fund’s findings on Charity Digital, Charity Digital’s Digital Champions piece and Third Sector on the ministerial brief.
Platforms, payments and the Christmas rush
A busy month for fundraising tech, so here is what each announcement means depending on where you sit.
If you use Raiser’s Edge NXT, Blackbaud used its bbcon conference to announce “Lantern”, which it describes as the first language model built specifically for fundraising, arriving in the product from 2027. Nothing to do yet, but expect AI features to start appearing in your CRM whether you asked for them or not, which is one more reason to have that AI policy in place.
If you run challenge events, two things. JustGiving launched an events integration with GivePanel, developed with British Heart Foundation, Alzheimer’s Society, Diabetes UK and Prostate Cancer UK, that joins event registration and fundraising pages together (it needs JustGiving’s Grow plan and Stripe). More immediately useful for any size of charity is the stat JustGiving shared alongside it: London Marathon fundraisers who connect a fitness app to their page raise 37% more on average. Nudging your runners to connect Strava or FitBit (and possibly Garmin) is free and, on this evidence, worth doing. Givestar raised $12m to grow its cashless giving platform, 76% of whose users are under 35, a sign that investors see events and tap-to-give as the route to younger donors.
If legacies matter to you, Smee & Ford made its legacy notification service free for every UK charity, pointing out that more than £1bn a year is left to charities not registered to receive alerts. If you are not registered, there is now no reason not to be.
If you take regular gifts online, which is nearly everyone, Access PaySuite’s analysis of Trustpilot reviews should sting a little: it ranked charities second worst of 16 sectors for payment experience, scoring 1.45 out of 5, with difficulty cancelling direct debits the most common complaint. It is vendor research with a small sample, but the pattern it describes will be familiar to anyone who has tried to cancel a charity gift. It matters more from 1 January 2027, when the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act’s subscription rules will require clear renewal reminders and easy cancellation for memberships and recurring payments. Making cancellation easy feels counterintuitive for a fundraiser, but a donor who can leave without a fight is far more likely to come back.
And if you are planning Christmas, goDonate’s platform data is worth a look: 15% of December one-off gifts arrive in the final 72 hours before Christmas, 67% of Christmas Eve donations are made on mobile (77% on the day itself), and digital wallets account for over half of Christmas Eve payments. Keep your campaign running past the 25th, and make sure the form works with a thumb and offers Apple Pay or Google Pay.
Read about Lantern, the JustGiving fitness-app figure, Givestar’s raise, Smee & Ford, the payment experience research, the DMCC subscription rules and goDonate’s Christmas data.
Regulation round-up: the ICO becomes the Information Commission, and Gift Aid goes digital (slowly)
On 30 September the ICO formally became the Information Commission under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, swapping a single commissioner for a board. It will keep the ICO name and nothing changes in your day-to-day GDPR or PECR obligations, so there is no action to take. The reason to note it is what the new body says it will focus on: AI, cyber resilience and children’s privacy. Expect more guidance in those areas over the next year, and if your charity works with children online, note that TikTok dropped its appeals this month and accepted a £12.7m children’s privacy fine.
Charity Finance Group launched its “Back the Future of Gift Aid” campaign, calling on the Treasury to build “a simple, secure and modern digital Gift Aid system” ahead of the 28 October Budget. Anyone who has wrestled with Gift Aid declarations and HMRC spreadsheets will understand why; it is one of the few places where digitisation would directly put money in charities’ hands. HMRC’s September newsletter confirmed a more modest step: streamlined single-purpose screens for online claims. If your charity is not already claiming Gift Aid on everything it can, that remains the easiest fundraising uplift available.
Two smaller items are worth a look. OSCR became the first UK charity regulator to put a generative AI assistant on its guidance, launching “OSCR Finder” in beta with source links and an error disclaimer. If your charity is wondering how to add an AI assistant to its own website responsibly, this is a useful template: label it clearly as experimental, link to the source for every answer, and tell people it can be wrong. And City of London Police opened its free Police CyberAlarm monitoring tool to charities, citing DSIT figures that 28% of charities identified a breach or attack in the last year. For a small charity with no IT support, a free early-warning system that sits alongside your existing firewall is about as low-effort as cyber security gets. The Charity Commission also confirmed new accounting thresholds for financial years ending on or after 30 September 2026; worth a conversation with your treasurer if you are near the £500,000 income mark.
Read the Information Commission announcement, CFG’s Gift Aid campaign, the HMRC charities newsletter, OSCR Finder, the Charity Commission accounting changes and Police CyberAlarm.
Innovation corner
Three use-cases caught our eye this month, each useful for a different kind of organisation.
Campaign Against Living Miserably won Digital Innovation of the Year at the Third Sector Awards for a Minecraft fundraising world built with the Jingle Jam gaming community. Gaming fundraising still sounds exotic to many boards, but Charity Digital notes that nearly three in five charities already use some form of gamification and the UK games industry is worth £7.9bn. You do not need to build a Minecraft world; you do need to be ready when a streamer picks your cause, and Charity Digital’s safeguarding guide for gaming fundraisers explains what that readiness looks like.
Zoe Amar’s Third Sector column highlighted Speakers Trust’s “Insight by Wilf”, an AI tool that photographs 40,000 paper feedback forms a year and saves around £20,000 in data entry, now adopted by five other charities. This is the kind of AI project we would point most small charities towards: a boring, repetitive, well-defined task, a clear saving, and no decisions about people being handed to a machine. If you have a pile of paper forms, surveys or handwritten records somewhere, this is a conversation worth having.
And the Third Sector Trends study, the longest-running survey of the voluntary sector in England and Wales, opened a free interactive data portal built on 8,680 responses from its 2025 wave. For anyone writing a funding bid or a strategy who needs a credible benchmark for workforce, volunteering or income trends, it is now a few clicks away rather than buried in a PDF.
Read the Third Sector Awards winners, Zoe Amar on innovation and the Third Sector Trends portal.
Also this month
Charity Digital turned 25, launched a new Marketplace of discounted technology for charities (worth a browse before your next laptop or antivirus purchase), and appointed Imran Sanaullah MBE as chief executive. SCVO published guidance on the environmental cost of AI, suggesting charities add a “lowest-impact tool” commitment to their AI policies, a point that will resonate with environmental charities and their supporters. The Chartered Institute of Fundraising launched a monthly tracker of 4,000 UK adults recording who is being asked to give and through which channels, which should become a useful barometer for planning. Museums Journal published research on hidden digital labour in the cultural workforce in which 62% of respondents had considered leaving their role within a year, a finding that anyone who is “the person who does the website” alongside their actual job will recognise. And Guardian Jobs, a fixture of charity recruitment for three decades, announced it will close, so if it is in your recruitment plan, start looking at alternatives.
Links: Charity Digital’s new CEO, SCVO on AI and the environment, the CIOF monthly tracker, hidden digital labour and Guardian Jobs.
The thread running through September
Put the month’s stories side by side and a pattern emerges. The technology keeps moving: agents can now, in a sandbox at least, set up a Direct Debit; a CRM vendor is training a fundraising language model; and AI search is quietly rerouting the traffic your website used to rely on. The governance is lagging: regulators are asking suppliers to read the guidance, trustees are being told that unread policies offer no protection, and a funder has concluded the only defence against AI-written bids is to stop reading them.
None of this requires a charity to chase the newest thing. Most of what we have described as worth doing this month is unglamorous: put the Fundraising Badge on your donate page, register for free legacy alerts, download your audience data, nudge your runners to connect their fitness app, make cancelling a gift easy, check someone has read the AI policy. The organisations that come through this period well will be the ones that treat AI as a question for the board rather than a tool for the comms team, keep a clear head about which technologies are proven and which are still promises, and put their energy into the things no machine can do for them: being trusted, being found for the right reasons, and making it easy for the people who already care to give.
A note on sources: We have linked to sources & checked every figure against its original publication during the first week of October 2026. It is unlikely we will update this post if those sources are edited.