Fundraising
Grant applications, appeal letters, campaign pages, donor follow-up and receipts with AI, from what shluchim actually ran in 2025 and 2026.
On this page
Fundraising is where shluchim report the clearest time savings: grant applications that took a week now take a day, and thank-you letters that sat for a month go out the same week. The relationship part stays with the shliach.
Grant applications
Two shluchim said the same method "saved about a week of work" (August 2025):
- Paste in the funder's priorities and the exact questions.
- Add your Chabad House description, programs, numbers and a past application or two so it copies your style.
- Ask for an answer to each question, one at a time.
- Check every number and claim yourself.
The recurring problem is word limits. Models miscount and say "this response is 75 words" when it is not (July 2026). What helped: write "hard cap of 300 words," ask it to aim a little under, count the words yourself in Word or Google Docs, and paste the real count back with "cut 40 words."
Perplexity's Comet browser, which members tried for filling in web grant forms in 2025, has been free for everyone since October 2025.
Appeal letters
Fundraising writer Jeff Brooks has long argued that appeals should read at about a fourth to sixth grade level: short sentences and plain words, which even highly educated donors respond to. A prompt that applies it:
Rewrite this appeal at a 6th-grade reading level. Keep my voice, my main points and every fact. Short sentences. No words like "leverage," "impact" or "journey."
More on drafting and on removing the signs of AI writing in Letter Writing and the guide How do I get AI writing to sound like me.
Campaign pages and events
- Donor page with a plaque. In July 2026 a shliach built a Chai Club donation page in about two hours with Claude Cowork: a donor's name appears on a virtual plaque when they sign up, Stripe handles the payment, and a confirmation email goes out. The Stripe secret key was the one thing he set up himself.
- Online kibbudim. A September 2026 build with Claude, a Google Sheet, web pages and Square: before Yom Tov, last year's buyers get a WhatsApp with last year's price and a link; unclaimed honors open on a live board; afterward each buyer gets a link to pay in one, two, four or twelve installments or by Zelle, Venmo, PayPal or check. The shliach said people gave more when they were not deciding in ten seconds with the room watching, and Hebrew names came in ahead of time.
- Campaign dashboards. An end-of-year volunteer and donor dashboard was built in Lovable (cypcampaign.lovable.app, December 2025). A local school used short AI videos to mark milestones in its matching campaign (November 2025).
- For pages that go inside ChabadOne, see ChabadOne Integration.
Anything that takes payments or stores donor details needs a developer's review first. See Vibe Coding.
Donor follow-up
Members' most-wanted agent in 2026 was a short daily list of donors to call. How shluchim approached it:
- Run the lapsed-donor report in the CRM, or export names and yearly totals and ask an AI to sort them.
- Build a profile document per major donor (giving pattern, relationship, what they care about) and keep it in a Claude Project with a fundraising-coach document, then ask for next steps (April 2026; the poster had not tested it much).
- In 2026 several CRMs added this directly: DAAS gives a "Daily Five" list, and MYS has an AI assistant for lists and appeals. See CRM Tools.
- A campus shliach's agent team (August 2026) handles acknowledgments, receipts, a lapsed-donor list, year-end statements and broadcast messages, each with his approval before sending.
- In October 2026 a member used the Instinct agent to send daily reminders to last year's donors who had not yet given, stopping when a Stripe gift came in. Gifts by Zelle or PayPal were the weak spot. Read Privacy & Data before connecting a donor list to a new agent company.
Researching a prospect
For people with a public footprint, Perplexity's deep research gave good results in 2025; Hatch.ai and WealthEngine are prospect-research services with paid plans. Keep it to public information about people who already know your Chabad House. A 2026 thread is the warning: a shliach used Gemini to find contact details for someone who had declined to give them, and the group called it creepy.
Receipts and tax wording
Two IRS rules worth knowing when AI drafts receipts and appeals (IRS Topic 506, checked 2026-10-21):
- A donor needs a bank record or a written note from the charity for any cash gift, and a written acknowledgment from the charity for a single gift of $250 or more.
- Starting with tax year 2026, people who do not itemize can deduct up to $1,000 of cash gifts to qualifying charities ($2,000 on a joint return). Gifts to donor-advised funds do not count.
Have your accountant check any tax language before it goes into an appeal or a receipt template. AI tools get these details wrong.
Maaser and tzedakah tools from the community
- My Charity Box (my-charity-box.lovable.app): an offline pushka tracker.
- Berel.me/donatext: makes a quick donation link and payment text.
- Payment tracking from email notifications: see Bookkeeping Agents.
Still unsolved
- An editable year-end donor report with photos and graphs. Gemini, Claude, Canva and Manus were all tried in January 2026 without a good answer; an HTML page link instead of a PDF was one idea.
- Annual budget presentations for the board at a reasonable cost (a shliach asked to hire someone in August 2026).