How Leaning Into AI Search Can Help Your Org Find Donors

For years, nonprofits practiced search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to get their websites in front of donors on search engines. But the addition of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, as well as Google’s AI overviews, means the internet search game has changed.

“People are using ChatGPT and other AI like they would use Google,” says Michael Yuasa, creative director at Antarctic, a marketing and fundraising firm. “They go to ChatGPT and ask for volunteer opportunities at organizations that fit a certain profile.”

Brittany Shaff, CEO of the Shaff Fundraising Group, says 40 percent of searches are being done through generative platforms, like ChatGPT, or by people reading AI overviews on traditional search engines. She says it’s important for nonprofits to “make sure that their organization is showing up.”

But the problem is many nonprofits aren’t showing up in AI searches, says Marc Ruben, partner at the marketing and fundraising firm M+R.

“That means fewer people visiting your website to get information and fewer opportunities to turn those website visitors into donors or advocates or volunteers,” he contends.

To combat that loss, nonprofits need to learn new strategies, Ruben and others say. It’s not just the keywords and tagging that many nonprofit professionals spent years perfecting so their organizations showed up atop results. Showing up in searches conducted by large language model AIs means organizing your site data in ways that appeal to them. The Chronicle spoke to experts who explain how SEO and AI search are different, what AI search is looking for, and the opportunities AI search offers nonprofits.

How AI and SEO Searches Differ

Many organizations have long built their online reputation through SEO. Shaff says not to abandon SEO, because it’s still useful. However, nonprofits need to understand how SEO is different from the new paradigm, which some people call artificial engine optimization (AEO) and others call generative engine optimization (GEO).

“I really do think that generative engine optimization is the new playbook,” she says.

So what are the key differences? SEO was more about keywords and tagging, says Mark Koenig, chief innovation officer at Oregon State University.

“SEO was this thing that existed, and if we put in the right tag and we did the right stuff, it would work,” he says. “Generative AIs aren’t SEO. Generative AI is going to know when you trick it, and it’s going to change its behavior. Now it’s going to be different.”

Generative search is looking to answer people’s questions in ways that people like to have answers. It searches websites the way people do, looking for things like bullet points and plain-language explanations that look easy to read — not long blocks of texts. AI searches also can parse video and audio files, which SEO searches typically weren’t capable of, say the experts the Chronicle spoke to.

For nonprofits, Ruben says, the key difference to remember is: “SEO is really about driving traffic” to your site, whereas AI engines want to answer the question within their platform, and aren’t pushing readers to click through.

AI Loves Clarity and Emotion

So, what is AI looking for that will help a nonprofit’s site turn up in responses? It wants to be able to quickly look at your content and summarize it to answer the question that the user asked, says Ruben, of M+R.

“AI creates its answers by crawling the web, and it loves structured information,” he says. “So making your content more readable by AI is critical. Make sure those key sources of information are scannable and that they use bullet points, lists, tables, FAQ sections.”

Shaff recommends making the information that people most often come to your site for easily accessible so AI can clearly match it to what the person wants. So, if people most often come to find out how to “volunteer for X,Y, and Z purposes,” the pages should clearly label those volunteer opportunities and provide typical information volunteers need to know, Shaff says.

Much like a child that needs structure, AI wants things to be structured consistent with the rest of the web, says Ruben, so it’s important to follow norms.

“If your homepage doesn’t clearly say who you are and what you do, and if your navigation doesn’t use clear terms, common parlance, AI may decide it prefers to get that information from other places,” he says. “We’ve all seen cool and interesting ways to talk about nonprofits that may be more aligned with your brand. You don’t want to move entirely away from atypical language, if that is part of your brand. But you may want to augment it with language that’s more accessible.”

That means organizations should have a “home” page, an “about us” page, a “donate” page, a “contact us” page, rather than being a little different, with a “Get to Know Us” page.

Nirmal Kaur, head of sales for the Google Marketing Platform at search engine giant Google, has an acronym-based tip to help nonprofits get their sites primed for AI search, which she shared at last month’s Donor Experience Summit.

“Synthesize the information on your own websites, where you’re using regular language, language that your donors type to ask questions, and then ensure that it’s E-E-A-T,” Kaur said. “That means the information that you have is actually shared by an Expert. It is Experienced information. It’s Authoritative or Authentic. And it’s Trustworthy.”

While most people don’t equate emotion with machines, AI search is somewhat tuned into the emotion and sentiment of the question and will try to match its response to that, says Bharanidharan Natarajan, chief technology officer at Antarctic.

“Emotions did not play a part in a regular Google or Bing search, but here, emotions play a part,” Natarajan says.

His colleague Yuasa offered an example. If a person’s query indicates they’re frustrated because they can’t find free food to feed their family without feeling shamed, the AI would look for relevant content that talks about those emotions. Yuasa says this is content many nonprofits already have on their site, which can be really relevant to AI searches.

“A testimonial would be a good example,” Yuasa says. “I was so frustrated by X, Y, Z, and then this is how we solved that problem: problem, solution, impact.”

Finding Opportunities in the New Paradigm

Nonprofits shouldn’t view optimization for AI search as another hurdle to overcome, says Nathan Chappell, founder of Fundraising.ai, a collaborative devoted to understanding and promoting AI use in nonprofit fundraising. Instead, he says AI search should be viewed as an opportunity to reach audiences in a different way. This is especially true because AI search engines “are prioritizing content — not just written content, but also voice and video.”

This means sites that have a variety of content can do well. “This is a level playing field for nonprofits,” Chappell says. “If they have rich content and they have been building content for awhile, they actually have a better chance of being surfaced uniquely to an individual that’s searching. I think it’s a huge opportunity for nonprofits that would not have been seen otherwise to actually be seen now”

But there is a flip side, he warns: “If you’re not leveraging video or voice, like podcasts or webinars, and just doing a traditional static website with very limited information on it, it won’t be significant enough to show up.”

The good news is that AI doesn’t need highly produced video content. Video shot with a smart phone that is authentic, such as a testimonial or event snippets, are great for site visitors and AI to index. Nonprofits that have longer-form video can use generative AI to convert it for a blog or podcast, which would offer visitors different ways to connect with the content.

The other opportunity with AI search is that people may be more motivated to act — maybe to donate or volunteer — when they finally reach your site, Ruben says.

“In some cases, the LLM may provide external validation of your trustworthiness as an organization, your effectiveness as an organization,” he says. “Nonprofits may see that the traffic that comes from LLMs directly is lower volume but higher quality in terms of conversion because of some of the learning that they may already have done.”