The volunteer coordinator at a small charity is often also the fundraiser, the social media person and whoever happens to be near the phone. Messages from the website land in a shared inbox that gets checked when there is a gap, which some weeks means Thursday.
Meanwhile the questions keep arriving. Can I volunteer if I am 16? Do you take furniture donations? Is my gift eligible for Gift Aid? Where is the food bank on Tuesdays? Almost all of them have answers already sitting somewhere on the website, buried three clicks deep.
An ai assistant for charities does one narrow job well: it reads your own pages and documents, answers those repeat questions at the moment someone asks, and passes anything personal or sensitive to a person. It will not write your grant applications or run your volunteer rota. It can stop a keen volunteer giving up because nobody replied for a week.
Four groups are asking you questions
Charity websites serve more audiences than most business sites, and they rarely overlap in what they want to know.
- Donors want to know where the money goes, how to give regularly, whether Gift Aid applies and how to change or cancel a direct debit.
- Volunteers want roles, time commitment, age limits, DBS checks, training dates and who to contact.
- People seeking help want to know if they qualify, when and where services run, and whether they need a referral.
- Partners and fundraisers want to know about corporate volunteering days, running a sponsored event or using your logo.
The mistake is feeding the assistant one generic "About us" page and expecting it to serve all four. Give it content for each, even if that is a single plain document per group.
What to feed it, and what it can then do
Here is a practical map for a typical small charity. The right-hand column is what the assistant does when the content exists; when it does not, a grounded assistant says so and takes the person's details instead of guessing.
| Question type | Content to supply | What the assistant does |
|---|---|---|
| Opening times and locations | Services page, a short document with each session's day, time and address | Answers directly |
| Volunteer roles and requirements | Role descriptions, age limits, DBS policy, training calendar | Answers, then captures name and email for the coordinator |
| Donating goods | Accepted and refused items list, drop-off times | Answers directly |
| Gift Aid and regular giving | Your existing donor FAQ | Answers from your wording and links to the donation page |
| Eligibility for services | Referral criteria in plain language | Explains the criteria, then hands to a person for anything case-specific |
| Personal hardship or crisis | Signposting text with helpline and emergency numbers | Signposts immediately and transfers to a person where possible |
Teaching is not a technical job. You can describe the charity in plain language, let it crawl the website, upload the volunteer handbook as a PDF, or type in question and answer pairs for the things people always get wrong. There is more on writing those pairs in building an FAQ that doubles as chatbot training data.
A volunteer enquiry at 9pm on a Sunday
This is the kind of conversation that used to sit unanswered until the coordinator got to it.
Visitor: Hi, I'd like to help at the food bank but I work weekdays. Is there anything at weekends?
Assistant: There is. The Saturday morning session runs from 9am to 12pm at the community hall on Mill Lane, and it usually needs people for sorting and packing. New volunteers do a one-hour induction first, held on the first Saturday of each month. Would you like the coordinator to get in touch about the next one?
Visitor: Yes please. Do I need a DBS check?
Assistant: Not for sorting and packing. A DBS check is only needed for roles working directly with children or vulnerable adults. If you leave your name and email, I'll pass your details to the coordinator with a note that you're interested in Saturdays.
The coordinator opens the inbox on Monday to a named lead with a preferred day attached, rather than a vague "I want to help" email that needs two more rounds of back and forth.
Where the assistant must step aside
Charities deal with people at difficult moments. Be deliberate about the limits, and write them into the assistant's instructions before it goes live.
- Crisis and safeguarding: any mention of self-harm, abuse, danger to a child or an emergency gets the relevant emergency number or helpline straight away. The assistant gives information and signposting, never counselling or advice.
- Individual casework: "Will I get a food parcel this week?" depends on someone's circumstances. The assistant explains the process and passes the person to staff.
- Complaints: capture the details, open a ticket if you use them, and make sure a trustee or manager sees it. Do not let the assistant argue a complaint.
- Anything financial beyond your published policy: legacy giving, large donations and restricted funds deserve a conversation with a person.
The live takeover feature helps here. If a staff member is marked on duty, they can take over a conversation from the inbox in real time. When nobody is on duty, the handover becomes a captured enquiry with a clear promise about when someone will reply. Our guide to when a chatbot should hand over to a human covers the triggers in more detail.
Costs and what to watch in the first month
Small charities cannot justify software that charges per conversation, because a busy appeal week would blow the budget. Look for flat pricing. SpideyChat's pricing starts with a free plan of 100 messages a month, which is enough to test with real visitors, and the Starter plan adds the website crawler and lead capture.
Once it is live, the most useful thing to watch is the list of unanswered questions. Every one is a small gap on your website. If three people in a fortnight ask whether you collect donations from their home, that answer belongs on the donations page, not only in the assistant. Treat the list as a free user research report.
Also look at when conversations happen. Charity sites often see volunteers and donors browsing in the evening and at weekends, exactly when nobody is at a desk. If that matches what you see, the nonprofits page covers how the assistant is typically set up for the sector.
Your next three hours
- Spend one hour going through the shared inbox and listing the 20 questions you answer most often. Group them by donors, volunteers, people seeking help and partners.
- Spend one hour checking that each question has a clear answer somewhere on the website or in a document you can upload. Write the missing ones in plain sentences.
- Spend the last hour writing the safeguarding and crisis instructions, adding helpline numbers, and testing the assistant with the hardest questions on your list before you put it on the site.
After two weeks, read ten real conversations end to end. Fix the answers that were technically right but unhelpful, and add anything that came up more than twice.