What would you do with an extra five to ten hours every week?

That is the question Ankur Kumar of OpenAI and I recently put in front of nonprofit professionals during a session we led for the West Virginia Nonprofit Association.

Ankur brought the OpenAI side of the conversation. I came at it from years in nonprofit marketing and fundraising, and now from building EverRaise. We kept coming back to the same practical point: most nonprofit teams do not need a complicated AI strategy to get started.

They need more time.

You write donor emails, prepare board reports, plan events, research opportunities, follow up with supporters, sit in meetings, answer email, manage campaigns, and try to keep everyone informed.

ChatGPT can help with a surprising amount of that work. But the goal is not to see how much of your nonprofit you can hand to AI.

The better question is: What work is keeping your team from doing what only your team can do?

That is how I think nonprofits should approach ChatGPT in 2026. Use it to reduce repetitive work, get organized faster, and move from a blank page to useful work more quickly. Then keep your people focused on judgment, relationships, trust, and the mission.

In this post, I’m going to cover:

• ChatGPT pricing and discounts for nonprofits

• What has changed about AI in 2026

• Six places nonprofit teams can save time

• How to set ChatGPT up for real nonprofit work

• Practical fundraising and development use cases

• How nonprofits can use ChatGPT for grant writing

• What information you should be careful sharing

• What should stay human?

• Where ChatGPT ends, and an engagement system begins

Let’s dig in.

Is there a ChatGPT nonprofit discount?

Yes.

According to OpenAI for Nonprofits, eligible nonprofits can access ChatGPT Business Standard seats for $8 per user per month when billed annually or $10 per user per month when billed monthly. The nonprofit discount does not include ChatGPT Business Premium seats.

Larger nonprofits can contact OpenAI for up to a 75% discount on ChatGPT Enterprise. OpenAI uses Goodstack to verify nonprofit eligibility.

For many small and midsize nonprofit teams, ChatGPT Business is likely the more natural starting point if several staff members will use AI for organizational work. OpenAI describes Business as designed for teams that need collaboration, centralized billing, and organizational security controls.

If your nonprofit has more complex security, data-governance, or compliance requirements, Enterprise may make more sense. One important example: OpenAI says ChatGPT Business does not include a Business Associate Agreement. Organizations that require a BAA should discuss ChatGPT Enterprise with OpenAI.

Also worth noting: the nonprofit discount currently applies to ChatGPT Business Standard seats and ChatGPT Enterprise, not API usage.

Because pricing and eligibility can change, verify the current OpenAI for Nonprofits program before deciding to purchase.

What has changed about ChatGPT for nonprofits?

A few years ago, most people experienced AI like this:

Ask a question. Get an answer.

That is still useful. But it is no longer the most interesting part.

Today, ChatGPT can increasingly work with context you provide, stay organized around specific Projects, reference files and source material, and connect with apps your team already uses.

That changes the role AI can play.

Instead of treating ChatGPT like a blank box where you ask random questions, you can organize work around a campaign, department, event, or recurring responsibility. You can add the right source material and reuse the same context as the work develops.

OpenAI’s Projects feature keeps related chats, files, sources, and instructions together for ongoing work. Connected apps can also help ChatGPT work with information that already lives in services your team uses, depending on your plan, region, permissions, and workspace settings.

That is the bigger shift. ChatGPT is becoming less like a writing tool and more like an assistant you can give context and jobs to.

How can nonprofits use ChatGPT to save time?

When Ankur and I built our nonprofit session, we did not start with dramatic AI projects. We started with the repetitive work nonprofit teams already do every week.

That is still where I would start.

1. Writing and editing

This is the easiest entry point.

ChatGPT can help your team draft donor emails, thank-you notes, event invitations, newsletter copy, appeal drafts, volunteer communications, website updates, and internal announcements.

The value is often not that AI wrote something for you. It is that you did not spend 45 minutes staring at an empty page.

Your team still supplies the story, facts, context, judgment, and final voice.

2. Repurposing existing content

Most nonprofits already have more useful content than they realize. The problem is that it sits in annual reports, program updates, board documents, newsletters, event recaps, and campaign pages.

ChatGPT can help turn one approved source into multiple formats, such as a donor email, newsletter section, social post, leadership talking points, event update, or board summary.

That’s a much better use of AI than creating more content from scratch.

3. Reporting and summarizing

Nonprofit leaders spend a remarkable amount of time turning messy information into something another person can understand.

ChatGPT can help organize board updates, campaign recaps, donor meeting notes, event debriefs, survey responses, weekly reports, grant-report source material, and team-meeting notes.

It is especially useful for taking scattered material and helping you see the structure.

4. Research and planning

ChatGPT can help your team move from idea to working plan faster.

That might include campaign planning, donor journey mapping, event promotion planning, sponsorship research, grant-opportunity review, audience research, program planning, or competitive research.

It should not replace your strategy. It can help you get something concrete on the page, so your team has something to react to.

5. Email and administrative work

This may be one of the most overlooked use cases.

Your inbox can consume the day in tiny pieces. AI can help summarize long threads, identify decisions, organize action items, prepare meeting agendas, draft routine replies, and turn follow-up notes into clear next steps.

That is where the five-to-ten-hour question becomes useful. Do not ask, “What impressive AI project could we build?” Ask, “Where did our team lose time last week?”

6. Use ChatGPT as a central hub for your work

This is where ChatGPT can become more useful than a standalone writing tool.

Once you connect the apps your team already uses, you can increasingly use ChatGPT as a central place to find information, make sense of it, and move work forward without constantly jumping between tabs and rebuilding context.

Depending on the app, your plan, permissions, and workspace settings, connected apps can let ChatGPT search or reference information from services such as Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, Slack, Microsoft 365, and others.

For example, you could use ChatGPT to:

• Search Google Drive for last year’s gala materials and use them to help plan this year’s campaign

• Review an email thread, summarize what happened, identify outstanding decisions, and draft your response

• Look at your calendar and help prepare agendas, questions, or background notes for upcoming donor meetings

• Analyze a spreadsheet with campaign results and identify key takeaways, questions, and recommended next steps

• Find previous reports or board materials and use them to prepare a new leadership update

• Pull information from multiple documents and organize it into one campaign brief

• Turn a program update in Drive into a donor email, newsletter section, leadership talking points, and social content

• Review meeting notes alongside related files and create a clear list of action items and owners

• Prepare for the week ahead by looking across your calendar and relevant work to help organize priorities

The real-time savings come from reducing the friction between these tasks.

Instead of finding the document, opening another tab, copying the information, pasting it somewhere else, summarizing it, and then starting the actual work, you can increasingly begin in one place.

I wouldn’t connect every app just because you can. Start with the places where your team spends the most time or loses the most time. For many nonprofits, that will be email, documents, calendars, and spreadsheets.

The goal is not to make ChatGPT the home of all your data. It is to make it a useful front door to the work your team already does.

Set ChatGPT up like you would onboard a new assistant

This was one of the most practical ideas Ankur and I covered in the session.

If a new employee joined your team, you would not sit them at a desk with no context and say, “Go help with fundraising.”

You would explain who you are. You would give them materials. You would tell them how your organization communicates. You would show them where information lives. You would explain what good work looks like.

ChatGPT works better when you do something similar.

Give it useful instructions

Tell ChatGPT about your organization, your role, the people you serve, your audience, your communication style, the work you commonly need help with, and the kinds of language you want to avoid.

You do not have to make this complicated. The goal is simply to reduce how much context you have to rebuild every time.

Organize recurring work into Projects

You might create separate Projects for brand and messaging, fundraising campaigns, marketing and communications, reports and board updates, events, and operations.

Projects can keep related chats, files, sources, and instructions together, which makes them useful for work that continues over time.

Add useful context, not everything you own

Better context usually produces better work.

Useful starting materials might include your mission and vision, brand guide, messaging guide, public website copy, annual report, a strong past fundraising email, program descriptions, and current campaign information.

Do not interpret “add context” as “upload the whole organization.” Start small.

Connect apps with a purpose

Connected apps can make ChatGPT more useful because it can work with the places where your information already lives.

But connect things because there is a real workflow to improve, not because the integration exists.

That is an important discipline with all AI tools.

How can nonprofits use ChatGPT for fundraising?

Fundraising is one of the clearest places for ChatGPT to help because development teams do a lot of communication, planning, analysis, and repeated work.

ChatGPT can help fundraisers plan campaigns, draft and edit donor communications, organize stewardship work, review campaign data, summarize donor notes, prepare for meetings, and identify follow-up opportunities. Staff should still own factual accuracy, strategy, sensitive donor information, and the relationship itself.

First-time donor follow-up

ChatGPT can help your team organize a simple first-time donor journey, including immediate acknowledgment, impact communication, non-financial engagement, survey opportunities, and appropriate next steps.

The strategy should still be rooted in good donor stewardship, not in sending more messages because AI made them easier to produce.

Lapsed donor reactivation

A lapsed donor list is not one homogeneous group.

ChatGPT can help your team consider the differences between someone who gave last year, someone who stopped a recurring gift, a former event donor, or a supporter who still engages but hasn’t given recently.

That planning can support a more thoughtful donor retention strategy.

Campaign planning

You can use ChatGPT to organize campaign objectives, audiences, key messages, timelines, channels, assets, responsibilities, follow-up, and measures of success.

Again, the value is speed to a useful working draft.

Donor meeting preparation

ChatGPT can help summarize non-sensitive source material, organize notes, identify questions, and prepare a meeting brief.

That does not mean you should ask AI to infer what a donor is thinking or make unsupported assumptions about giving capacity. Preparation is useful. Speculation is not.

Campaign analysis

This is another strong use case. Give ChatGPT clean campaign data and ask it to help separate what happened, what the data clearly supports, possible explanations, what needs further investigation, and what you might test next.

AI can produce a very confident explanation for a pattern that may actually be coincidence. Your team still has to interpret the result.

Can nonprofits use ChatGPT for grant writing?

Yes.

But I would be careful with the phrase “use ChatGPT to write grants.” A better way to think about it is: use ChatGPT to support the grant-writing process.

It can help review an RFP, extract requirements, organize deadlines and attachments, build an outline, summarize approved program material, find repetition, improve clarity, compare a draft with evaluation criteria, and identify questions your program staff still need to answer.

It should not invent outcomes, statistics, partnerships, budgets, beneficiary stories, program history, research, or claims you cannot substantiate.

OpenAI’s nonprofit guidance points to grant refinement as one use case, including reviewing a draft proposal against donor evaluation criteria and identifying specific opportunities for improvement.

The important distinction is not “AI writes grants now.” It is that AI can reduce the manual work around information your organization already knows to be true.

Start with non-sensitive information

This is one area where I would encourage nonprofit teams to move slowly.

When Ankur and I presented this material, our advice was simple: do not make uploading sensitive donor data your first AI experiment.

Start with materials such as public website copy, mission and vision statements, public annual reports, brand language, general program descriptions, de-identified example communications, and public campaign pages.

Then develop your team’s policies before moving toward more sensitive material.

Be particularly cautious with:

• Full donor databases

• Giving history

• Payment information

• Health information

• Personnel issues

• Sensitive legal documents

• Confidential board matters

• Credentials and passwords

There is an important distinction between “Can the system technically process this?” and “Should our organization put this information into this workflow?” Those are not the same question.

OpenAI’s business data privacy guidance says ChatGPT Business and Enterprise workspace data is excluded from model training by default, and Business workspace data is encrypted in transit and at rest.

That is useful to know. It does not remove your responsibility to determine what information staff should share, which workspace they should use, which connected apps are approved, and what internal review is required.

If your donor records need attention, nonprofit data hygiene is part of responsible outreach because good engagement depends on information your team can trust.

What nonprofit work should stay human?

This is where I think many AI conversations get off track.

We ask: Can AI do this?

That is not always the most useful test. Sometimes it can. That still does not mean it should own the job.

Your people are not the inefficiency in the system. They are where judgment lives.

I would keep people firmly involved in work such as:

• Major-donor cultivation

• Sensitive donor concerns

• Crisis communication

• Stories involving vulnerable people

• Final grant claims and numbers

• Financial reporting

• Legal or compliance decisions

• Personnel issues

• High-stakes organizational communication

• Conversations where someone asks for a person

The goal is not to eliminate human work. It is to eliminate enough repetitive work that your people have time for the work where being human matters.

That same principle guides how we think about AI voice agents for nonprofit organizations. Structured, repeatable outreach can be a good fit for technology. Complex or sensitive conversations usually are not.

ChatGPT can help create the work. Who executes it?

This is the point where ChatGPT and a system like EverRaise start solving different problems.

Imagine your team uses ChatGPT to create a thoughtful lapsed-donor campaign.

Now you have the plan. But someone still has to:

• Identify the right donors

• Validate the contact information

• Apply preferences and suppressions

• Segment the audience

• Approve the outreach

• Launch the campaign

• Coordinate the channels

• Capture responses

• Follow up

• Route the right people to staff

• Update what you learned

ChatGPT can help plan campaigns, create materials, and carry out supported actions through connected apps. Your team still needs a reliable process for coordinating donor outreach, managing preferences, capturing responses, and following up. EverRaise brings those engagement workflows together.

EverRaise is an AI engagement assistant for relationship-driven organizations. It helps lean teams turn approved campaigns into real engagement through AI voice, SMS, email, surveys, campaign workflows, contact validation, data hygiene, and follow-up.

The goal is not to remove fundraisers from fundraising. It is to give them more capacity.

Because creating another email is not the outcome. Reaching the donor is. Listening to the response is. Following up is. Keeping the relationship alive is.

That is why our core belief at EverRaise is simple: Engagement drives retention. Retention drives revenue.

A simple way to start using ChatGPT at your nonprofit

You do not need a six-month AI implementation plan. Try four weeks.

Week 1: Find the repetitive work

Ask your team where work takes more time than it should, what gets recreated repeatedly, what gets postponed because no one has time, where information is copied from one place to another, and what starts with a blank page every week.

Pick two or three low-risk tasks.

Week 2: Set up the context

Create the appropriate Project. Add useful instructions. Provide a few trusted source materials. Don’t add sensitive information you don’t need.

Week 3: Use it repeatedly

Do not judge ChatGPT based on one clever demonstration. Use it on the same real task several times. See where it helps, where it creates more work, and where staff still need to step in.

Week 4: Decide what should become a workflow

Ask whether the process saved meaningful time, improved quality, actually got used by the team, and still required manual work. Then decide whether it belongs in ChatGPT or whether the work now requires a more specialized system.

Start small. Save time. Build trust.

Frequently asked questions about ChatGPT for nonprofits

What is ChatGPT for nonprofits?

ChatGPT is a general-purpose AI assistant nonprofits can use for tasks such as writing, editing, summarizing, planning, research, data analysis, fundraising preparation, grant support, and administrative work. OpenAI also offers discounted ChatGPT Business Standard and Enterprise plans to eligible nonprofits.

Is ChatGPT free for nonprofits?

There is not currently a special free nonprofit Business workspace. OpenAI for Nonprofits lists discounted ChatGPT Business Standard seats at $8 per user per month when billed annually or $10 per user per month when billed monthly.

Does ChatGPT offer a nonprofit discount?

Yes. OpenAI for Nonprofits offers discounted ChatGPT Business Standard seats for eligible nonprofits and says larger nonprofits can access discounts of up to 75% on ChatGPT Enterprise.

How can nonprofits use ChatGPT for fundraising?

Nonprofit fundraising teams can use ChatGPT to support campaign planning, donor communication drafts, stewardship planning, lapsed-donor reactivation, meeting preparation, reporting, research, and campaign analysis. Staff should still own donor strategy, factual accuracy, sensitive information, and relationship decisions.

Can nonprofits use ChatGPT for grant writing?

Yes. ChatGPT can help analyze grant requirements, organize source material, outline proposals, review drafts, identify gaps, and improve clarity. Nonprofits should not rely on it to invent facts, statistics, budgets, program outcomes, partnerships, or beneficiary stories.

Can nonprofits put donor data into ChatGPT?

Nonprofits should evaluate the sensitivity of the information, their organizational policies, and the controls of the ChatGPT plan they use before sharing donor information. OpenAI says Business and Enterprise workspace data is excluded from model training by default, but that does not mean every piece of sensitive data is appropriate for every workflow.

Can ChatGPT replace nonprofit staff?

That should not be the goal. ChatGPT is most useful when it reduces repetitive work and gives staff more capacity for judgment, relationships, strategy, and mission-critical work.

The takeaway

When Ankur and I closed our session with nonprofit leaders, the main point was not that AI can do everything.

It cannot. And that is the wrong goal anyway.

The better question is: What work is keeping our team from doing what only we can do?

Start there.

Use ChatGPT to help your team move faster on repetitive work. Give it useful context. Connect it to real work when that makes sense. Be careful with sensitive information. Keep people where judgment and relationships matter.

Then look for specialized systems when the work moves from generating an answer to executing a real workflow.

AI should not remove the human heart from nonprofit work. It should give your people more time to use it.

If your team already knows who it wants to reach but needs more capacity to execute donor and supporter engagement, see how EverRaise helps relationship-driven organizations build better campaigns, reach more people, and follow up more consistently.