Major donors and philanthropic foundations now use LLMs to perform due diligence on charities. Ensuring your financial transparency, impact reports, and leadership credentials are easily parsed by AI is critical.
High-net-worth individuals and grant-making trusts conduct extensive research before committing major funds. Increasingly, this research begins in Perplexity or ChatGPT rather than traditional search engines.
The AI due diligence process
An LLM can summarise a 100-page annual report in seconds, extracting key metrics on overheads, executive pay, and programmatic impact. If this information is hidden in unparseable PDFs or vague marketing copy, the AI will either hallucinate or state that the data is unavailable—a massive red flag for major donors.
A philanthropy advisor told me she now runs all prospective charities through a custom GPT prompt to check for controversies or financial inefficiencies before she even visits their websites. It's a brutal, automated filter.
Key Takeaways
- Make financial reports available in machine-readable HTML, not just PDF.
- Ensure executive leadership profiles are clearly structured and verifiable.
- Publish unambiguous impact metrics that AI can easily extract.
Secure your major donor pipeline by optimising for AI due diligence. Speak to our team today.