Record Offline Donations in Charitable with AI
Hand over the list of cheques, cash, and bank transfers from your event and get every gift recorded against the right campaign and donor.
Prerequisites
A connected site running Charitable 1.8.18 or newer on WordPress 6.9 or newer, the campaign the gifts belong to, and your list of offline gifts with names, emails, amounts, and dates.
I use Charitable on my WordPress site. Record these offline donations for my campaign [campaign name]: [paste your list, one per line, as first name, last name, email, amount, date received, and a reference such as a cheque number, for example: Helen Marsh, [email protected], $350, September 18, cheque 10482]. Use the Charitable abilities. First find the campaign and confirm its name and current total with me. Then, for each person on my list, check whether a donor with that email already exists and whether they already have a donation of the same amount on the same date, and flag any of those as a possible duplicate. Show me the whole list as a table with donor, amount, date, status, note, and whether the donor is new or existing, and wait for me to confirm. Record each gift once, as a manual donation marked paid, with the date I gave and my reference in the note. Use pending only for gifts I marked as pledged or unpaid. If any one fails, tell me which and why, and keep going with the rest. Do not retry a donation that may have gone through without checking first. When you finish, show me a table of the donation IDs created, and read the campaign's performance back so I can see the new total and how much it changed.
Skip pasting the full prompt. Drop this into your AI on a site that already has WPVibe:
Run the “Record Offline Donations in Charitable with AI” recipe from the WPVibe cookbook on my connected site.
The gala raised real money, and half of it arrived as cheques, cash in envelopes, and bank transfers. None of that shows on the campaign page until someone types it in, one donation form at a time. So the progress bar undersells the campaign for weeks, and the donors who gave the most in person are missing from the donor list when it is time to say thank you.
You paste the list and the AI records each gift through Charitable's manual donation ability, which exists for exactly this: money received offline. It matches each donor by email address, so someone who has given before gets the gift added to their record, not a second record. It records the date the money actually arrived and puts your cheque number or reference in an internal note. You see the full list before anything is written, and the campaign total read back afterwards.
Paste the prompt with your campaign and your list. This recipe writes real donation records, so check the list before you confirm it, and do not run the same list twice: recording a gift is not something Charitable can tell apart from a second identical gift, so a repeat run doubles your totals. The prompt has the AI check each donor's history first for that reason. Charitable refuses future dates, and pending is the right status for a pledge that has not been paid yet.
Outcome
Every offline gift is recorded in Charitable against the right campaign, matched to existing donors where they exist, and counted in your totals.