How to Research a Nonprofit P2P Fundraising Platform Using AI and When to Stop

Picture this. Somewhere in your organization, someone opens ChatGPT. Then they type: “Best fundraising platforms.” or “Best P2P fundraising tools.”

Then a clean list appears after just a few seconds. LLMs often deliver organized, confident answers, so it’s easy to take the information at face value. For a busy nonprofit team, that kind of speed feels like relief. One less thing to worry about. 

Then reality hits. The question that comes up is “does any of this actually fit how your fundraising works?” The answer is that it depends on how you search. 

It’s a fact that despite reservations around AI and LLMs, nonprofit employees are using AI search. Limited staff bandwidth and time push nonprofit teams toward faster answers. There is a very real risk from this approach however. That risk comes when speed replaces scrutiny.

In this blog, we’ll dig into how your nonprofit can use AI to evaluate nonprofit P2P platforms, where pitfalls exist, and how to avoid them. 

Nonprofit AI Hesitation 

If you’re like most nonprofit leaders, you know that LLMs can’t replicate or replace the years of experience, education, and hard work you’ve put into your craft. That’s one of the reasons why nonprofit staff members rarely accept LLM answers at face value. In all honesty, that’s a good thing. 

You would be right to wonder where AI pulls information from, why the same platforms keep showing up, or why every option starts to sound interchangeable. You’ve probably faced this issue in vendor evaluation as well, but AI creates a unique flatting effect here. Worse, it can hide perfectly valid options based simply on how optimized they are for SEO and AI search. 

Curious how you can increase your nonprofit’s discoverability in web search and AI answers? Check out our on demand webinar: Get Found Online: A No-Nonsense SEO and AI Search Workshop for Event Organizers.

The good news is that healthy skepticism can protect your mission and your team’s capacity. Nonprofit leaders like you know that it isn’t the vendor or AI tool that carries the weight of implementation or a poor platform selection. Your staff does. When you make the wrong choice, you will likely increase strain on your team and potentially even face donor drop-off and lost revenue. 

None of this is to say that there is no place for AI search in your evaluation process. When you’re choosing a nonprofit p2p fundraising platform, there is a genuine benefit to getting a quick answer. Just don’t forget that you can add value with your own knowledge, experience, and validation efforts.

Where AI Helps Your Nonprofit Evaluation Process

AI works best during early-stage research, when your team needs direction rather than final answers.

You can use AI to build a starting list of tools, understand high-level differences, and translate technical language into something your whole team can follow. For smaller nonprofits or teams without dedicated technical staff, that kind of clarity can remove friction early on.

You might ask:

• “What platforms support peer-to-peer fundraising?”
• “Compare event-based fundraising tools for nonprofits”

Responses from those prompts can help your team organize thinking and identify categories worth exploring further. AI also helps draft comparison frameworks, which can save time when preparing for internal discussions.

Where AI Falls Short for Nonprofits

The biggest issue with AI search is that it is limited by what’s most cited. This challenge arises in a few particular ways. 

Vague Questions Lead to Generic Results

When you ask broad questions like “What is the best fundraising platform?” AI tends to return well-known, general-purpose tools. Those tools may work for some nonprofits, yet they often miss the needs of teams running complex or event-driven programs. 

A more specific prompt might offer more clarity, but even that still risks revealing only the biggest players:

“What platforms support multi-event peer-to-peer fundraising with integrated registration?”

That level of detail helps surface more relevant options, but even that search has issues. For example, it mentions a platform that has since been acquired by another company as a current option for a solution.

That happens because LLMs have no lived experience and no ability to identify truth. While they can be powerful tools, you need to do your own research as well. 

AI Struggles With Day-to-Day Reality

The fact that AI doesn’t actually know how to run a nonprofit means that it doesn’t necessarily understand what the answers to its questions mean. Where your team runs programs, plans campaigns, and faces operational challenges, LLMs do not. 

The difference shows up quickly in queries around peer-to-peer and event-based fundraising. Registration flows, participant dashboards, and event-day logistics all shape success, yet those details rarely appear clearly in AI-generated summaries. 

For a deeper look at these operational factors, this guide offers a useful reference:
https://www.hakuapp.com/resource/how-to-choose-a-p2p-fundraising-platform-for-your-nonprofit

That resource walks through real considerations such as participant experience and staff workload, which are areas that tend to get flattened in automated comparisons.

Visibility Influences What You See

AI draws heavily from widely available content. Platforms with more published material often appear more frequently, regardless of fit.

This dynamic can hide tools designed for specific nonprofit models, especially peer-to-peer or endurance fundraising. If your programs rely on those approaches, your prompts need to reflect that reality or you risk overlooking relevant options. If you want your P2P Platform to have built in volunteer management and gamification and recognition capabilities as well, be sure to mention that specifically. 

What AI Can’t Evaluate Well for Nonprofits

Some of the most important decision factors for nonprofit teams don’t translate cleanly into AI output.

Ease of use for staff, onboarding experience, and long-term support quality all shape whether a platform succeeds inside your organization. AI also struggles with externalities, like when cost extends beyond pricing. AI cannot explicitly understand how a platform may influence your staff time, training, and ongoing management. Because all of those carry weight, you’ll likely need to do your own evaluations even after AI gets your started.

A Better Way to Use AI in Your Process

A more intentional approach helps your team get value from AI while avoiding common traps.

1. Start Broad, Then Refine

Begin with general discovery. Rather than building a list of potential platform, identify what capabilities you need. Then narrow your prompts based on your actual fundraising model.

Moving from general capabilities to your own specific leads to more useful results and reduces noise.

2. Define Your Fundraising Model Early

Clarity in this stage lets you narrow the field to the options that really matter to your organization.

If your nonprofit relies on peer-to-peer fundraising, event participation, or runs, walks, or challenge campaigns, your platform needs to support those structures directly. General donation tools may handle transactions, yet they often fall short when managing participants, teams, and event logistics. 

3. Use AI to Generate Better Questions

Ask AI to suggest what you should ask vendors about implementation, participant experience, and event-day execution. This approach turns AI into a preparation tool rather than a decision-maker.

You can also ask it to specifically compare tools to one another, but remember to validate that information on the vendor’s website. For example, nonprofit fundraising platforms like haku often have capabilities that don’t show up in AI search, but are well developed and mature.

4. Validate Through Direct Experience

The most important step to using AI for evaluating a nonprofit peer to peer platform is to stop using it. We aren’t saying not to use AI at all, but you need to take what you’ve learned from an LLM and go further with real humans. Speak with peers in organizations similar to your own. Request detailed demos from vendors. Ask them to walk through real scenarios. Test how platforms handle the workflows your team manages every day. If they have self-guided product tours, consider walking through how they handle p2p fundraiser profiles. 

If multiple platforms appear similar in early research, deeper exploration will reveal meaningful differences.

Questions Your Team Should Ask

When evaluating platforms, focus on practical questions tied to your daily operations:

1. How does this platform support a full fundraising cycle?
2. What experience do fundraisers have when they interact with the platform?
3. What workload falls on your staff and does this contribute to nonprofit burnout?
4. How flexible does the platform feel across campaigns, including P2P and others?
5. What level of support can your team expect?

These questions will help ground your evaluation in reality rather than a surface-level comparison. Consider looking into the answers to these question with AI and then looking further with live demos and conversations. 

Explore a Real Product Experience

Before committing to vendor conversations, take time to explore how a platform actually works in practice. We’ve created a product tour to highlight haku’s leading peer to peer fundraising platform. It shows how fundraisers can manage their outreach and how your staff can get valuable insights and offer feedback and coaching to your fundraisers. 

The reason we include this here is to provide an example of what you should look for. While we hope you like what you see, consider this more as a reference of what a product tour for p2p fundraising looks like. 

You can walk through the guided experience here:
https://hakuapp.navattic.com/2y4r0yg5

Did you follow the flow from a participant and staff perspective? This type of hands-on view often reveals more than written summaries, because you can see what the experience looks like in platform.

Take the Next Step, Check out haku’s P2P Fundraising Capabilities

At some point, research turns into action.

If your nonprofit runs peer-to-peer campaigns, is a charity partner to endurance events, or is exploring DIY or supporter-led fundraising, your platform choice will shape both your evenue and team workload.

You can learn more about how haku supports these programs here:
https://www.hakuapp.com/solutions/nonprofit/p2p-fundraising

Or request a demo to find out more about haku in particular. 

Don’t hesitate to bring real scenarios your team has faced or to ask detailed questions. No matter which platforms you ultimately evaluate for your peer-to-peer fundraising, be sure to push for clarity on how the platform will support your work. 

Final Thoughts on Using AI for Nonprofit P2P Fundraising Platform Research

AI is one possible starting point for initial research into nonprofit peer to peer fundraising platforms, but you should think of it as a smart intern without much fundraising experience, not a senior nonprofit expert.

The final choice of your core platform cannot be outsourced to an algorithm. After all, the platform you choose will impact your mission, the sanity of your staff, and the trust of your community. 

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