A private AI demonstration · The UK charity sector
Charity Chat
The entire Charity Commission register, except you can just ask it questions.
There are around 170,000 charities on the register for England and Wales. The official search will show you one of them at a time. Charity Chat lets you ask the whole thing a question, in plain English, and get the answer back with the figures.
It is also a working example of the kind of private AI I build for charities. So it is worth saying up front how it runs.
How it works, and why that matters
Charity Chat runs on open weights in my own AWS account. Your questions are never sent to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or any other outside service. The data it answers from is public, and every answer is traceable to the exact database query that produced it, so nothing is taken on trust.
That last part is the whole idea. The register is public data, so I can show you the queries openly here. The same build, an assistant sitting next to a read-only copy of your records and answering in plain English, works just as well on the data you cannot make public: your donor list, your case notes, your finance export. With private AI, none of it leaves your control.
See what it can do
Each example below starts with something a real person in the sector is trying to find out, then shows the question they'd put to Charity Chat and the answer it gives back. You can see the query it wrote running underneath each answer, so you can always check the working. Nothing is staged: these are the answers the register actually gives.
See who is connected
Questions about the relationships between charities, which the official register cannot answer at all.
Maybe you're a journalist, a funder doing due diligence, or simply curious how concentrated the sector is: you want to know who turns up again and again, sitting on board after board across different charities.
You'd ask Charity Chat:
"Who are the people that sit on the most charity boards?"
You're looking into a particular charity, perhaps before a partnership or as a conflict-of-interest check, and you want to know which other charities its trustees are also involved in.
You'd ask Charity Chat:
"Which charities share a trustee with the British Red Cross? Show me all shared trustees."
Map your sector
Filter the whole register by cause, place, size and age at once, the way the official search will not let you.
You're new in post, or moving into a new patch, and you want the lie of the land quickly: who the biggest charities in your area are, and what they actually do.
You'd ask Charity Chat:
"What are the biggest charities in Cornwall, and what do they work on?"
You run services for young people and want to know who else has recently set up locally, whether as potential partners or just to understand the field you're working in.
You'd ask Charity Chat:
"Show me youth charities operating in Leeds that have reported an income, newest first."
Sometimes you just want the headline picture of the sector: who the giants are, and what they're for.
You'd ask Charity Chat:
"What are the biggest charities in the UK, and what do they do?"
Spot the trends and the risks
Patterns across the whole sector at once, drawn as a chart or a list, instead of one charity at a time.
You're writing a strategy or a funding case and want to show a trend over time. Is interest in a cause growing or fading? A chart makes the point better than a sentence ever could.
You'd ask Charity Chat:
"Chart how many new animal charities have registered each year since 2010."
You're a funder or a trustee watching for early signs of trouble, and you want to find the larger charities whose income has been sliding year after year.
You'd ask Charity Chat:
"Which large charities have had their income fall three years running?"
You want a sector-wide health check: which sizeable charities are spending more than they bring in, setting aside the grant-making foundations that do so by design.
You'd ask Charity Chat:
"Which large operating charities spent more than they raised last year?"
Find a funder, profile a charity
From prospecting a whole field down to a single charity's dossier in seconds.
You're fundraising for an environmental project in the South West and want to find the grant-makers worth approaching, narrowed by cause and by area, biggest first.
You'd ask Charity Chat:
"Which are the biggest grant-making charities in Devon that fund environmental and conservation causes?"
You're about to meet, partner with, or research a particular charity, and you want everything that matters on one screen: what it does, who runs it, and how its finances have moved.
You'd ask Charity Chat:
"Give me a full profile of Macmillan Cancer Support: what it does, its trustees, and its income over five years."
Want to try it yourself?
Charity Chat is not open to the public, and there is no sign-up form. Every question it answers runs real AI in my own account, so each one costs me a little to run. That is money well spent when it is genuinely helping someone in the sector, and not really the point if it is just idle curiosity.
So I give access to people working in the UK charity sector who will get real use out of it. If that is you, the quickest way in is to connect with me on LinkedIn and tell me briefly what you would use it for, and I'll set you up with a login. Not on LinkedIn? Email me with the same.
Or, if you'd rather not have an account at all and there's just one thing you'd like to know, email me the question. I'll run it through Charity Chat myself and send you back what it finds.
Built on the Charity Commission for England and Wales register, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0. England and Wales only; Scotland and Northern Ireland keep separate registers. Figures are from the June 2026 release of the register and are a snapshot, not live.