The organisation declared this destination. A human at the nonprofit affirmed it, verbatim, and that affirmation is stored in the file.
Plate 00 · start
The nonprofit says where its money may go.
An AI agent asked to donate routes to whatever it can parse, and today that is structurally never the nonprofit. VGP is one file, published from the one domain the organisation controls, declaring the giving destinations it authorises.
- 01 Draft it here. The generator fills in the structure and checks it against the schema as you type.
- 02 A human at the nonprofit authorises each destination. Typed verbatim, off the machine. This step has no tooling and cannot be automated.
- 03 Hand it to your developer, or your local AI. It is one static file, served at /.well-known/giving.json on your own domain.
Plate 01 · the declaration
powerpoetry.org/.well-known/giving.json application/json
{
"vgp_version": "0.1",
"canonical_domain": "example.org",
"organization": {
"legal_name": "Example Foundation",
"ein": "12-3456789",
"country": "US"
},
"giving": {
"authorized_destinations": [{
"id": "direct-card",
"type": "credit_card",
"recipient": "Example Foundation",
"authorization": {
"status": "authorized",
"approved_by_role": "Executive Director",
"approved_at": "2026-08-26T00:00:00Z",
"statement": "Our organization authorizes
donations through this destination."
}
}]
},
"verification": {
"organization_approved": true
}
} 01
No declaration exists for this destination. That is a void in the run,
not a finding about anyone.
Figure 01 · an approved declaration and the two states a consumer may report. Ink 3 marks authorisation and appears nowhere else in this system.
Plate 02 · the route
How an agent reaches it.
Once the file is served, nothing else has to be built. This is the whole path a donation takes when the agent can read what the nonprofit declared.
01 A donor asks
“Donate $50 to wildfire relief.”
02 The agent reads the declaration
nonprofit.org/.well-known/giving.json
03 It sees only authorized destinations
Anything the organisation did not declare is not there to route to.
04 The donor lands on the nonprofit’s own pathway
And arrives as the nonprofit’s donor, not a stranger’s.
Figure 02 · the route a declared donation takes. Step 03 is the protocol; the rest is ordinary web.
Without a declaration, step 02 has nothing to read and the agent guesses. It lands on whatever it can parse — an outdated page, a form it cannot complete, or a third-party page raising money on a nonprofit’s behalf without its express permission. Those pages keep the donor: the name, the email, the relationship. The organisation gets a cheque months later, and never meets the person who gave.
Why this is the shipping container moment Plate 03 · the same page, to an agent
What an agent can actually read.
A real donation page: powerpoetry.org/donate. Nothing about it changes for a human. The difference is what an agent has to work with when it gets there.
01 Before
what the agent sees html
<iframe src="https://givebutter.com
/embed/c/donate-power-poetry">
</iframe>A cross-origin payment widget. The agent cannot read inside it, cannot see what it charges, and cannot tell who receives the money. What is left is the prose around it, so the agent does what it always does: it guesses, or it leaves for a page it can parse — which may be one nobody at the nonprofit authorised.
02 After
tools the page registers webmcp
giving_verify who this organisation is
giving_options destinations it authorized
giving_designations funds it accepts
giving_prepare builds a URL; never chargesFour described, schema-typed tools the agent discovers automatically. It no longer reads a page; it asks a question and gets the organisation’s own answer. Two lines in the page’s HTML do this — the declaration is already the hard part, and it is already done.
Figure 03 · the same donate page before and after publishing a declaration. Ink 3 marks the side where an authorised destination exists to route to.
The tools fail closed. If the declaration is missing, unapproved, or served with the wrong media type, the page registers no giving tools at all — and the agent is told this site exposes no authorised giving pathway, rather than being handed a form it might use anyway. Absence is a much safer default than an ambiguous form.
Plate 04 · three statements, routinely conflated
Only one of these authorises anything.
| No. | Statement | Who makes it | Means | Authorises |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | benefits | Anyone | Proceeds from this go to Organization X. | |
| 02 | confirmed | A discovery process | Public evidence consistently identifies this destination. | |
| 03 | authorized | The organisation | We declare this an approved giving destination. |
No volume, quality, or agreement of evidence converts confirmed into authorized. Discovery may propose; only a human at the nonprofit may publish. The affirmation is compared as a constant, not a sentiment — a paraphrase is refused by the tooling.
Plate 05 · permitted methods
Eight declared methods. Nothing else prints.
Every destination carries a numbered method, a named recipient, and an authorisation record. Each unit is cited by the same number in the specification, the generator, and the validator.
01
credit_card 02
ach 03
check 04
daf 05
stock 06
crypto 07
workplace 08
other any method not declared prints as an empty box
Figure 05 · the permitted method set. A ninth cell cannot be added by a consumer, a processor, or an agent.
Plate 06 · adoption
An afternoon, in four operations.
| No. | Operation | Where it happens | Who does it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Draft the declaration | /generate | Developer |
| 02 | Authorise each destination | Off the machine | The nonprofit |
| 03 | Serve it | /.well-known/giving.json | Developer |
| 04 | Register the agent tools | giving-tools.js | Developer |
Operation 02 is not automatable and has no tooling. A nonprofit administrator affirms, verbatim: “Our organization authorizes donations through this destination.” Everything else on this site exists to make the other three operations short.