“I love grant proposal writing because of the repetitive questions, arbitrary character limits, idiosyncratic budget formats, and the endless variety of infuriating grant portals,” said no grant professional, ever. By some estimates, 46% of all grant awards may cost more than they are worth when the true investment of people’s time and energy is taken into account. The people doing the work, grant professionals, are skillful and diligent, yet much of their hard work is sapped by the incredibly inefficient system they operate in.
This reality has led people like NonprofitAF.com author, Vu Le, to call for the replacement of grant applications with a better funding system because the current process wastes resources, deepens power imbalances, and ultimately harms efforts toward equity. Most of the comments and kudos from Le’s article titled “Foundations, it’s time to stop using grant applications to distribute funding” are from grant professionals who recognize the need for a better way forward, even if it means fundamental changes to the way they earn a living.
In the article, Le makes the case for trust-based partnerships as a more effective and equitable way for foundations to distribute money to organizations led by marginalized communities. I agree trust-based philanthropy should be a guiding principle for the sector to follow, and yet I also know building trust takes time while losing trust can happen in an instant. Scaling trust is slow and delicate work. How can we speed things up?
AI is a practical tool grant professionals can use to accelerate the progress being made in trust-based philanthropy by helping to reclaim their time. There are many parts of grantseeking that are huge time-wasters, such as rummaging through folders for content to reuse, shrinking or expanding character counts, and reworking old answers into new ones. Generative AI systems are ideal to take over much of the drudgery of the grantseeking process.
Who would this benefit most? According to the State of Grantseeking Report, 43% of organizations with annual budgets under $100,000 were all-volunteer, while another 28% employed part-time staff. These organizations report a median of $12,500 in grant awards—far lower than organizations with larger budgets and dedicated grant professionals on staff or working as consultants. Time and capacity are the biggest barriers preventing small and historically marginalized applicants from accessing grant funding they are eligible for. With more grant funding, these organizations will grow, creating more jobs in the sector and roles for grant professionals to play.
The sewing machine, when introduced in the mid-1800s, did not eliminate the need for seamstresses, as was initially feared by some. Instead, demand for much cheaper, high-quality clothing skyrocketed and a new era of fashion was born. AI writing systems, like sewing machines, require skillful human operators who use them to produce previously time-consuming products many times faster. Making high-quality grant proposals a basic commodity available across the nonprofit sector, instead of a luxury good only accessible to the largest organizations, is a big step forward in equity and lays the foundation for an era of trust-based philanthropy.