Learn to Achieve Grantwriting Synergy With AI

Over the last several months, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with dozens of nonprofit sector groups about the rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and my company’s product, Grantable. The hosts of these conversations are usually excited to see higher-than-usual turnout indicating great interest in the topic, and after a brief introduction, I field insightful audience questions from wire to wire.

This experience has allowed me to begin forming a composite picture of our sector’s thinking in these early days of the AI revolution, which has helped me to refine the information I like to share in these gatherings. In an upcoming webinar I will have the pleasure of hosting on the GrantStation platform, a year of webinar insights will coalesce in a session designed to be both practical, in a day-to-day sense, and philosophical, as we grapple with the implications of such powerful technology on society and the world we live in.

We’ll focus on the need for all of us to develop new mental models for understanding how generative AI functions and how it is different from traditional forms of software we’ve gotten used to over the last several decades. This will mean a short primer on AI fundamentals and then a look at some situational case studies to help us understand what’s happening under the hood of systems like ChatGPT and Grantable.

With our new mental model, we’ll begin developing a new risk profile for generative AI systems, which means understanding how their functional differences inherently change what it means to use them responsibly. I’ll introduce the Fundraising.AI framework and its ten areas of responsible AI use in fundraising contexts. This framework has been designed specifically for nonprofit fundraising professionals, so it has the right level of “zoom” to be relevant to our work.

Of course we’ll take Grantable for a spin! My cofounder Robert and I work everyday to improve the performance of our world-class grantwriting assistant, which is powered by the same technology underlying ChatGPT. Combining my 15 years of nonprofit experience as a grant professional and Robert’s incredible abilities as a software engineer, Grantable is a product of both my deep understanding of the brokenness of our current grants system and our collective aspirations for how it can be improved.

Robert and I often scrap weeks of work because of a realization about how to make our product better, which means bringing it closer to where you currently are in your work with grants and technology, and making generative AI abilities as intuitive as possible for you to both use and understand.

It is my hope that in our session together, while the technology may feel new, the work will feel familiar, and you’ll know exactly how to begin applying what you learn to what you already do. We’ll begin from scratch and work on creating a smart content library, and then we’ll take a shot at responding to some real requests for proposals using Grantable. This will be an opportunity for you to ask questions and share perspectives, and to see if what we’re building has a place in your tool kit. The bottom line is that AI tools can indeed help us to reclaim some of our time, and the critical choice we must make is how best to use the time we save. My recommendation is to devote it to strengthening trust relationships in our sector.

After we’ve explored Grantable, I’ll encourage you to continue playing with generative AI technology in order to gain confidence and familiarity with a technology that is rapidly changing the world we live in. In the near term, it is my hope that you’ll leave our session with a much better grasp of what generative AI is and how to explore its responsible use in your work. In the longer term, my intention is to encourage all of us to be active in creating the policy and cultural norms that must be sturdily constructed in order to mitigate the potential for great harm as well as unleash the awesome positive potential of generative AI across society.

Please consider joining us, and I invite you to bring others in your network that are curious about artificial intelligence and how it may come to help us all serve our clients and our missions more effectively.