As a grant writer, or as many of you are, grant writing consultants, you know how challenging it can be to juggle multiple clients with varying needs and requirements. That’s why utilizing AI technology like ChatGPT can be a game-changer for your workflow. By creating a standard document that outlines the basic information about each of your or each of your clients’ organizations and using ChatGPT to generate a draft proposal, you can save time and effort while still producing high-quality proposals. In this post, we’ll outline a step-by-step process for using ChatGPT to generate grant proposals that can be easily customized to fit the specific needs of each client. We’ll also provide troubleshooting tips to help ensure success when using this AI technology.

List Basic Information About Your Organization

The first step in using AI to write grants is to produce a document that you can easily find that lists the basic information about your organization in bullet point form:

• Describe your nonprofit organization and its mission, goals, and track record of success
• List 3 specific outcomes the grant will aim to improve/accomplish and how it will achieve those outcomes
• Outline the budget for the grant and how the funds will be allocated to achieve the desired outcomes
• Describe the potential impact of the grant on the organization and the community you serve
• Include a timeline for the activities of the grant proposal, including key milestones and deliverables

Also, for each different grant you’re applying for, add these two bullets to the top of your bulleted list:

• Specify the type of grant you are writing (e.g., federal, private, corporate, etc.)
• Identify the target audience of the grant (the grantmaker) and how they align with your organization’s mission

Paid software like Fundwriter.AI will have boxes in their online form for grant writing that will ask you similar questions as these bullet points. If you’re using free software like ChatGPT, you will need to make sure you include each piece of information manually. Having it in a standard document that you can copy and paste at any time makes the process go much faster.

Troubleshooting: Keep in mind, when you’re creating these prompts, you’re always making the request and pasting the writing you want revised or included in one prompt so that ChatGPT knows they go together and doesn’t start generating a draft based on incomplete information.

Enter Listed Information in AI software to Generate an Initial Draft Proposal

Next, enter the bulleted information into the AI of your choice. After entering this information, use ChatGPT to generate a draft proposal, but keep in mind that the response is not the final draft. Use your grant writing expertise to refine it by copying and pasting sections of the grant into ChatGPT and asking for more detailed responses. For established nonprofits, paste existing content into the prompt and ask ChatGPT to revise it to appeal to specific funders.

Troubleshooting: Sometimes ChatGPT will stop generating in the middle of a response. You can either ask it to finish generating the response or you can select “Regenerate response.” Just know that it might create something totally different in that case.

Copy and paste the response it gives you into a document. ChatGPT is not reliable about saving its answers; sometimes it saves your chats and sometimes they disappear.

Troubleshooting: if Chat GPT is down, come back to it another time. This is why it’s best practice to give yourself plenty of time when working with it. It’s not reliable unless you purchase the $20 a month Chat GPT Plus, which is what we do. We need the reliability.

Use AI Software to Revise Each Section of the Grant Proposal

Next, you might want more detail on specific sections or every section of the draft it wrote for you. After much experimentation, I’ve found that the best way to get Chat GPT to be more specific rather than just have it regurgitate the exact same response is to copy and paste one section of the grant at a time and ask it to “provide a detailed response than this: “[and then paste put in quotes the response it gave]”.”

Then it will typically give a more detailed response. If it’s not what you want, you can ask it how you want it to be more specific. So for example, if it generates a timeline that goes quarter by quarter rather than month by month, you can ask it to provide a month-by-month timeline with four to five activities for each month. The more specific you are in your prompt/request, the more specific the response will be.

Another workflow for more well-established nonprofits that have a lot of existing writing is to copy and paste content into the prompt and then ask the AI to do something specific with it. For example, you could copy your organizational history into ChatGPT and then ask it to make this history and mission appeal to a grantmaker whose funding priority is [list the priority the grantmaker lists on their website]. So it will revise your history to focus more and incorporate specific language that will appeal to that type of grantmaker or that particular program/priority for a grantmaker.

Compile and Refine the Overall Narrative of the Final Proposal

Usually you will need to cobble together multiple different responses from the AI into a doc. Sometimes the prose can get a bit uneven and things really seem cobbled together. So once you have that cobbled together draft, copy and paste all of it into and ask Chat GPT to “revise this narrative into a cohesive grant draft that keeps the level of detail included here. Specifically, please incorporate introductory and transitional sentences to make it flow: “[and then paste the draft here]”.”

And there you have it, a detailed grant draft that you can add to manually or using ChatGPT!

As with the revision you just did, you can take existing paragraphs of writing you have, for those of you with well-established nonprofits, and ask chat GPT to incorporate them into the grant draft in the appropriate sections (you specify where for the best result).

Grant writing is usually a complex and time-consuming process, but with the help of AI technology like ChatGPT, it can be made easier and more efficient. By creating a standard document that outlines your organization’s basic information and then using ChatGPT to generate a draft, you can save time and effort while still creating a high-quality proposal. By following the step-by-step process outlined in this post, as well as the troubleshooting tips provided, you can increase your chances of success in securing funding to support your nonprofit organization’s mission and goals.