What will replace the grant proposal?
Step four: funding follows a living record
By Wesley Stevens, Founder of Quillify. October 3, 2026.
What will replace the grant proposal?
A living record of an organization's work. A proposal is a snapshot written for one funder on one deadline, then rewritten for the next. A living record says what the organization does, for whom, at what cost and with what results, and it stays current because it is kept as the work happens. Funders read the record, and renewals follow from it.
The proposal is a snapshot
A proposal describes an organization at one moment, in one funder's format, for one decision. The next funder gets a new snapshot, rewritten from the same facts. After an award, the report is another reconstruction of what happened, written months later.
The cost lands on both sides. Kris Putnam-Walkerly, who advises foundations, tells of a program officer who admitted that their foundation read fewer than one in five of the reports it required. One of that foundation's grantees told her he spent about forty hours preparing its reports.
What a living record holds
The programs. What the organization does, where and for whom, described once and kept accurate.
The results. Outcomes and figures logged when they happen, each traced to its source.
The money. Budgets and finances, current and comparable from year to year.
The obligations. Every award's deliverables, deadlines and conditions, with their status.
The organization owns the record and decides who sees which parts. A funder reading it sees the same facts the organization works from every day.
Why it changes funding
A funder reading a living record no longer needs a proposal to learn who an organization is, so it can ask only the questions that reflect its own strategy. Progress is visible as it happens, so reports shrink and renewals can follow results on their own schedule.
Multi-year funding becomes easier to justify, because the funder can see the work continue instead of waiting for the next application.
Pieces of it exist today
Quillify already keeps parts of this record for the organizations that use it. An organization's documents sit in its own Data Room, scoped to that organization, and every draft is built from them. An award letter becomes a schedule of every obligation, each quoting the sentence it came from where the letter states it. When a report comes due, Quillify drafts it from the award and the status of each deliverable, and leaves any figure it does not have for a person to supply.
What remains is making the record verified, shareable on the organization's terms, and readable by funders directly.
What you can do today
- Reuse one proposal across funders
- What happens after you win
- Quillify for staying on track after an award
More in this series: How will AI change philanthropy? The future of grantmaking, Will AI replace grant writers?, Will there ever be one grant application for every funder?, How will foundations find nonprofits in the future?, What will grantmaking look like without applications?, What are the risks of AI in philanthropy?.
Start on the steps that are possible today.
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