Automating Grant Applications While Maintaining Quality
Learning how to automate grant applications reduces your writing time from 300 hours to just 8-10 hours while keeping the authentic voice funders want to see. This proven method combines AI assistance with personalized storytelling to create compelling proposals that rise above the competition.
Your organization can streamline the grant writing process through automation frameworks and smart templates, regardless of size or resources. The results speak for themselves - clearer writing, stronger outcomes, and more funding opportunities await organizations ready to modernize their approach to grant applications.
Strategic Grant Automation Frameworks
As you've likely noticed, general AI tools can be effective at generating initial drafts and ideas that sound convincing. However, these drafts often contain similarities such as repetitive bullet points, em dashes, fluffy language, and even emojis like rocket ships or targets. While these AI-generated drafts can help get your thoughts on paper, they may not be viewed as high-quality or compelling by funders.
The Funder's Perspective
Imagine you're a funder who has issued a solicitation, seeking a partner to solve a specific problem. If you receive a generic, obviously AI-generated response, you're likely to skim through it without forming any meaningful human connection. This is the current state of AI in the funding space, with funders being inundated by lengthy, generic proposals generated from the same source, using identical words, bullet points, and em dashes.
In this age of AI-generated content, funders are increasingly attracted to the human element and unique voice in grant applications. To stand out, you must connect with funders through your writing, showcasing your distinct perspective and supporting it with compelling storytelling and data.
How Quillify Can Help
This is where Quillify can help organizations like yours, particularly nonprofits with limited staff and resources, to optimize your grant proposals and improve your chances of securing the funding you need to reach the next level.
Consider these scenarios:
If you're a large business, you probably have a grant writer on staff.
If you're a smaller business, you might sometimes consult with a grant writer.
For nonprofits with one to five people, the CEO may be doing all the grant writing, or someone is juggling grant writing with other tasks and projects.
In these situations, you don't have much time, and AI can be very attractive and appealing. That's where Quillify comes in – we built this so organizations like yours can have a chance at getting the funding you need to get to the next level without the hassle of finding a good grant writer or the pitfall of using generic AI to try and get in the door.
Assisting Grant Writers
Quillify is also highly effective in assisting grant writers in their work. Let me give you an example: we had a client from a local university's nursing college who wanted to write an application for the STEPS program. Our AI took their information about who they are, what they do, and what they aimed to achieve with the grant. It then generated a complete proposal, saving the grant writer a significant amount of time. In fact, we've had proposals that normally would take a grant writer somewhere around 200-300 hours, and they've been able to use Quillify and come out with a full grant proposal in less than a day.
While our proposals are not a silver bullet, they provide a highly customized way to incorporate your voice into the format and style that funders expect to see. The grant writer can then take the AI-generated draft, which has already done most of the work, and polish it up. They may ask a few clarifying questions, but usually, the AI has extrapolated all the necessary information and done a good amount of grant research. The grant writer's role is to update the formatting, make the content more concise, and ensure compliance, although Quillify's AI is quite adept at meeting compliance requirements.
The end result is a highly polished, refined, and automated grant application that effectively communicates your unique voice and story to potential funders. By leveraging Quillify's strategic grant automation frameworks, you can significantly improve your grant writing efficiency and optimize your proposals to stand out in a competitive funding landscape. Embrace the power of AI while maintaining the human touch that funders crave, and you'll be well on your way to securing the funding your organization needs to thrive.
Grant Writing Efficiency Through Smart Templates
When applying for federal-level grants, you are often provided with a generic outline of what is needed, such as a project plan, research plan, information about the principal investigator (PI) and supporting entities, and a description of the need. However, the challenge arises when you are asked to write a compelling 15-page research plan without any additional guidance.
The Value of Experienced Grant Professionals
This is where experienced grant professionals can help by utilizing smart templates that incorporate research and findings on the most effective sections and formats. These templates provide structure and outline how your thoughts should be presented on paper.
When you have a clear flow for presenting your ideas and outlining your plan, it makes reading the grant application more easy and compelling, ultimately increasing your success rate.
Quillify's Approach to Smart Templates
Quillify, as an illustration, has an internal awareness of the types of materials and sections each funder prefers to see. Depending on your specific application, Quillify may:
Provide a general outline of what needs to be included
Break down larger sections into smaller, manageable parts, such as allocating five pages for the technical description, a page for the executive summary, and a couple of pages for background and history
The Importance of Impact Measurement
One crucial element to include in these templates is impact measurement. Keep in mind that each funder is looking for specific things. The National Science Foundation (NSF), for instance, is interested in whether the project will lead to publications and advance the scientific community.
Every funder has their own grading rubric, which they sometimes share. Therefore, each template should optimize for the key value points that the funder is seeking, allowing you to easily and quickly address each point.
Techniques for Optimizing Grant Proposals
To improve grant writing efficiency and optimize your grant proposals, consider the following techniques:
Utilize smart templates tailored to each funder's preferences and requirements
Structure your ideas and plan in a clear, compelling manner
Incorporate impact measurement backed by data and align with the funder's key value points
Break down larger sections into smaller, manageable parts
Seek guidance from experienced grant professionals who understand the most effective sections and formats
By implementing these strategies, leveraging smart templates, and using AI appropriately, you can streamline your grant application process, increase your chances of success, and ultimately secure the funding needed to bring your project to fruition.
Personalized Grant Proposal Systems
Staring at a blank sheet of paper, trying to whip out a 20 or 30-page document, and coming up with all the ideas you have can be daunting. You start writing, but then you run into something and wonder how to phrase it. You put a placeholder there and keep going, but 20 pages later, you've forgotten to go back and fix it or phrase it better. After a couple of edits, you get some things right but miss others. In some places, you just don't know how to make it better, and poof you're out of time.
How AI Can Help
This is where AI can be incredibly helpful in getting those ideas out and rephrased, allowing you to orchestrate the process and pick out the elements that resonate with you, even if you didn't know how to say them before. Your individual voice comes a lot from how you think about the problems of the people you serve, the demonstrations of effort that you're going for, and your brand messaging.
Leveraging AI to get those thoughts out and format them in a way that fits within the scope of the grant can significantly improve grant writing efficiency. After the AI has done its work, you can go back through and refine it, infusing your voice into the document.
Optimization Techniques
Here are some grant proposal optimization techniques:
Using coined phrases that your brand uses can be very effective.
Making sure that every story is specific and unique to you, not just the general AI.
Keeping the proposal personalized through local statistics.
To illustrate, at Quillify, we have found that nonprofits in Richmond, Virginia have a really hard time winning grants. By helping them use AI to write grants and find new opportunities, they're able to increase their output to win at the numbers game. But more than that because the scaffolding is already in place, they're able to effectively get their proposals out while maintaining what makes them unique and as a result, we're actually improving the local community. It's AI for good.
What Funders Look For
Remember the three things a funder looks for:
A compelling story
Data that proves what you're doing
A vision of what you could achieve with the funding
If you can paint a picture of the impact the grant could have locally, backed up by data and statistics, you'll be well on your way to a successful proposal.
Adding a Personal Touch
Adding testimonials can also go a long way. As an example, Habitat for Humanity often has their house recipients call up their donors and say thank you and get follow-on funding. Little human touches like that can be meaningful and impactful when asking for money.
Grant Optimization Through Data Analytics
To optimize your grant applications for funding success, focus on providing the data that the funder is looking for. This can be hard data indicating a certain need, such as poverty rates, Latino rates, or neighborhood-by-neighborhood breakdowns of graduation rates. The more granular the data you can weave into your story, the more credibility you build. This helps the funder understand that you're solving an important need that exists.
Linking Data to Your Project
In the application, link how the data shows the current situation and how your project will solve these problems. Be as specific as possible about how the numbers should improve if you are successful. This demonstrates to the funder that you know exactly what you're doing, why it will work, and that you have thought this through very well.
The funder will also have its own idea of what the problems are in the community and should be able to validate and back up the data you're presenting, showing that you've already been making an impact in that area.
Finding the Right Grants
Quillify can help you parse through this data to extract value. For example, Quillify parses through the foundation 990 tax forms to see what grant makers are giving for and how much when looking for new grants to apply for. You may even be able to understand success rates between different departments, especially at the federal level. Open data from the government showcases the breakdown of success rates between organizations and different programs.
If you focus on the organizations that like to fund projects like yours, your success rate goes up because the top-of-mind interest of the funder is exactly what you're doing. Funders are basically putting a message out saying, "I need this problem solved." If you're the one that can say, "I can solve that problem exactly, here's how, and I have a great track record of doing this," then they're more likely to fund you.
Tracking Data in Your Proposals
It's important to also mention how you're going to track data when you write proposals. While performing on the grant, you will have to pull together those data points and show them to the funder to prove that you are collecting good data and that it is showing that you are doing a good job and the aims of the grant are succeeding.
Here are some ways to track data:
AI language models can help with measuring and evaluating raw data and getting a summary of the data's effect.
Simple calculations through Excel, Google Sheets, or other tools can also help track.
Project management tools like CRMs can help you track your projects and the results that are happening because of them.
Quillify can help ensure that your applications have all the sections and aspects needed to succeed in automating and optimizing your grant writing process for improved efficiency.
Accelerating Your Grant Success Through Strategic Automation
You can streamline your grant applications with automation tools that preserve your organization's authentic voice and message. Our proven methods help you cut grant writing time by up to 90%, letting you focus on crafting compelling stories and showing real results.
Ready to modernize your grant writing approach? Our team will guide you through each step of building an effective automation strategy that meets funder requirements. Contact us now to start your journey toward consistent grant funding success.
