The situation
A youth-services nonprofit running after-school programs, summer camps, and a teen workforce-development arm. The development director was a one-person show — sharp, well-connected, and capped at the number of hours in a week. The board was pushing for $1M+ in new restricted revenue; the path required submitting at least 35 grants/year. They'd done 19 the year before.
The bottleneck was research and drafting. Every grant cycle required hours of due diligence on the funder, hours assembling boilerplate, and a final pass that the director did personally because nobody else could write in the org's voice.
What we built
- Funder intelligence — given a program description, surfaces 5-10 vetted foundation and family-office prospects per week, ranked by fit and giving history.
- LOI/proposal drafting — converts a brief plus the org's narrative library into a tailored draft in the director's voice. Citations are explicit.
- Reporting helper — drafts post-award reports from program data, matching each funder's preferred format.
How the work ran
We started by indexing the org's narrative library — past proposals, theory of change, program logic models, outcome data. This was the most valuable two weeks of the engagement; the director had been the human index for years.
Build took three weeks. The first live grant went out in week five — an unsolicited LOI to a regional family foundation. They invited a full proposal. It was funded for $85K.
I'm not spending less time on grants. I'm spending the same time, on twice as many grants, and the relationships I make are deeper because I show up prepared. — Development Director
Outcomes after one fiscal year
- Grants submitted rose from 19 to 41.
- Success rate rose from 28% to 41% — likely because the org applied to more fitting funders, not just more funders.
- Net new revenue attributable to the new pipeline: $1.4M in year one.
What we'd say to a similar organization
One development person + AI is a different job than one development person alone. They shift from drafting to relationships. The grants get better because the person has more time to think about the funder, not less. If you're going to do this, brief your board first — the change in pace will surprise everyone.