Grants and admin

The same background section rewritten for a fifth donor, the budget narrative, the quarterly report due tomorrow. Paperwork takes a startling share of a small organisation’s week.

It is repetitive text with a fixed structure, which these tools handle well. Hand over what you have written many times before: organisational background, methodology, the description of a standard activity. Give ChatGPT your own paragraph and ask it to fit a new donor’s wording. The parts that persuade a donor are the parts only you can write.

Watch out for this

Proposal files hold more than they look like: unpublished budgets, staff salaries, partners who have not agreed to be named, details of where your people work. None of that belongs in a free AI service that keeps what you type by default. Check the donor’s own position too: several now require you to say whether AI was used in an application, and a few restrict it outright.