Empowering Impact:
How the Grant Strategy Team Uses AI
As the Grant Strategy Team (GST), our mission is to secure financial resources for organizations creating incredible change in their communities. To do that efficiently, we utilize advanced technology, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically Gemini.
We view AI not as a replacement for human insight and expertise, but as an administrative support. Below is our formal policy and an overview of how AI strengthens our daily workflows.
Our AI Policy: Human-Centered, AI-Supported
Our Core Principle: Technology adapts to humans, not the other way around. Every piece of data, narrative, or strategy managed by the Grant Strategy Team is anchored in human empathy, ethics, and expertise.
- Human Oversight: AI never has the final say. Every AI-generated output is strictly reviewed, fact-checked, and refined by a human grant strategist before it ever reaches a client or a funder.
- Data Privacy and Security: We do not feed sensitive personal information, proprietary client data, or unreleased organizational secrets into public AI models.
- Fact Verification: Because AI models can occasionally misinterpret data, our team manually verifies all sources, statistics, and citations provided by AI tools to ensure absolute accuracy.
AI in Action
How We Use It
Currently, our use of AI is primarily focused on deep research, data reformatting, and operational efficiency. Here is how it directly improves our grant process:
1. Document Conversion and Formatting (V1 Portal Migration)
Grant portals often provide guidelines and budgets in rigid, uneditable PDFs or poorly formatted scans. For efficiency in such situations, a formal first step in the GST process is to use AI to convert portal PDFs into clean, editable working documents.
- Example: If a client provides a scanned, unformatted budget, we use a closed AI model to translate that raw data into an organized Google Sheet, allowing us to seamlessly adjust, track, and optimize the numbers for submission.
2. Identifying Community Needs and Sourcing
Crafting a compelling “Statement of Need” requires robust evidence. So we use AI to accelerate our searches for high-quality data regarding specific community challenges and strengths and then a team member fact-checks to verify.
- Example: We use AI to quickly surface reputable sources, studies, and data points that our team can use to demonstrate the necessity of wraparound services for unhoused individuals, giving our strategists a strong foundation for a definitive, strong needs statement.
3. Data Modernization and Stat Updating
Funder confidence relies on up-to-date data. To meet the expectation of accuracy when working with past client narratives, we leverage AI to find the latest available metrics.
- Example: If a proposal contains an outdated statistic, we ask AI to locate the original source’s newest release, as well as alternative reputable databases with parallel data. This approach drastically reduces internet search friction and ensures that our proposals are cutting-edge and credible.
How We Do NOT Use AI
To maintain the highest standards of integrity, authenticity, and ethical advocacy, the Grant Strategy Team avoids the use of AI in the following ways:
- No Automated Narrative Writing: We never use AI to ghostwrite client stories, organizational mission statements, or the core heart of a grant proposal. Every narrative voice we craft is written directly by a human strategist to ensure true emotional resonance and authenticity.
- No Blind Compliance or “Auto-Submissions”: We never allow AI to automatically generate responses to funder questions, nor do we ever use automated tools to submit grants. Human eyes review every syllable.
- No Unverified Data or “Hallucination” Acceptance: We never take AI-generated facts, statistics, or source links at face value. If a piece of data cannot be independently verified by a team member using a reputable primary source, it is excluded from our work.
- No Compromising of Confidentiality: We never paste proprietary client methods, financial bank statements, or sensitive community-member stories into public AI tools. Our clients’ organizational trust and data security are entirely non-negotiable.
Why This Practice Matters for Our Clients
By allowing AI to handle the heavy lifting of data updates, document conversion, and preliminary search queries, our strategists spend less time fighting with difficult documents and endless online searching and invest more time in doing what they do best: crafting winning narratives and designing high-impact grant strategies.
Interested in reviewing our AI Policy? Click Here.
Contact the Grant Strategy Team today to learn more about our methodology.