For many small and local organizations working in international development — with limited resources — the complexities of securing funding have become a pressing challenge.
The time, expertise, and resources required to prepare a competitive proposal can push these organizations to the sidelines. But with the development of AI-powered toolkits, these barriers are beginning to breakdown, believes Maggie Ehrenfried, Vice President of Advancement at LifeNet International.
“AI-enabled tools like Grant Assistant allow smaller, local organizations to punch above our weight class in fundraising, just as we do in our programs. It’s a great equalizer and it’s very reassuring for the future of organizations like ours," Ehrenfried said.
Launched in April2024, Grant Assistant aims to streamline the grant proposal process — from evaluation and design to budgeting and compliance review. The company is led by Chief Executive Officer Mustafa Hasnain with Sean Carroll, a former Chief of Staff at USAID, serving as the board chair and Dr. William Steiger, also a former Chief of Staff at USAID, providing guidance on the advisory board.
Local organizations are the ones closest to the communities they serve and are often best positioned to provide solutions for on-the-ground realities. Yet sometimes they lack the English-language skills, grant-writing experience, or time to pursue funding from international donors like USAID, explains Ehrenfried.
Could AI-assisted tools like Grant Assistant really help small organizations? How might tools like this impact job security and potential job loss within fundraising teams, and what steps are being taken to address these concerns? — we asked Ehrenfried.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What are some of the pain points or issues that you’ve experienced in the proposal drafting process that AI-enabled proposal tools aretrying to solve?
For an organization like LifeNet, which is focused on efficiency and the best use of donor funds, maximizing time and our value-add is pivotal. LifeNet is a highly leveraged organization. Despite having less than 100 employees and a budget under $10 million, we have an outsized impact, including improving nine million patient visits a year with more than 400 healthcare facility partners across six countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
Grant funding is critical for our success, and we seriously value those donated dollars. To that end, we have a very lean, super-efficient team, and we use all the additional resources – like AI! – so we can maintain and increase our operational leverage.
If you work in international development, you know that knot-in-the-stomach feeling when you come across a terrific grant opportunity, but the solicitation looks like a book of arcane language and requirements.
With AI-enabled tools like Grant Assistant, we’ve been able to organize and accelerate the process, while ensuring our final product is higher quality and more accurate. Those tools have allowed our team to quickly and seamlessly review and summarize each solicitation, create a template for our response, allow our team to collaborate on program elements and ideas, flesh out those ideas with AI-generated structure and content, and even conduct a compliance check to ensure we’ve met all of the requirements.
Can you share some of your team’s experience with Grant Assistant and how it helps address those issues?
Earlier this year, we had a tight deadline fora very technical proposal that was a great fit for us, but it was a big project and we had limited time. Additionally, the proposal and all of the attachments needed to be in French, which is not my primary language. Normally, that proposal would have taken at least four weeks and involved hiring multiple consultants and translators, significantly increasing our costs and time.
With Grant Assistant, we were able to expedite the entire process, completing everything from program design to submission in just 10 days. The tool helped us with everything from organization to collaboration, structure, drafting, and review, as well as providing a translation into French.
Not only did Grant Assistant reduce the time, money, and stress involved, but it also helped us ensure the quality of the final submission. This ability to move quickly and efficiently has helped us become more competitive in the grant space and further increased our operational leverage.
Share a little of the nuts-and-bolts of using an AI-enabled tool to support your team when you draft a proposal. How does your organization ensure it maintains its voice and its ideas in the end product?
We’ve found that AI-enabled tools work best when paired with human creativity. Those tools can help handle the nitty-gritty, so we can focus on the things that people do best.
Our team uses Grant Assistant to summarize proposals, suggest templates for our response, and allow seamless collaboration between team members as we brainstorm and develop a project plan. Once we have developed the framework of our plan, the magic of generative AI helps flesh out those ideas and adds structure, so the proposal really sings. Our team then spends time reviewing and polishing the language, and we use Grant Assistant to create a compliance matrix to ensure we’ve met all of the requirements before submitting it.
In short, we ensure that our organization’s voice and ideas remain at the forefront by using AI as a supplement and support for the experts and authors on ourteam. While AI helps draft content, our team reviews and refines everything to make sure it aligns with our vision, values, and unique approach.
Do you think that AI tools will lead to a loss of jobs on fundraising teams? Or will there be a more synergistic relationship between the roles?
I don’t think AI is going to replace employees. Instead, I like to say that AI helps us become better and faster, making us more effective and efficient. It increases our capacity, allowing us to operate almost like a "human-plus" organization.
Thanks to AI-enabled tools, our team has more time to focus on strategic, high-value activities, rather than drudge work. Those tools are great for repetitive and time-consuming tasks like summarizing solicitations or fleshing out draft language, thus freeing up our staff to engage in higher-level work around program design, creative thinking, and mission alignment.
Rather than replacing jobs, we see Grant Assistant as a way to increase our capacity. It’s as if we’ve gained additional employees to assist our development team, so we can find and evaluate more opportunities, collaborate more efficiently, brainstorm better ideas, and submit more and better proposals to fund our lifesaving work.
What additional functionality or improvements do you feel smaller organizations like LifeNet International would benefit from next?
The future of AI-enabled proposal tools is bright, and there are several improvements that could benefit organizations like ours. One major area is the continued refinement of AI’s ability to understand and reflect organizational values and unique perspectives. While current tools do a great job of helping with structure and content generation, there’s room for improvement when it comes to embedding the nuanced, mission-driven tone that organizations like LifeNet rely on.
Another area for growth is integration with other platforms that smaller organizations frequently use, like donor management systems or budgeting tools. Seamless integration would allow for a more streamlined process from proposal drafting to grant reporting, making iteasier for organizations to manage the full grant cycle.
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