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December 13, 2024
Trends in Development in 2025: A Conversation with Bill Steiger and the Grant Assistant Team

Grant Assistant (A FreeWill Company) hosted a virtual discussion with Dr. Bill Steiger, Former Chief of Staff, USAID - Trump 45. Topics included USAID changes under Trump 45, new priorities, AI in development, and funding strategies.

December 13, 2024
Unleashing the Power of AI: How Grant Assistant Transforms Proposal Writing

Grant Assistant revolutionizes proposal writing with AI, enabling seamless collaboration and the creation of impactful proposals without the stress of tight deadlines and complex requirements. This AI-powered tool transforms the proposal development process, ensuring compliance and enhancing creativity, thereby empowering teams to focus on their mission and achieve greater global impact.

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December 13, 2024
The Pressures of USAID Proposal Creation: Embracing Localization for Sustainable Impact

Navigating the complexities of USAID proposal creation, business development professionals must embrace localization—tailoring proposals to the unique cultural and socio-economic contexts of target regions—to ensure relevance, effectiveness, and sustainable impact amidst tight deadlines and intense competition.

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Frequently Asked Questions

1.
Are all proposals going to look the same?
  • No, proposals will be unique. They draw from your ideas, documents, previous successes, and research.
  • The AI works as a smart assistant, surfacing information, but you decide what goes into the proposal.
2.
Are you going to share our data with our competitors?
  • No, data is not shared with competitors.
  • For enterprise customers, data is hosted on a secure, independent SOC 2 compliant AWS deployment. For business users, data is hosted on a secure AWS pod.
  • Your data is black boxed and only available to verified people within your organization.
3.
Are you training on my data to make it available to others?
  • Not at all. Your data is hosted securely and is only available to verified people within your organization.
  • We do not train general language models on client data. Independent fine-tuned model training on your corpus is available as a separate service.
4.
Are you a secure system? What sort of data security policies do you have in place?
  • We prioritize data security and operate with a very high level of protection.
  • Enterprise customers have their own independent SOC 2 compliant AWS deployments.
  • We offer AES256 bit encryption for data transfer between hosting and the language model.
5.
Does the system improve as my company uses it?
  • Absolutely. The system improves its suggestions over time, especially as your corpus of knowledge grows. It will be able to suggest even more relevant documents and provide better insights.
6.
Is it going to take away business development jobs?
  • No, Grant Assistant is a tool to augment and assist business development professionals, not replace them. It works in tandem with the BD team. We aim to eliminate many of the most tedious elements of the proposal process to allow you more time to apply human creativity, experience, and expertise to your proposal.
  • Grant Assistant helps your team ensure better throughput so they can focus on giving their best ideas rather than worrying about lexicon or compliance.
7.
Can we add tech leads or external contractors to our projects?
  • Depending on your package, you may be able to add internal and external people not directly associated with business development to projects as members or guests.
8.
Does the system account for our ideas when making proposals?
  • Of course! Grant Assistant follows the full proposal development cycle. It has a dedicated program design environment where your team and the AI can collaborate on ideas.
9.
Is this beginner friendly for those new to proposal development?
  • Yes, Grant Assistant has been built from the ground up to be beginner friendly. It helps guide you through wizards, provides go/no-go support, helps develop win themes, and helps structure your proposal for the best chance of success.
  • We also offer detailed in-person and self-paced tutorials, a world-class support team, and experts to help you get the most from your proposal efforts.
10.
Will my funder or client object to AI being used for proposal production?
  • Major funders seem genuinely excited about the potential for AI. Grant Assistant doesn't replace the proposal process with AI, but simply augments the tedious parts of development.
  • Clients can expect better quality proposals with more targeted ideas. Our compliance tool will reduce the client's burden to issue requests for clarification or emails to fix responses.
  • Think of this as going from a typewriter to a computer - you have a better tool to do the same work, faster and with fewer errors.
11.
How is this different from ChatGPT or Copilot?
  • ChatGPT and other AI tools are general-purpose solutions. Grant Assistant is a specialized toolkit built expressly for making the proposal process easy.
  • We use an assortment of the best models with our own fine-tuning and patent-pending data management and ML techniques to augment the proposal production process from start to finish.
  • If ChatGPT is a Swiss Army knife, Grant Assistant is a specialized set of tools specifically built to write compelling and donor-compliant purposes.
12.
Are there security and privacy concerns we should be worried about?
  • We have developed a highly secure system and provide the most effective tools for data security and privacy, including separate AWS deployments for enterprise customers.
  • We are happy to work with your team to ensure the highest level of security needs are met.
13.
What about hallucinations? What is that and does the system hallucinate?
  • Hallucinations occur when an AI model mixes up information in its training corpus and produces incorrect information that seems legitimate.
  • Giving the model accurate, properly tagged and collated information helps prevent hallucinations.
  • Through our patent-pending data management and ML techniques, we significantly reduce the chances of hallucinations compared to general-purpose models.
14.
Do you support SSO/SAML and independent AWS clusters or deployments for enterprise customers?
  • Yes, we support all of those. Please reach out to have our team work with you on SSO/SAML and independent deployments.
15.
Can the system be trained on our entire corpus?
  • The system stores, processes, and uses ML to improve output quality over time based on your corpus, but we don't train our core language models on your data to prevent it from being utilized by others.
  • We offer independently trained and fine-tuned language model deployments as a separate service, which can be hosted locally or on our servers. Our teams are happy to discuss these needs with you.
16.
What sort of training and support do you provide?
  • We are dedicated to providing the best support possible. This includes:
    • In-person training and dedicated account management for enterprise customers
    • Built-in online support, chat, and help center directly in the system
    • Self-paced 101 and mastery courses
  • Our team is committed to ensuring your success with Grant Assistant.
17.
How does data ownership work? Do we own what is produced?
  • Your organization has complete ownership over both the inputs and outputs produced through the use of Grant Assistant through your account. We fully transfer all ownership of content produced through your account over to your organization.
18.
What are your data retention policies once an organization stops using your system?
  • In case of a termination of the agreement, Grant Assistant will provide your organization with 1 month to download all necessary data from the system. After that period, the data will be purged entirely from our data stores. Grant Assistant does not maintain or in any way use your data after the termination of our agreement.

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