Using ChatGPT for grant writing: FAQ guide for nonprofits

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ChatGPT by OpenAI has quickly become a standard part of professional toolkits across all sectors. It’s an impressive, flexible, and highly accessible tool—leading many nonprofit professionals to wonder:

‍“How can our organization incorporate ChatGPT into our work? Can it help us work smarter and raise more support?”

If you’ve asked these questions, you’re not alone. A 2024 study found that while 66% of surveyed nonprofits already use some form of AI, 77% believe they’d benefit from finding even more AI use cases. 

One of the most impactful ways to integrate ChatGPT into your work is in the field of grant writing. After all, grants directly fund your work, and successful grant seeking is often a numbers game—efficiently producing enough quality proposals to grow your win rate over time. An AI tool like ChatGPT can help you unlock greater efficiency, leading to more finished proposals in less time. 

‍Nonprofits that learn how to make the most of this modern tool can transform their grant programs into highly effective revenue sources.

However, successfully using ChatGPT for grant writing isn’t as simple as inputting information about your grant and receiving a submission-ready proposal.

Let’s review the most important questions nonprofits have about using ChatGPT for grant writing and provide some essential context and considerations for adopting AI for the first time.

Quick context: The role of AI in grant writing

When used well, AI tools like ChatGPT speed up and improve your grant writing process, ultimately allowing you to produce more high-quality proposals in less time.

Nonprofits of all sizes already use AI to:

• Research funders
• Provide an overview of their organization’s background in minutes
• Analyze internal and external data to create summaries and identify trends
• Generate document summaries and outlines
• Draft and refine larger sections of proposals
• Improve the organization and consistency of proposal sections
• Generate basic visuals to illustrate claims

ChatGPT can help with all of these use cases. Specialized AI tools designed explicitly for nonprofits can do even more at a more reliable level of quality—check out Grant Assistant from FreeWill for an example of this kind of AI platform.

But whether you use ChatGPT or a tool built specifically for grant writing, you must remember one key rule:

AI does not replace you as a thoughtful professional who has all the expertise, context, and reasoning that turns a bland proposal into a winning one. 

Understand the uses and limitations of AI. Build intentional workflows that keep your human judgment and context at the center. If you plan to rely heavily on AI-generated outputs or don’t have the time to hold the AI’s hand through the entire process, a purpose-built tool for grant writing is likely your best choice.

Remember, AI isn’t perfect. It requires collaboration and oversight. 

Increasing your grant writing efficiency is the whole point of using AI in the first place—if you’re spending more time than you’re saving while using ChatGPT or other tools for your proposals, pause to take a closer look at workflow and toolkit.

With this context in mind, let’s dive into the specifics. Can you use ChatGPT to help write grant proposals?

Can you use ChatGPT for grant writing?

Yes, you can use ChatGPT to streamline multiple parts of the grant writing process. It can directly help with these common problems faced by grant writers:

• Time constraints
• Content quality
• Idea generation
• Proposal consistency when collaborating with multiple team members

As a generative AI platform, ChatGPT is extremely flexible and allows you to get quick answers to questions, brainstorm ideas, generate text, analyze data, and even create mockups of diagrams and other visuals. If you haven’t yet used ChatGPT, explore OpenAI’s overview of the platform to see its full range of functionalities.

ChatGPT also stands out to many nonprofits (especially small shops) for its exceptional price tag—its basic features and reasoning models are completely free. Additional functionalities and expanded capacity are available through Plus and Pro subscriptions ($20 and $200/month, respectively).

Just keep in mind that your success using ChatGPT for grant writing will rely heavily on how well you use it—we’ll discuss best practices and strategies below.

How do you best use ChatGPT for grant writing?

We’ve all seen stories about generative AI platforms hallucinating answers and providing incorrect information. This can happen, although it’s important to remember that the ultimate usefulness and reliability of tools like ChatGPT depend on how you use them. Based on the inputs or prompts you give, your workflows for double-checking the quality of responses, and more, ChatGPT can either become a time-saving tool or a distracting step. 

Follow these important practices to maximize the value of ChatGPT in your grant writing process:

• Clearly define your use cases. How exactly will you use AI? ChatGPT can’t (and shouldn’t) do it all. Generative AI platforms are much better at particular grant writing use cases like those listed above. It’s also unwise to ask for a complete draft of a proposal and take its quality for granted. Keep full control over the process by determining how your team will use AI-generated outputs.
• Learn the skills of prompt engineering. Engineering is the process of providing requests or inputs to AI engines in a way that builds context. Providing clear context helps reduce the chances that the AI will provide incorrect or misleading responses—we’ll examine prompt engineering in greater detail next.
• Manually review and improve all funder-facing AI responses. A grant proposal should reflect your nonprofit’s unique plans, mission, and capacity. AI engines inherently work in generalities by “learning” from vast sets of aggregated information. Performing manual reviews and adjustments of all AI-generated content will not only ensure your organization’s unique voice shines through but also generally improve its quality and chances of winning.
• Verify all data provided by ChatGPT. While ChatGPT provides valuable insights, you should cross-reference the information with local environmental studies, government reports, and expert consultations to ensure accuracy and relevance.
• Layer in additional tools or GPTs. The AI world is vast, with new specialized tools emerging every day—including some of our favorite AI tools for nonprofits. ChatGPT also offers a marketplace-style directory of custom GPTs (pre-configured AI models for specific tasks that can be easily “plugged into” the platform). Once you understand ChatGPT’s use cases and functionalities, branch out to find additional tools that fill important gaps or offer more advanced functionalities that you need.
• Build a resilient workflow. Don’t over-rely on ChatGPT. Some grant writing steps won’t require or warrant help from AI. For those that do, ensure that a team member manually reviews, adjusts, and curates responses into finished sections or materials. Keep your nonprofit’s unique voice front and center, and avoid using AI in ways that don’t truly save time or improve outcomes.

What is ChatGPT prompt engineering?

Prompt engineering is the process of providing carefully crafted requests to ChatGPT that yield specific, detailed responses. The key to effective prompts is specificity and clarity—overexplain what you need and why.

Prompt chaining is the process of providing ChatGPT with a series of well-engineered prompts. These “chains” aim to build rich context and guide the AI through the logical steps of your task without losing details or making unhelpful assumptions.

Effective prompt engineering and chaining improves the reliability, consistency, and quality of the AI’s outputs.  

Remember, AI tools generalize and make assumptions—and you’re the one with the details and context that they need to provide truly valuable responses. Answering a single question can involve an entire chain of thought and logical steps. Never assume that ChatGPT understands these steps, especially when working with complex, context-rich subjects like nonprofit programs and grants.

Here’s an example scenario:

Let’s say you’re writing a grant proposal for an opportunity to fund your nonprofit’s next planned project—constructing a community garden and greenhouse in an urban setting. You’re using ChatGPT to help brainstorm and draft the section of your proposal that details impact measurement. Specifically, you need to explain the external and environmental factors that may influence your ability to effectively measure the project’s impact over time and potential mitigation strategies.

You could ask, “How can I mitigate external factors that will influence my ability to measure the impact of my community garden project?” However, this leaves out important details and asks the AI to make several assumptions that may lead to vague, generic, and generally less helpful answers.

Instead, break your request down into discrete logical steps. What are all the details that you should consider when filling out this section of the grant? Think through how you’d approach this question step by step. You might work through this chain of prompts:

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1. As a nonprofit organization planning to construct a community garden and greenhouse, we aim to measure the program's impact on community health and engagement. What environmental factors in our community should we consider that might affect our ability to accurately assess this impact?

This first prompt establishes the broad context for ChatGPT by establishing that you:

• Are a nonprofit
• Are constructing a community garden
• Need to measure impact
• Need to learn more about external factors

2. Considering urban agriculture initiatives, what environmental challenges have been documented that could influence the success of community gardens and greenhouses in urban settings?

This prompt guides ChatGPT to identify specific environmental factors by narrowing the focus: urban-specific challenges for community gardening projects. This prompt should also yield links to specific sources that you can further explore and cite in your proposal.

3. What best practices have been identified to mitigate environmental challenges such as soil contamination, air pollution, and water scarcity in urban community gardening projects?

This prompt takes ChatGPT to the next step of considering mitigation strategies, asking for detailed, actionable solutions. It should also provide links to sources that you can (and should!) manually explore to learn more.

4. What methodologies are recommended for evaluating the environmental impact of community gardens and greenhouses, considering factors like soil health, biodiversity, and resource consumption?

This prompt moves us to impact measurement, specifically methodologies relevant to your project, and it will provide more sources to explore and cite.

5. How do community members' perceptions of environmental factors, such as air quality and green space availability, influence their engagement with urban gardening projects?

Next, we look more specifically at a key focus area of your impact measurement efforts: community engagement. This prompt asks ChatGPT to consider connections between environmental perceptions, community involvement, and ultimate success.

By following this type of prompt chain, you guide ChatGPT through all the logical components of your task and maximize the usefulness of its responses. This process also brings a few additional benefits:

• Prompt chaining encourages you to slow down and fully consider all the parts of your task, which can lead to helpful new ideas and connections you haven’t yet considered.
• Asking ChatGPT for specific details and examples will yield links to relevant online content that you could explore to gather additional ideas, data, and citations for your proposal.

Mastering prompt engineering and chaining will automatically set you apart from many other grant writers using ChatGPT today. Remember to take your time, provide plenty of details, ask for corrections or adjustments as needed, and periodically prompt ChatGPT to confirm that it’s following your chain of thought.

That said, perfecting your inputs can’t guarantee perfect outputs. There are still many considerations and risks to keep in mind when using ChatGPT for grant writing. Refer to our recommended practices above and read on to learn about additional considerations for AI usage.

Do funders accept proposals generated by ChatGPT?

Using specialized, purpose-built AI tools for nonprofit grant writing, like Grant Assistant, can also help ensure higher-quality AI outputs. Manually review, adjust, and curate these outputs to quickly create personalized, win-worthy proposals. 

However, when you use helpful but general AI tools like ChatGPT, you run a greater risk of your proposals including incorrect information, vague language, or a bland voice that’s easily identified as coming from AI.

So, if you use ChatGPT to produce a grant proposal, could funders outright reject it? Possibly.

However, the outcome will depend heavily on each funder’s AI usage policies, which are currently quite inconsistent across the field. 

Candid’s recent study on funder AI acceptance policies sheds some light:

• 57% of funders are unsure if they’ve received proposals created using AI like ChatGPT. 42% reported that no, they haven’t received AI-generated proposals, and 1% reported yes. Reliably detecting AI content has become more difficult in recent years, and applicants are unlikely to self-report unless asked. 
• 67% of funders are undecided about whether they accept or plan to accept applications with content created by generative AI. 23% reported that no, they do not or will not. 10% reported yes, they do or will.
• Several funders that reported “no” also explained that their grant applications are by invitation only, meaning you might not even be aware of their opportunities unless you have an existing relationship with the funder.
• Other funders indicated that their due diligence processes prior to awarding grants involve seeking out direct knowledge of nonprofits’ work, meaning that the application is only part of the process and AI usage may be less of a concern.

Funders involved in the study also provided some helpful comments on their perspectives:

“We do not have the resources or expertise to determine what is AI-generated or not. Additionally, as a community foundation, we know our local nonprofits and do not have a very complicated application. The risk of AI unduly influencing our evaluation process is minimal.”

“We fund a community with a large number of refugees and other non-native English speakers. We are hoping this will help them level the playing field.” 

“We want the grant application process to be as easy as possible. If AI helps accomplish that, so be it.”

What does this mean for you?

Some funders have no issues with applicants using AI to produce grant proposals; others do. Some want to screen their received applications for AI usage; others don’t. Where does this leave you as a grant writer seeking to use ChatGPT to improve and speed up your proposals?

The best takeaway is this:

You’re unlikely to win grants with bland, generic proposals that aren’t carefully aligned with funders’ requirements and missions—regardless of whether they were generated fully or partially by generative AI.

As one funder put it, “Whether assisted by AI or not, applicants need to articulate their needs and alignment with our areas of giving in order to receive favorable assessment.”

It’s unwise to let AI completely write a proposal for you whether or not the funder has explicit AI usage policies. You especially shouldn’t use general, error-prone AI like ChatGPT to do all the heavy lifting.

The solutions:

• Center your human knowledge, context, and reasoning in the grant writing process. 
• Make your proposals your own.
• Use more specialized tools designed specifically for nonprofit grant writing (like Grant Assistant) to maximize the accuracy and helpfulness of your AI outputs.

Remember, AI doesn’t replace you—it saves you time and can give you a framework on which to build your grant proposals (the quality of which varies by tool and your prompting strategies). 

What other considerations should you keep in mind when using AI for grant writing?

We’ve discussed specific practices to help you make the most of ChatGPT for grant writing, but what are the broader considerations when using any AI for grant writing?

There are three key risks to keep in mind:

• Incorrect or inaccurate responses
• Privacy and security concerns
• Inadvertent bias

Explore our guide Can you use AI for grant writing? to take a closer look at these risks and learn more.

The easiest way to reduce these risks is to use high-quality AI tools in the first place. Then, follow the fundamental practices discussed earlier in this article—clearly defining your AI use cases, ensuring human oversight throughout the process, and building intentional workflows.  

You should also always closely review funder requirements to ensure your proposal completely complies. It’s clear that many funders don’t or won’t mind if you use AI to help develop grant applications—but they will mind if you disregard their requirements because you didn’t carefully review and edit AI-generated content.

So, is it worth using ChatGPT to write grant proposals?

To sum up:

Yes, it’s worth using ChatGPT to help write your nonprofit’s grant proposals (or, ideally, more specialized AI tools built specifically for nonprofits). However, there are critical caveats:

• If you use AI, your grant writing process should remain efficient or become more efficient.
• If you use AI, the quality of your grant proposals should improve.

If AI doesn’t improve and streamline your grant writing process, it’s likely wasting your time and limiting your chances of winning funding.

But as we’ve explored, you can accomplish these goals by following best practices and learning how to effectively engineer and chain your prompts to generative AI tools.

AI is the future across many industries, including grant writing. Grant writers will increasingly be expected to know how to work with these tools. AI gives in-house nonprofit grant writers an edge to secure more funding more efficiently. It also gives freelance grant writers the ability to secure more paid work. AI is worth mastering—it’s a truly game-changing tool if you know how to use it effectively.

Where can you learn more?

To learn more about using AI for grant writing, explore these additional resources:

• Can you use AI for grant writing? What you need to know by FreeWill
• AI grant writing tools for nonprofits: The top 15 platforms by FreeWill
• 20 best AI tools for nonprofits: Unlock efficiency & funding by FreeWill
• AI Fundraising Use Cases: Ways to Propel Your Giving Efforts by BWF
• What is Chain Prompting in AI Grant Writing? By Learn Grant Writing
• How to Build Context for Grant Writing Using AI by Learn Grant Writing

If you’re interested in finding alternatives to ChatGPT for grant writing, take a look at our list of recommended platforms: Top 10+ grant writing software picks and supplemental tools.

Grant Assistant by FreeWill is the leading AI grant writing tool that offers a full range of advanced but easy-to-use features for your grant writing workflow. Trained on over 7,000 winning grant proposals, our platform brings deep, nonprofit-specific knowledge that other AI tools can’t yet match. Request a free demo to see its features in action!