The thing a good prompt can't do

AI and fundraising has been a common discussion point with several of our clients this month. It comes up in nearly every conversation now, usually somewhere between "should we be using it" and "is everyone else using it and not telling us".

I think there is a fundraising revolution happening right now, and one that funders are feeling the full force of.

What funders are seeing

A huge number of generic applications are being submitted via AI platforms. The effect on the other side of the desk is not what anyone intended.

Funders are closing their application windows earlier. They are taking much longer to assess applications. And, I would argue, they are making more risky awards, because when everything in the pile reads competently it becomes much harder to tell which organisations can actually deliver.

This is not just what I am hearing in Kent. The GC Gibson Charitable Trust, which manages a fund of around sixteen million pounds, stopped accepting online applications altogether and said plainly that AI had ruined the process. NPC has reported funders seeing application numbers double or triple while their assessment teams stayed the same size. The Association of Charitable Foundations surveyed around four hundred of its members and found AI-written applications registering as a moderate challenge for roughly a fifth of them.

Not great, all in all.

The honest caveat

I want to be fair here, because there is a counter-argument in the sector and I think it is a good one.

In that same ACF research, AI was nowhere near the top of funders' worries. What worried them most, by a long way, was the level of need among the people they exist to help. More than half pointed to the sheer volume of demand for trust and foundation funding.

Several people who know this landscape better than I do have made the point that AI is an easy thing to blame, and the harder question is why so many more organisations are applying in the first place. Government money arrives as contracts rather than grants now. Local authority grant funding has been cut back. Donations are harder to come by and costs have not stopped rising. Trusts and foundations have become close to the last stable source of money in the sector, and they are being asked to carry a weight they were never sized for.

So the queue is longer for reasons that have very little to do with anybody's chatbot. AI did not cause the problem. It did make the queue harder to read.

What this means for you

If you take one practical thing from this, take this: a well-written application is no longer a competitive advantage. It is the floor. Everyone's application is well written now.

Which means the things that distinguish you have shifted. Evidence that you know your community specifically. A track record a funder can check. Numbers that are yours and not plausible. And, more than any of it, a funder who already knows who you are before your form lands.

That last one is the whole game, and it is the thing being quietly rediscovered across the sector right now. The recommended response to the application flood, from the people studying it, is not better filtering. It is more human-to-human engagement.

What AI doesn't do as well as we do

The one thing AI doesn't do as well as us humans is building relationships and connections with funders.

Attending the Kent Charity Awards last month reminded me of exactly this. A room full of people who work extremely hard for not very much, talking to each other, recognising each other, making the connections that turn into partnerships and introductions and, eventually, funding. The passion and humility in that room was the real thing. That is not something a well-written prompt via Claude or ChatGPT can produce.

Or can it?

I will let you sit with that one. My honest answer is no, not yet, and probably not in the way that matters. A funder gives money to an organisation they believe in, and belief is built in person, over time, by people who turn up.

Three things worth doing this month

Ring a funder you have applied to and ask what they are seeing. Most of them are more approachable than their forms suggest, and most of them are currently quite keen to talk to real people.

Use the tools, but for the right job. AI is genuinely good at structuring a first draft, checking you have answered the question and tightening your word count. It is not good at knowing your community. Do not let it write the bit only you could write.

Go to the thing. The networking event, the awards night, the funder briefing. It feels like the least productive hour in your week and it is routinely the most.

If you want to talk through your funding approach for the year ahead, book a free 45-minute advice session with me.