5 Ways To Use Ai In Grant Writing

November 6, 2025

By Rohit Mehta with Edits from Jason Shim and Tina Crouse, AI Experts

Personally, I have done a full 180 in the last year. I went from being against grant writing, thinking that it was taking away our creativity, our independence, and making our writing less unique.

However, AI adoption has picked up and most of our clients who use AI have asked us to review their text versus writing grants from scratch. The software has improved, hallucinating less, more accurate, and more tailored and it's here to stay.

So in this post I'd like to send a clear message, it's okay to use AI in grant writing. In fact, I think it's expected by institutional funders at this time. It's acceptable that some AI will be used to write grant proposals, so I'm all for it.

Five ways that you can use AI to support your proposal writing process:

Bridging Blocks Of Text

You can use a prompt like “You are a writing expert. I'm working on a grant for X organization and their website is Y. The question is “Z”. Without adding new content, could you bridge the following bullet points? Here’s my bullet points…”

This can be a really effective tool as it adds words to join your sentences and avoids expanding on your concepts with new information. You are giving it a specific role, and by providing the website for your organization, it provides useful context for the AI to draw upon.

To Look Up Statistics Or Citations

Use a prompt like “… the question is “X”. Using statistics or data specifically for Toronto, Ontario, can you identify statistics or research which suggests that marginalized residents are more likely to experience barriers to employment? Provide direct links to citations.”

In this prompt, we are asking the software to stick with a geographic region such as Toronto, and specifically asking it to research something that backs up or validates an assumption. Additionally, asking it to provide citations helps to ground it in data, however you also need to verify that the citations are genuine, accurate, and taken in the right context.

To Check For Grammar And Consistency

You can ask the software “ … here is a summary of my project. You are an expert copy editor. Can you review the answers and check for consistency, and look for any discrepancies in logic or flow?” Identify them in a list so that I can make corrections myself. Here’s my answer…”

In this example, one thing that I like to do is to ask the AI to guide me by giving me a list of corrections so that it's not doing all the work for me. I think it's really important that we maintain our skills while decreasing our stress level but avoiding passing on the mental aspect of the work to the software, as critical thinking keeps us sharp.

To Assess Your Responses

Ask the software to assist you by copying and pasting the evaluation or rubric, and then asking it to assess your responses based on the rubric.

You can write something like: “… I'm providing a rubric which is used by funder X to evaluate Grant proposals. Using this as an assessment tool, can you review the following answer and assess my answer and determine where I would score in this rubric? please suggest how I could make improvements and list out the suggestions so that I can learn from it. Here’s the rubric: …”

The software then reviews the rubric and completes an assessment just like a grant reviewer would. In many cases it will be able to provide you with some helpful feedback. Another tool for this is the Notebook Language Model, which summarizes your findings based on documents you upload, without looking up the details from the world wide web.

You might be in a rush and realize that your 500 word answer actually has to be 200 words. In this case, here's what you can do to summarize large blocks of text:

“…The question asks X. In 200 words or less, could you summarize the following text? …”

In all examples, remember to start with “I'm working on a grant for Y organization and their website is Z…” as it primes the AI on how to think, and what you’re expecting from it. Hope this helps you to do more with this new tool!

Did you know that we offer workshops to teach and train boards, groups of staff, and volunteers on how to use AI tools more effectively? Did you know we have expertise in Fund Development and strategy, and can help you with decision-making regarding the use of AI tools? Reach out to us at info@dogoodfinding.ca and let's raise more money!