Watch our Video
We think the use of AI in bid writing could help level the playing field of grant making processes that often result in small charities being less able to secure funding. However, we think that there is a significant risk of very large quantities of poor quality AI bids being submitted. In response, we have created 2 charity AI bid writing best practice guides. This one is for grant makers, the other is a guide for grantees, including details of our free AI Bid writing bots.
Whether you should be awarded a grant depends on how great the unmet need is and how well you would meet that. However, whether you get it often largely depends on how well you understand bid writing, how good you are at writing and, too often, how well you know the funder. This makes the system often unfair for small and marginalised groups and reduces the charitable impact of grant making.
I don't think AI is yet well understood and I think that the lack of understanding of this still new technology and concerns about the inaccuracies and hallucinations it has, may result in it being banned or obviously AI drafted bids being given less credence by grant makers.
Our AI bid writer asks people a whole series of questions and then uses AI to turn that into a well written case for support that gives a grant maker all of the key information to inform their decision making. It's available free to anyone and works for everyone, including those who know nothing about writing funding bids and those who can't write well - for whom English is a 2nd language, or who have learning difficulties or who aren't particularly good at writing prose. Since launch in 2023 (to date 2025), we think it has supported charities in submitting more than 20,000 bids. The biggest success we've heard about was securing a grant of £20,800 for a village hall.
Our bid writer has made applying for funding more accessible to often marginalised groups, saved them time in writing bids and made the process fairer in doing so.
Background. We launched the sector's first AI Bid Writing bot in 2023 and since then he's drafted 1000s of cases for support and the best result we've heard back about was to secure £20,800 for a village hall. These are now increasingly common and ever greater numbers of people are using LLM chat bots (like Copilot) to draft bids.
The Growing Problem. We very strongly suspect that what we'll increasingly see is similar to the very large numbers of AI drafted job applications that have swamped recruitment. Our advice to charities on responding to this is the same as our advice on AI slop. Craft authentic, high quality content with your human voice coming through and making it emotionally engaging to ensure your work is clearly differentiated from the junk. That's why we wrote our AI bid writing best practice guide.
AI Tools. Current AI tools can detect AI-generated content to some extent, and some also include plagiarism tools to detect copy and paste, but these are far from perfect and cannot be entirely relied upon. They may generate false positives, AI content can be reviewed to make detection extremely difficult and AI detectors may struggle with technical writing and may penalise legitimate content that’s just well-structured. As with any other AI use, you can use it to help by flagging incomplete and/or potentially poor bids but our advice is to always have a human in the loop.
| Risk | Probability | Impact |
| Large volumes of poor quality bids flood the sector | Very High | Significant additional work on grant makers and very good quality project applications are lost in the 'noise'. |
| Grant makers move increasingly to invitation only, rather than open rounds. | High | Poorer quality outcomes and less innovation(fewer projects to choose from), small charities disproportionately excluded due to lack of relationships with grant maker staff and reinforcement of 'old boy' networks. |
| Grant makers ban use of AI in applications | Medium | Reviewing of AI drafted bids by professionals will make these almost impossible to identify and smaller charities will be excluded or have bids rejected. Significant risk of false positive rejections. |
| Large grant makers implement software to detect and exclude AI applications. | Medium | Unless this is done well with human oversight, there may be significant risk of 'false positives' - excluding genuine bids and may not be able to detect all AI bids anyway. |
| Scammers submit increasing numbers of very convincing fake applications. | Medium | Increase in risk of fraud and risk of reputational damage undermining public confidence in donating. |
How Might Grant Makers Respond? My thanks to James Newall, of GSR Foundation, for making me aware of work that's being done by US grant makers on using AI in assessing bids - Solve: How AI Helped Us Screen Applications in Half the Time (Aug 25). We've built this out to create a checklist that grant makers could use to help manage their response to the groping volume of bids.
It would also help everyone if grant makers were to ensure that grant information was correct, comprehensive, clear and up-to-date to help potential applicants and themselves by minimising the number of ineligible applications. Our Grant Makers Survey includes a section on How to Make Your Grant Making Fair for Everyone.
Find the Funding and Free Help Your Charity Needs
A registered charity ourselves, the CEF works for any non profit, not just charities.
Plus, 60+ policies, 8 online health checks and the huge resource base.
Quick, simple and very effective.
Find Funding, Free Help & Resources - Everything Is Free.
Thank You!
My thanks to Rachael Roser whose input helped me to improve this guide.
This article is for general interest only and does not constitute professional legal or financial advice. I'm neither a lawyer, nor an accountant, so not able to provide this, and I cannot write guidance that covers every charity or eventuality. I have included links to relevant regulatory guidance, which you must check to ensure that whatever you create reflects correctly your charity’s needs and your obligations. In using this resource, you accept that I have no responsibility whatsoever from any harm, loss or other detriment that may arise from your use of my work. If you need professional advice, you must seek this from someone else. To do so, register, then login and use the Help Finder directory to find pro bono support. Everything is free.
Ethics note: AI was partially used in researching this guide.
