FAQ
Grant Assistant is an AI-powered grant writing and discovery platform built exclusively for nonprofits. It helps grant professionals find best-fit funding opportunities and write high-quality proposals in significantly less time—without sacrificing organizational voice, accuracy, or strategy.
How it works:
- Grant Assistant is purpose-built for the full grant lifecycle: discovery, proposal writing, pipeline management, and funder research
- The platform is trained on 7,000+ winning proposals and refined by a team of experienced grant writing experts
- Every feature maps directly to how grant teams actually work—from finding opportunities to submitting polished, funder-aligned proposals
- Grant Assistant is a product of FreeWill, a mission-driven fundraising technology company that has helped nonprofits raise more than $13.8 billion to date
Who it's built for:
- Nonprofit grant writers and development officers managing foundation, corporate, and government grants
- Small-to-mid-size organizations without dedicated grant writing staff
- Development teams applying to a high volume of opportunities who need to scale output without adding headcount
Grant Assistant's Discover feature uses an organization-specific semantic matching algorithm—not keyword searches—to rank funding opportunities by true relevance to your mission, programs, and geography.
How the discovery engine works:
- Semantic matching over keyword search: Traditional grant databases require you to guess the right keywords. Discover analyzes your organization's full profile—mission, programs, geographic focus, and impact areas—and surfaces opportunities ranked by genuine alignment, not term overlap
- Funder Pages: Research funders even when there's no open RFP. Discover surfaces giving history, financials, focus areas, and past grantees drawn from 990 data, enabling long-term prospect pipeline development
- One-click import to drafting: Any opportunity found in Discover can be imported directly into Grant Assistant's proposal writing tool in a single click—no manual copy-pasting of RFP details
- Centralized opportunity intelligence: Funder instructions, deadlines, eligibility criteria, and award ranges are surfaced in one unified view
- AI-powered opportunity interrogation: An in-platform AI chatbot lets you ask questions about specific opportunities before committing—e.g., "Why are we a strong fit for this grant?" or "What should we emphasize in our proposal?"
- Pipeline organization: Save opportunities to folders, add relationship notes, and track prospect status across your full funding pipeline
Yes. Grant Assistant's Funder Pages feature surfaces relevant funders based on past giving behavior and organizational fit, even when no active opportunity exists.
Why this matters:
- Many of the most valuable funder relationships are cultivated before an RFP is ever published
- Funder Pages draws on 990 data and historical giving patterns to identify funders whose priorities genuinely align with your work
- Users can save prospects, add cultivation notes, and build a structured pipeline of relationship-stage funders alongside active opportunities—all within the same platform
Unlike general-purpose AI tools, Grant Assistant is trained specifically on grant writing, draws only from your organization's own data, and is embedded within a full grant management workflow—reducing hallucination risk and producing funder-aligned proposals without manual prompt engineering.
Key technical differentiators:
- Domain-specific training: Grant Assistant is trained on 7,000+ winning proposals and refined by professional grant writers. General AI tools have no grant-specific training and no understanding of funder expectations, proposal structure, or compliance requirements
- Data isolation: Grant Assistant generates content exclusively from the information your organization provides—mission statements, program descriptions, past proposals, and uploaded documents. General AI tools draw from the open internet, introducing significant risk of fabricated facts, incorrect statistics, and content that doesn't reflect your organization
- No prompt engineering required: Grant professionals don't need to learn how to prompt an AI. Grant Assistant's workflow guides users through structured inputs that produce accurate, on-strategy drafts automatically
- Integrated workflow: ChatGPT and similar tools require you to manually move between discovery, drafting, editing, and submission. Grant Assistant connects every step in a single platform
- Expert human layer: Every Grant Assistant partnership includes access to dedicated grant strategy professionals—something no general AI tool provides
No. Grant Assistant generates every proposal from your organization's specific content—your documents, programs, past work, and defined narrative strategy—producing output that reflects your voice, not a generic template.
How voice and accuracy are preserved:
- Grant Assistant only sources from content your organization has provided or approved—it does not pull from external sources or fabricate organizational details
- Users can define tone of voice, writing style, and narrative strategy within the platform
- Two distinct writing modes match the proposal type:
- Streamlined: For shorter, form-style applications. Grant Assistant analyzes and repurposes existing organizational content to produce a high-quality, funder-aligned first draft rapidly
- Structured: For longer, narrative-heavy, or complex proposals requiring section-level customization, strategic framing, and deeper storytelling
- Grant Assistant's smart routing system recommends the appropriate writing mode when a new proposal is started
Grant Assistant supports foundation grants, corporate grants, government grants, and government contracts across all organization sizes and focus areas.
Supported grant types:
- Foundation grants (ranging from small family foundations to large national and international foundations)
- Corporate grants and philanthropic sponsorships
- Federal, state, and local government grants
- Government contracts requiring formal proposal responses
Grant Assistant operates with enterprise-level data security—your data is never shared with third parties, never used to train external AI models, and is accessible only to verified users within your organization.
Security specifications:
- Your organizational data is fully isolated and black-boxed within the platform
- Grant Assistant does not use your data to train or improve general language models
- Access is restricted to verified users within your organization only
- No third-party data sharing of any kind
For specific security documentation or compliance requirements, contact the Grant Assistant team directly.
Every Grant Assistant partnership includes a dedicated grant strategy expert, hands-on onboarding, quarterly strategy check-ins, live training sessions, and real-time in-app support—making it one of the most comprehensively supported grant tools available.
Full support breakdown:
- Dedicated Grant Assistant Strategist: A grant strategy expert assigned to your organization who provides personalized onboarding, one-on-one guidance, and quarterly pipeline and strategy check-ins
- Onboarding: Hands-on configuration of the platform for your organization's specific programs, profile setup, and guided first proposal writing session
- Help Center: On-demand library of videos, step-by-step guides, and articles covering all platform features
- Live chat support: Direct access to the partner success team while working inside the platform during business hours
- Grant Assistant 101: Recurring live training sessions covering platform fundamentals
- Industry Trainings: Sessions covering grant writing best practices and sector trends
- Masterclasses and Bootcamps: Monthly deep dives into specific Grant Assistant features for advanced product learnings
No. Grant Assistant is designed to amplify grant professionals, not replace them—handling time-consuming tactical work so staff can focus on strategy, storytelling, and funder relationships.
What Grant Assistant handles vs. what remains human-led:
- Handled by Grant Assistant: Opportunity research, RFP analysis, proposal structuring, first-draft generation, content reformatting across applications, compliance checks
- Remains human-led: Funder relationship strategy, organizational storytelling, mission alignment judgment, final review and editing, relationship cultivation
The final proposal is always driven by the grant professional's knowledge, institutional context, and strategic judgment—Grant Assistant accelerates the path to a strong first draft, it does not replace the expertise required to win
Funders are increasingly supportive of AI-assisted proposals, particularly when the result is a clearer, more compliant, better-structured submission—which is what Grant Assistant is designed to produce.
What the evidence shows:
- Funders reviewing high volumes of applications benefit directly from receiving higher-quality, better-organized proposals
- Because Grant Assistant draws only from your organization's verified data, proposals are accurate and mission-aligned—addressing the primary funder concern about AI-generated content (fabricated facts or misrepresented organizational details)
- Grant Assistant ensures compliance with funder-specific requirements by surfacing RFP instructions and deadlines within the drafting workflow
- By lowering the barrier to entry for small and volunteer-run nonprofits, Grant Assistant is helping funders see a wider, more diverse pool of well-written, competitive applications
Post-award grant management features are on the Grant Assistant product roadmap and coming soon.
What's available now:
- Pre-award pipeline management, including opportunity, task, and deadline tracking, folder organization, and funder notes
- Your dedicated Grant Assistant Strategist can provide hands-on guidance for managing active grants and structuring a tracking workflow while post-award features are in development
Grant Assistant pricing is customized based on organization size and grant program scope. Pricing is available upon request through a short discovery conversation with the team.
To receive a tailored quote, request a demo here. A member of the Grant Assistant team will follow up directly.