How to use ChatGPT to find funding

Since starting as a volunteer with Ian at Charity Excellence, Ian has stressed to me how difficult it is for charities to find funding – particularly small charities. Fundraising is at a critically low point, even worse than it was at the peak of the cost-of-living crisis.

It is the charities with an income of under £500k p/a that are hit the hardest, so we wanted to find ways to support them so they can continue to carry out their much-needed work.

AI may not be the long-term solution to the fundraising crisis, but it is an underused resource and we want to make it easier for charities to tap into it and find new sources of funding.

That’s why I created our free ChatGPT for Non-profits Toolkit outlining a step-by-step guide with example prompts you can use to find charitable grant funding using ChatGPT.

How does ChatGPT compare to grant directories?

Firstly, ChatGPT is free whereas many grant directories cost. ChatGPT is an incredibly useful tool that, when used correctly, can bring up funders with whom you may not otherwise have been aware. You can use it to find grant funding for less common activities that may not appear in grant directories, such as funding for women’s wellbeing or neurodivergent young people.

ChatGPT is also quick and can bring up many different funders using the same prompt by asking it to ‘give me more’ or by changing the wording slightly (more below).

ChatGPT also allows you to filter out grants that aren’t applicable to you. For example, if you’re looking for funding for a small unregistered charity, you can ask it to filter out grants that require you to be a registered charity. If you already have a list of potential grant makers, you can copy and paste it into ChatGPT and ask it to find funders not on your list.

These features allow you to tailor your search to suit your organisation’s needs. We’ve had a lot of success using these methods so far.

The drawbacks of ChatGPT for grant funding

We have talked about the pros of using ChatGPT for funding – no cost, quick, simple, etc. But there are a few things to be aware of when using the generative AI platform. ChatGPT can make mistakes and relies on out-of-date data, so be sure to check the information it provides.

It is useful to keep a separate document open to copy and paste the results onto, then check them once you’ve finished your search. ChatGPT won’t provide long lists of funders, so you keep asking it to search for more. And ChatGPT will not understand conversational nuances, so be very clear and specific with your prompt (we will teach you how to do this in the toolkit).

How ChatGPT compares to other AI systems for grant funding

Most AI systems work in a similar way, so the prompts we use for ChatGPT can be used in systems like Copilot or Gemini, too. Copilot is a paid for system – luckily, Ian is running monthly prompts to create funding lists for small charities, you can access his results on the Charity Excellence website or through his LinkedIn.

How to use ChatGPT for grant funding

ChatGPT is reasonably easy to use, once you’ve made an account you simply have to create a clear and specific prompt detailing all the information you require. Prompts are the instructions or questions you ‘ask’ ChatGPT.

In our Toolkit we have given three prompts you can copy, amend, and paste into ChatGPT to find what you’re looking for. We have prompts for geographical searches, sectors and groups of people, and funding type.

Changing one word can sometimes bring up different funders. For example, you can change the location from the UK, to England, to Yorkshire. Then you can try changing the wording of the sector – for example environment, environmental, conservation, then climate change.

The future of AI and grant funding

Our experience in building our charity AI systems over the past two years is that human curation remains critical, so we don’t expect grant directories to disappear any time soon, if ever. But AI can search vast volumes of data very quickly and at very low cost.

We obviously don’t know what will happen but expect to see grants research for directories becoming increasingly AI-driven and much more sophisticated.

We see substantial potential for AI apps in systems such as Microsoft’s Copilot, to act as very low-cost/free mini grant search tools, particularly for small charities that make up 95% of the sector. What we’re doing is exploring to see what that might look like and how it could be done.

Find out more

If you’d like to access the full PDF version of the ChatGPT for Non-profits Toolkit, email ian@charityexcellence.co.uk. We also have an overview of the toolkit on the Charity Excellence website which you can access here.