Grant Applicant Follow-Up: Nonprofit Fundraising Teams Losing Opportunities to Slow Responses

Slow grant inquiry processes are a more than a time waster for non-profits, they are a knowledge retrieval speed problem with known solutions.

Why grant applicant follow-up breaks down for nonprofit fundraising teams

An inquiry arrives from an applicant to a grant program. The person asking the question wants to know whether his/her project can be granted, what kind of documentation is required, how the reporting for granted projects is done in terms of frequency and scope etc.

The five places in practice where the answer lives.

In a Google Doc that the organization had received 8 months prior to this correspondence, the eligibility criteria for reporting were set out. The organization had been corresponding with this individual previously, and the program officer had all of the correspondence stored in her email inbox. However, she was currently in a series of back to back meetings, and the correspondence sat in a queue awaiting her attention.

Two days pass. Maybe three.

Most development teams have the information they need, but fail to retrieve it.

The knowledge retrieval problem hiding inside every slow grant response

The development team don’t lack information, they just need to get it faster.

Information regarding program eligibility, funding priorities, reporting to OSE, past notes on applicants, past year awards, and templates for frequently asked questions (FAQs) currently exist in several forms. The information is not compiled or readily accessible and resides in such places as Salesforce records, email threads, the university’s shared drives, the grant management software currently utilized by the office, and in the knowledge base of current staff.

That last part is the fragile piece. Development staff turnover in nonprofits averages around 16–18 months. When the person who carries the grant program's institutional knowledge leaves, the knowledge doesn't transfer cleanly to a document. A large amount of information is created and then that information evaporation occurs. The next person has to start all over again to learn enough about the task at hand. That person will have to query the same people that helped create the evaporation information. That person will have to read old emails. Phone calls that no one should have to make may even be required of that person.

Each grant inquiry response during this time gap will be slower, less accurate and therefore contain errors that erode trust with applicants.

It’s a structural problem. Solving it by individual efforts is not going to work. More documentation only very marginally would change the way processes are currently working. It would probably even slow them down.

The solution to this problem is to make knowledge retrievable using something that doesn’t forget, doesn’t get passed to someone else and doesn’t schedule meetings.

What fast grant applicant follow-up actually requires

The amount of time it takes a nonprofit to receive a response to a grant inquiry is equal to 1) how long it takes the staff person to find the information that the grantmaker has requested in the inquiry and 2) how much friction there is in getting that information to the grantmaker.

A constant lack of reliable information is the reality for most non-profits. Information might be spread out here, there, and everywhere; accessible only by asking someone, navigating through a variety of different systems, or waiting until the person is back in the office to get to the information.

A faster workflow needs three capabilities working together.

One database or system that the team can query instead of ten different tabs, sixty folders on a shared drive, or a hundred files on a shared drive with a complex hierarchy of folders and subfolders. A single layer of data for eligibility, program priorities, and required reports with common applicant questions and prior interaction with applicant all searchable.

Stay current without so much manual maintenance. The greatest failure of knowledge management in non-profits is that documentation goes stale. A policy changes. The documentation does not. Six months go by and a staff person is telling applicants that they are eligible for a grant for a window of time that is defined by the old eligibility criteria for a program as stated in documentation that was last updated before the board of directors changed the policy in a program in a way that changes the eligibility criteria for applicants in that program. Automatic ingestion of current information from the tools in which the information is maintained into the layer of knowledge on an issue is key to keeping that layer of knowledge current as opposed to storing information in a wiki that will eventually become stale because no one remembers to update the information.

Information retrieval happens in time for same day activity. Twenty minutes to find out information that already exists within the organization is too long and therefore indicates that the process does not work. Can a new team member three months into his or her new position answer a very complex grant related question within an hour without having to place a call.

Most development teams cannot pass that test today.

How LemonLime fixes grant inquiry response speed for nonprofit fundraising teams

LemonLime connects to the tools a nonprofit fundraising team already uses, like Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, and others, through a sign-in. It ingests the information living inside them automatically without a data migration or an IT ticket.

The Knowledge Layer contains all the information related to a grant, such as documents, program materials, records, correspondence, notes and templates that are found in other tools. The information is organized in such a way that it can be retrieved by the AI for reasoning purposes, as opposed to mere keyword searching in a folder.

When a grant inquiry is sent from this level of the system, the AI returns to the person who sent the inquiry with such information as relevant eligibility criteria, correct reporting time frame, prior contact with applicant and correct template language all pre-populated out of system for them.

This layer is dynamic and current at the time it links to the various tools that are being used. In the example above, program officers would update the eligibility and review criteria in a Google Docs and add notes in their Salesforce.com. A new development coordinator joins an organization and on her first day of work, she puts in a question to the system and gets the same quality of answer that a 10-year veteran would give.

This is particularly relevant in the nonprofit fundraising shop, because the majority of the knowledge held by staff members are the very same people who are likely to leave the organization. Thus, the knowledge layer never actually leaves with the staff member.

LemonLime is currently on waitlist. Teams can sign up at lemonlime.ai.

What a faster grant response workflow looks like for a nonprofit development office

Here is an example of this type of communication: A potential grantee recently sent an email to The Literacy Trust with 3 questions. Can after-school literacy programs be considered for funding as they fall outside of current priorities? What are the required formats for the interim reports that are due before the end of the year? Are organizations that were granted 2 years ago eligible to reapply for a grant.

Without a knowledge layer a Development Associate would spend 40 minutes searching through past awards listed on Salesforce, searching for most current program guidelines on the shared drive and emailing the program director to confirm re-application period that she wouldn’t receive until after lunch.

A response will be posted the following day. Fingers crossed it’s posted the same day following!

An example of how an associate uses the tools and layers to get answers quickly in less than 5 minutes and then develop a response to a grantee by end of day, is shown below. The associate queried the knowledge layer to get answers to 1) eligibility for literacy programs for the current funding cycle, 2) interim report for literacy programs with report attached to relevant template, and 3) prior grantees’ eligibility after 12 months. She completed her draft within the same morning and sent it to the grantee.

What the applicant notices, the funder also notices. A responsive development office is evidence of an organization’s ability to do good work with resources already at hand. During communication with a grantee, Grant-makers use this to evaluate the grantee’s “readiness” or “growing edge” and how speedily the grantee responds is a signal in itself.

In order to support this kind of work, one needs three things: a set of connected tools, automated data ingestion, and a layer of abstraction on top of the data retrieval layer that returns the correct answer instead of the most recently matched keyword. LemonLime provides all three pieces without asking the development team to maintain a separate system.

Frequently asked questions about grant inquiry follow-up

Why is my nonprofit's grant applicant follow-up so slow even when we have the information?

Just because information is stored does not automatically mean that it will be retrievable quickly. For the majority of grant knowledge for the development team, that information is housed in Salesforce records, in email threads, on shared drives and locked in the memories of team members. Each time staff receive an inquiry, they may have to retrieve the information from a variety of systems that house that information or pick up the phone and call another staff person and ask them to recall and share the information with them. Creating a knowledge layer that houses the knowledge in a aggregated and organized fashion, changes the nature of the work for information retrieval from searching for information to querying the knowledge that has been aggregated for them.

How does staff turnover hurt my organization's grant response quality?

For the first 2-3 years of program knowledge, a development officer can typically know the eligibility nuances for every program, be able to recall every past applicant, and remember every exception case. As that development officer leaves, it will slowly dawn on the next person in the loop as to the vast amount of information that that development officer has to relearn. Meanwhile, the inquiries that that development officer would respond to on a moment’s notice will begin to arrive at a glacial pace, often to be answered less accurately than in the past. In the meantime, staff will likely find the experience very frustrating. With LemonLime’s knowledge layer, that staff will not have to go through this experience. All of the same knowledge will still be available to them.

What tools does LemonLime connect to for a nonprofit development team?

LemonLime connects to tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, and others through a sign-in, no data migration or IT setup required. For a development office, that typically means grant program documents, applicant records, prior correspondence, and reporting templates are all ingested automatically and structured into a layer the AI can retrieve from.

Will my team have to maintain or update the knowledge layer manually?

No. Automatic ingestion from connected tools. The data in the layer stays current as the connected tools evolve. So for example if a program officer updates an applicant’s eligibility in a Google Doc or adds notes on an applicant in Salesforce, that will automatically update the layer. That is very different from a wiki or shared drive which only are as current as the last time someone updated them.

How quickly can my development team see a difference in grant response times?

Test LemonLime out with your primary tools by querying your program data to see what the AI can answer for you. From the moment you connect, ingestion to the LemonLime layer starts automatically and you will start to see the layer come together within minutes. Teams don’t wait months to see if it works, they can connect a tool in a few minutes and query their own program to see answer quality for themselves.

Is my organization's grant data secure with LemonLime?

It is a reasonable request to ensure that data from the fundraising system is kept secure. The current and authoritative details on how LemonLime handles your data are published at lemonlime.ai/security. Review the set up page against your organization’s requirements before connecting to your data, review with your leadership and/or your counsel regarding any data handling stipulations in your grant agreements.

Related Work: grant applicant follow-up, nonprofit fundraising AI, grant inquiry response, development team knowledge management, AI for nonprofits, grant process efficiency.