Maybe—ChatGPT can absolutely help you filter, focus, and prioritize funding opportunities, not just overwhelm you with options. However, it is not a substitute for a traditional grant research engine. Perhaps one day it will be a brilliant substitute for Grant Station, Instrumental, or Foundation Search. But for now, it has limited capacity to sort through the relevant information, determine the chances of winning, and properly store what it learns in a way that you can use it later on. A state-of-the-art grant research tool is not a dumb effort that dumps endless data on you. It is a specialized tool that meets the needs of grant writers in a highly specific manner.
If you do use ChatGPT, then the way you use it is not much different than how you would use an already existing database. Look at the similarities.
1. Start with Organizational Clarity
Before asking ChatGPT to find or prioritize funding opportunities, you need to feed it the same information you’d add to Grant Station:
- Your mission and impact area (e.g., housing for veterans, youth mental health, climate justice in urban areas)
- Your geographic focus
- Your program types (e.g., direct services, advocacy, workforce training)
- Your capacity (e.g., size of your team, track record, annual budget)
2. Create a Smart Funder Profile Filter
ChatGPT suggests it can help you build a customized “funder filter”—a checklist of criteria that defines your ideal funder. For example, you could prompt it with:
“Help me create a checklist for evaluating whether a funding opportunity is a good fit for our organization.”
It will generate things like:
- Alignment with mission and service area
- Geographic funding limits
- Typical grant size
- Preference for established vs. emerging organizations
- Required outcomes or metrics
- Application complexity vs. capacity
Once this filter is built, you can then evaluate opportunities against it to avoid wasting time on low-fit prospects. However, these checklists are already fully established in grant research databases. They are better organized for holding on to that information and sharing it with your team. I’m totally on board with ChatGPT when it is better than the existing arrangements. Using it for grant research is a stretch right now, particularly if you need to generate a large number of leads for a large national grant campaign.
3. Ask for Prioritization Strategies
ChatGPT recommends asking, “What grants are available for nonprofits like ours?”—ask:
“Help me rank grant opportunities based on mission fit, ease of application, and likelihood of success.”
Again, this is exactly what takes place when you use Grant Station, Instrumentl, or Foundation Search. They give you a simple scoring system or decision matrix. Nevertheless, you are wise to imitate ChatGPT when it suggests how to triage your pipeline, such as focusing first on renewal grants, then local funders with strong alignment, then national funders with broader scopes. This is the sort of insider edge that even existing grant research databases fail to consider. Good for ChatGPT.
4. Summarize Opportunities, Don’t Just List Them
While ChatGPT can take grant listings you find (or paste in) and summarize key points like deadlines, priorities, eligibility, and strategic fit. The existing grant research tools already do this better, in a more organized fashion, with connections that let you easily transfer this information to other platforms like Salesforce or Asana.
5. Use It to Stay Focused
One truly interesting idea is that you can empower ChatGPT to be your objective friend and let it know when you are wasting your time. You can prompt by asking it:
“Does this new grant opportunity fit our strategic plan and mission priorities?”
Push comes to shove; however, I think you are still better off having the human beings in your organization make these guesses. You could have ChatGPT do it in theory, but right now, that looks like too much work, unproductive work.
After all, the best way to determine whether there is a fit is to call the funder’s program officer. Until ChatGPT does that, it is the wrong tool for the job.
Bottom line:
ChatGPT will not replace your existing, increasingly expensive grant search engines. Spend the time you might be helping ChatGPT limp through this field on something more useful, like getting the full power out of your existing grant research subscription.
