Cutting Through the Noise: What Nonprofits Need Now from Their Fundraising Partners
By Sharyl McGrew
As a grant writing consultant, I get a lot of questions from friends and colleagues about the viability of my business. With the significant reduction in public grants due to current federal priorities and the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which can generate first drafts of proposals in under a minute, where do my finely honed skills in researching funding opportunities, writing well-crafted and compelling narratives, and creating thoughtful and aligned objectives, project plans, and timelines fit in? I’d be lying if I said I haven’t had some sleepless nights pondering these questions.
During my daytime hours, I spend a lot of time looking at shifts in funding trends and opportunities, reading about the impact of Big Bills and executive orders, and observing (and coaching) my clients. They are also trying to figure out how these changes will affect their programming, operations, and finances. I see them grappling with questions like:
Do we rewrite our mission statement to avoid scrutiny?
Should we remove words like diversity and equity from our website and funding proposals?
Should we even bother applying for federal grants? If we don’t, how do we make up for lost revenue?
How do I prove my organization’s relevance to new funders when the competition from other worthy organizations is so fierce?
Should I freeze hiring, reduce my services, or both?
These are important questions with profound implications. Small nonprofits with limited development teams and movement-aligned organizations are especially vulnerable as they balance the heightened urgency of supporting their communities with the need to raise money.
This is where I and my colleagues come in. When four smart, tenacious, and experienced fundraising professionals started Collective Agency four years ago, we had no idea the incredible organizations and projects we would be trusted to support. We have been enormously fortunate to engage in deep thought partnerships with talented and dedicated leaders working to make the world more humane, creative, and well-resourced. Along the way, we have learned from and contributed to an incredible array of organizations, issues, and fundraising strategies.
As revenue strategies and technology like AI evolve, we continue to see ourselves as true partners with our clients by:
Responsibly and thoughtfully integrating AI into our workflow and processes to save time and preserve our clients’ resources. As we hear and see what our clients are struggling with, we ask our own hard questions:
How can we use AI to streamline repetitive or time-consuming tasks to be more efficient?
How can we embrace AI in ways that we trust to produce the exacting quality we expect of all of our work?
What guidelines around ethical use, data security, and transparency must we adopt to safeguard our clients’ sensitive information?
In response, we’ve rolled up our sleeves, researched best practices, and adopted AI tools like chatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. We’ve created an AI Acceptable Use Policy, and begun using AI across the organization to support internal and client content, systems, and tasks.
As we integrate this powerful tool into our workflows, we maintain the same level of rigorous attention to detail, authenticity, and accuracy essential to our work. AI is great for conducting research quickly, summarizing lengthy RFPs, and analyzing proposal content for gaps or weak reasoning. But it does not yet have the nuanced use of language and organizational context that we have developed over years of crafting our skills and working with our clients.
At the same time, we’re doing what we’ve always done: Bringing a broad yet nuanced perspective to each of our client partnerships. We support each client within their unique context (issue area, programming/services, financial model, geography, organizational structure) while having a wide view on the nonprofit sector as a whole. All those sleepless nights, all that research, and all of our client interactions across education, criminal justice reform, social services, arts and culture, and more allow us to make connections that folks working within just one area or sector might not know about.
At our core, we are optimists. We believe in our clients’ power to change the world for good, and we bring strategy, experience, nuance, and breadth to each of our client interactions.