Supercharge Your Grant Applications: AI as a Time-Saving Tool for Funding Bids

This half-day, in-person workshop moves beyond the basics. 

We will not explore "What is AI" nor how to let AI write a generic, robotic bid for you. Funders are increasingly rejecting AI-generated spam.  Instead, this session focuses on using AI as a powerful time-saving analytical tool to enhance your existing expertise, speed up your workflows, and audit your applications before submission.

What You Will Learn: 

• The Funder Fit Analysis: Discover how you can use AI to understand the vision that drives a funder’s philanthropic efforts and easily align your impact story with their funding priorities. 
• Reframing Narratives: Clear articulation of your work and its impact can encourage funders to support your work. Use AI to translate the outcomes of your project into compelling narratives to persuade a funder to invest in your work.
• The AI Assessor Audit: Learn advanced prompting techniques to train your AI to adopt the persona of a strict grant assessor, providing you with specific, highly targeted feedback on your draft application. 

Strict Prerequisites – Please Read Carefully: This is a hands-on, "bring your own device" workshop where you will be working on live data. 

To attend and get value from this session, you must come equipped with: 

1. Your Laptop. 
2. Basic AI Competence: You must be comfortable logging into and using an AI tool (e.g., Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot). Completion of the CiviCode/NICVA 'Intro to AI' session is highly recommended. 
3. A 'Case for Support': You must bring your existing, human-authored Case for Support - a concise description of your work and the cause you address that encourages funders to support you. Or bring a document that briefly answers the following questions: 
   1. What is the need? (the problem you are addressing using both external and internal evidence). 
   2. What is the solution? (how your work addresses the problem and evidence of why your approach works).
   3.  What is the impact? (how effective you are and evidence demonstrating the transformation or positive change your work creates - include case studies, stats, quotes/testimonials, partnerships, awards etc.) 
4. Target Funder Guidelines: Bring a printed copy of the guidelines for a grantmaker you are currently targeting (or have recently applied to). If required, we can provide a brief list of funders.

What You Will Take Away: 

You will leave with a toolkit of advanced prompts tailored for Northern Ireland and Great Britain funders.

Follwing the session, attendees will be able to request a 1-2-1 follow-up clinic with a CiviCode expert. Here, Civicode will sit down with you to review your specific application and help you seamlessly integrate local NISRA deprivation statistics to make your 'Evidence of Need' bulletproof. Arrange directly with Civicode.

Please note that a maximum of 2 participants per organisation can attend. This is to ensure that we can support a larger number of organisations in Northern Ireland.