Rachel: Awesome. We're seeing a lot of folks come in, so I'm going to go ahead and use that as our cue to kind of get started here. If you haven't already and you're just coming in, feel free to continue introducing yourself in the chat box. I'm going to go ahead and close this poll and share that out.
Margit, you should also be able to see these results as well.
It looks like we're kind of somewhere in the middle with our AI expertise. About 64 percent of us are just starting out, 25 percent use it quite a bit and 10% have never used it. So, we've got a widespread. We'll see how we can kind of incorporate all those different expertise levels in our program.
Margit: This is amazing, Rachel, because in past webinars, I taught, especially in early 2023, those numbers were so different. So, I'm amazed only 10 percent have never used it. It used to be 60% or 70%.
Rachel: That's so true.
Margit: Which is really kind of a lot. Yeah.
Rachel: Yeah, we've really kind of reached a different phase.
Margit: Yeah.
Rachel: Well, I'm so excited to get into your content today, and I will kind of get us moving here into our initial housekeeping slides, so you can learn a little bit about what we're covering. So thanks again for spending time with us today. We are focusing on Using AI: Finding & Approaching Funders. For any of our first timers here, this is a free grants workshop put on by Instrumentl. We are one of the most loved all-in-one grants platform for grants management, tracking, and prospecting. We currently help almost 4,000 nonprofits and grant consultants save time in finding and applying for more grants.
To start us off, I just want to quickly introduce the Instrumentl team who's putting on this event today. My name is Rachel. For folks who haven't met me before, I'm one of the events and community managers at Instrumentl, and my job is to develop helpful and educational programs like this one to share with our Instrumentl grantseeking community. I have about a decade plus of experience in the informal education field, specifically in museums, and I'm based in Los Angeles, California.
I'm also really excited to introduce one of our newcomers to Instrumentl. I'll invite Nia to hop on the screen for a quick second and introduce herself.
Nia: Hi, everyone my name is Nia and I'm one of the newest team members here at Instrumentl, like Rachel mentioned. I'm joining Rachel in her role as an events and community manager, and therefore, my job is also to help develop helpful events like this one. I come from the nonprofit world like many of you, I'm sure. Before Instrumentl, I worked for a rainforest conservation and research nonprofit. So I was building partnerships and organizing events, like the Annual World Rainforest Day Summit. And this is my third week at Instrumentl. So, you'll be seeing a lot more of me. I'm super excited to get to know you all better. And thanks for spending your mornings with us.
Rachel: Thanks, Nia. We're so glad to have you on board. As she mentioned, you'll be seeing a lot of her as she starts to ramp up with her events through Instrumentl as well.
So, some quick FYI's as we get started. This event is about an hour long. We've got a partner webinar for you today with a lecture portion and an active Q & A. So, please feel free to continue to contribute questions and thoughts in the chat box. We'll be collecting those for a live moderated question and answer period at the end of the lecture.
You'll also get the recording and the slides. So look out for this info to come right to your inbox. Please feel free to bring a snack, stay hydrated on your personal needs and step away if you need to, but we don't want you to miss the chance to win. There's some really great kind of incentives to stick around today, including some awesome offers from our partners. So, make sure you're sticking around to listen to those at the end of the program. Lastly, if you want to read along as well as listen, closed captions are enabled in Zoom so you can toggle those on, on your own device.
If you need some extra reason to stick it out to the end today, I've got some cool freebies for you. And if you submit your feedback form at the end of the program, you'll get access to one of these Instrumentl resources, Ai For Grant Writing: 20+ ChatGPT Prompts You Can Use. So we'll be giving those out to anyone who shares their feedback. Plus, if you submit your feedback form, you'll also be entered to win coffees for the office. So you can be the hero for all those late night grant seeking endeavors, or you can use that for your own coffee caffeine needs. So, please do submit your feedback form at the end.
Lastly, I have a little Event Resources page for everybody. I'm going to drop that information in the chat box. This is a web page that I've created just for this event and includes a repository of some links and resources. It'll be updated with the slides and recording. So bookmark this page and come back to it later. I'll be continuing to add things as we share out during the program.
With that, I'm very excited to get on to our special guest for today. So I'll invite Margit to come on here with me and read her intro really quickly. So Margit Brazda Poirier, GPC MS owner and founder of Grants4Good LLC, created the company in 2009 to help nonprofit organizations and businesses find and get grant funding. She's one of the 400 or so nationally certified grant professionals, and one of only 30 approved trainers in the U S on this topic. Margit and her team have written and received millions in grants for nonprofits and businesses, and she has the unique perspective of understanding both grant seeking and grant making, given her experience leading a prominent New York foundation. Her passion is teaching others to secure grant funding through public speaking and her online course, all about grant writing. She's spoken at national and international conferences of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, Grant Professionals Association, and others.
Margit, welcome. We're so glad to have you.
Margit: Thank you so much, Rachel and Nia. I appreciate you both asking me and inviting me to come and speak about one of my favorite topics, which if you follow me on LinkedIn, you know it's all about AI. So, I'm going to now share my screen and I'm going to jump right into the presentation.
And just a quick thumbs up from Rachel, if you're seeing what you should be seeing?
Rachel: Looking great.
Margit: All right, awesome. Well, welcome everybody. I'm really excited that this, I've taught several webinars for Instrumentl partly because I love to teach, but secondly, I love the Instrumentl platform. And so, I'm really pleased to be here. I'm also really pleased that we have 500 people registered for today's webinar, and that tells me something, that, along with the poll, that so many people are really getting started in AI. 64 percent people on this call said you're just starting out. So, this is perfect. I'm going to focus on some things today that I hope you'll find helpful to kind of get up to that next level of using AI, that you'll come away with some new ideas of ways that it can help you streamline your work. So, let's get started.
Today, we're going to talk about finding the best funding sources for your organizations. How can AI and which chatbots specifically might be really useful for helping you narrow down or find some new funding sources. I'm also going to share with you some time-saving shortcuts for finding grant funding. And also I want to talk a little bit about how can we use AI to build better and more lasting connections with funders. This sounds almost counterintuitive because I am very much a sit down with people person. I prefer that. I would love to see you all in a big conference hall, 500 faces so we can interact. But this is second best, and AI is simply a tool to enhance a lot of the work you're doing. So, I believe and really it should by no means replace your personal interactions. And I don't think it will, especially in the sector that we work in. There's some special bonuses that Rachel alluded to. I have a little surprise up my sleeve as well, which you'll be hearing about.
So I've been to a lot of AI classes, seminars. I've taken a prompt engineering course, which I will be teaching one of those this fall. So if you're interested in diving even deeper into this, definitely go to my website Grants4Good, sign up for my email list. You'll be sure to get notification. But the reason I say this is that with any of the webinars I teach and with many of the ones I've attended, we almost always start with a broad overview of how generative AI works and how it doesn't work. And that doesn't mean we get into the weeds of coding and all of that, but we have to understand how is it working on a most fundamental level so that we know what its limitations are and what its uses might be. So if this is something you've heard before, here comes a review. But if it hasn't, keep in mind that AI, generative AI, works by generating narrative images through pixels, it can generate figures, but it doesn't search the Internet per se. So, it's different from going to the Google search bar and asking, where is the best place in Norway to my summer vacation, because what you would get then is you'd have a list of websites of, you know, Norway travel tours, ship tours, et cetera. Whereas, if I ask a chatbot, such as ChatGPT, where is the best place in Norway to begin my vacation, it will come up with some suggestions based on what I'm interested in. Do I want to be in London Oslo. Do I want to be in Bergen on the shore. Clearly, you can see that I'm planning my next summer's vacation already here. But I'm offering this as an example by way of showing that they work very differently.
So, search bars worked very differently from generative AI. Generative AI was trained on Large Language Models, LLMs, which essentially means that for years before ChatGPT came out to the general public in November 30, 2022, it was created by a San Francisco-based company, called OpenAI, that company, OpenAI, had been training its models for many, many years for, I want to say, five or six years, before it ever released ChatGPT, as you see it now. So, in those years, software engineers have been feeding billions of parameters of data into computer systems so that once ChatGPT was launched, you can type a question in that prompt bar, and you're going to get an answer solely based on patterns and probability. So keep in mind these three P's, Patterns in language, Probability, meaning what word is likely to come after this next word. Those two things are used to predict the answer and the narrative. So clearly there's no inherent intelligence here. But when we talk about training, that's what you're hearing, is training. So, in a most basic level, Jack and Jill went, you all know the next few words, up the hill and clearly generative AI knows it too because it's seen that in its training data so many times, it's pretty much seen everything on the Internet, and so it can predict what language is coming next.
How do we use that to our benefit and how do we utilize some safeguards as well? I know we could have a whole webinar on safeguards, but I'm just going to touch upon those.
I want to share with you some popular chatbots. And when I first got into this field, I was calling the software programs, technically now they're really called chatbots. So ChatGPT is a chatbot created by OpenAI, which is the company that programmed it. Gemini is the chatbot created by Google. Bing Chat, or Microsoft co-pilot now, is Microsoft’s product. Ernie Bot is one I've not ever used, but it's very popular in China, and it's by a company called Baidu. And Claude is getting more and more popular, developed by Anthropic. There's also Perplexity, which I've worked with a little bit, and I highly recommend you check that one out as well. Right now, I believe the most popular are still ChatGPT and probably Gemini. I'd have to look at the latest data. It changes weekly. But I wanted to give you an overall preview of what is out there.
And If you are one of the 10 percent who answered the poll that said you have never worked in AI, then here's a great way to start. You can download free accounts and just create a ChatGPT account going to the OpenAI website. And I've got links here in the slides, but Rachel is also sharing with you a short one-page resource sheet after this webinar, along with the recording, because on that sheet, it's a PDF, so you can just click on all of the links that I mentioned just because you can't write all these down. Right? So, here's the first link, and it's how to create your ChatGPT account. And then if you're interested in playing with a couple of different chatbots, try Google Gemini. I've gotten really good results there. You can also just try Perplexity, Claude, or any of the others that you are interested in playing around with. They're all free, except that they now all have monthly more advanced versions, so to speak. So, with the monthly, I used ChatGPT for free for a very long time, and I went to the monthly version earlier this year because I didn't want to have to wait to get my question answered. And I also wanted to know that it was going to remember questions that I'd asked in the past, so that I could go back to a question string all about finding funders for, let's see, we had someone from Habitat for Humanity in the chat I saw. So, if I'm looking at funding for habitat for humanity, and building housing, looking up homelessness, it's going to remember that I asked those questions in the past, and I like that kind of a feature when I'm working on my own.
Now, I'm just going to interject a moment because I don't use, when it comes to finding funders, I don't rely on chatbots and AI alone. I use it as a tool. So, I use Instrumentl because it's, and Rachel knows this, I was here. Rachel, I was here before you and Nia. I interviewed one of your co-founders way back when, the interview is on my blog site, but I was here when they first started, and I was one of those people that would send Instrumentl notes saying, “Hey, did you know you could improve by doing such and such and they still talk to me, which is great. So, I was there at the beginning and I just, I have found it an extremely useful tool. So, I use Instrumentl, I use AI, and then I just use my own institutional knowledge of what I know about funders and how they've helped my clients in the past. But this is an important part of this three legged stool. So definitely get started with one of these programs now.
And when I talk about prompt engineering, you've heard the word before, what that means is how do you put your question in this blank prompt bar right here, which is no longer blank, how do you phrase your question so that you get the best possible answer with the least number of questions? Because You want to use this as a tool to save time, you probably don't want to spend an hour trying to get an answer to your question. That would be very frustrating. So, prompt engineering is really a matter of knowing what to ask, how to ask it, how much information to put in the prompt bar so that you can get the results you want, and then to continue to engage with the chatbot. That's all I'll say about that for now. I'm glad Instrumentl is providing the 20+ prompts. I think that's going to be a great resource. I have a handout I share as well. It's always good to have some of those just to get started or at least to improve upon what you're already doing.
But what you'll see when you open one of these accounts is how can I help you today? And it may give you some examples. I use the example of planning a trip to Norway. You can use it to brainstorm names or subject lines for emails, names for your projects. You can brainstorm just about anything and there's a million uses. But I'll show you a prompt right here where I put in help me write a one-page letter of inquiry to the, this is fictional, orange foundation to support our XYZ nonprofit with a $30,000 grant that will help 350 girls ages 14 to 18 receive career exploration mentoring during the school year in Cleveland, Ohio. And this is a very specific request because I want this one-page letter of inquiry to be done. I don't want to have to make a lot of edits, although I know I will because I always. One caveat with using AI is be prepared to edit. You don't want to just take what it gives you automatically. But if I provided this level of detail, and I tested this out, I got a fantastic letter of inquiry. It included information that I didn't give it, that as a grant professional of more than 20 years now, I would say was pretty miraculous that it included all that in the letter. So, I invite you to definitely try this prompt, try similar prompts, and get started with a one-page LOI, or a two-page if you prefer.
So, we're focusing, I'm going to give you some very specific use examples about how to find funders. But before I do that, I really want to share with you some other exciting ways to use AI, if you haven't already tried it. So, we talked about the letter of inquiry. We haven't talked about presentation outlines. Let's say you're asked to give a presentation to your board on the amount of grant funding you've received, where it's come from, which projects it's allocated to, and really any future plans you have for meeting your target grant funding goals, or maybe you're in the grant management field. So, you can ask ChatGPT, Gemini, any of the chatbots to help you create a presentation outline. And just like the example I gave before, it's always helpful if you say the presentation will be 20 minutes long to a board of directors for…let's see, I saw Easterseals is on the call. So, for Easterseals of whatever region you're in. so, give it some of that information and see what comes up. And then what you can do is when you see the outline, the timed outline, knowing it’ll ask for a timed outline, let's say you don't want to spend as much time on past funders, you want to focus more on your future strategy. In that case, you can ask it to adjust. So, you can talk to it as you're moving through. Kind of treat it as an assistant that's there to help you.
Another great way that I've seen a lot of people in our sector using these tools is proofing your grant proposals and letters and also editing. Have you ever written a fantastic grant proposal only to find out that you have to answer some of these questions in 200 words or less? And I know if we were sitting in a conference room right now, a lot of people would be saying, yeah, all the time. And this is where I found the tools to be very useful, is you could put your, you know, three-paragraph answer Into this chat bar, which looks very small but can accommodate large amounts of data, and you can ask it to reduce it to 200 words or less. And if there's any particular succinct points you want it to keep, do that too. You can use it for thank you letters to funders to donors. You can write full grant proposal narratives. I'm not going to get into that today, but there's a teeny tiny surprise that Rachel is going to be talking about with Instrumentl. So, I'm not going to pop that bubble because I'm excited about hearing it. And finally, using it for prospecting for donors and grant opportunities. So, let's jump into that.
I want to also just as an aside, as I'm presenting, I won't be seeing the chat. And Rachel, how would you like people to pose their questions? Should they put maybe hashtags in for the questions so that you or Nia can help find the questions, so I can address those either as we go or after?
Rachel: Sure. Yeah. If that's helpful for folks, you can add three hashtags at the front in the chat box, if you're asking a question you would like to be added to our Q & A. I'm keeping an eye on the chat box. I'm responding to what I can, and then I'll jot down ones and add them to our moderated Q & A questions for the end.
Margit: Perfect. Good. Thank you. Because I do want people to ask questions as we come along. There's just so much to cover when we talk about AI. Really, if you leave here, we with even one thing, and this is such a cornerstone concept is, thinking of AI as your assistant, definitely not as your replacement. Many of us on this call today, whether you've worked one year in the field or 30 years in the field, you've already gained a bank of knowledge that is irreplaceable. So, AI is a great assistant. Use it with your traditional software databases like Instrumentl or any others that you might use. And never forget your own knowledge. That's important too, especially if you've been in the field a while, you know which funders are working and which ones aren't for particular organizations.
So, let's talk about finding grant funding first. I won't spend a lot of time on the numbers. You've probably seen this. If you read the annual Giving USA report. We know that just in the last year, approximately 500 billion was given in grants and donations, extremely large amount, and that there are 100,000 or more grant making foundations in the U.S. That includes private and corporate foundations. On top of that, there's thousands of state and federal grants. So, finding the best funders isn't always the easiest task. And I remember when I started out in this field in the early 1990s, it was a matter of driving to my city library and using, what was it called, well, it's Foundation Directory online back then. But I remember using that and using hardcover books to find funders. So, things have gotten a lot, lot better. So, now, in terms of your traditional tools, you can go to www.grants.gov for your federal grants. You can go to your state websites for state grants. You can utilize Instrumentl for private and corporate foundation grants, community foundations. And my coupon code is there. If you do decide to jump into Instrumentl for the first time or come back to it, use GRANTS4GOOD50 and you'll get $50 off your first month or year. I always go by year because I know it's a better deal.
But what about community foundations? How do you find the community foundation for you? I saw a food bank of Central Florida in our chat and I love going to Central Florida because I like to surf at Cocoa Beach, so it's a personal favorite location. Let's find out. I would say you could find out who your community foundation is or other private foundations. But I'm going to use some examples that I entered here before the webinar because it's just a lot quicker to share screenshots than to go live on ChatGPT right now. But here's an example. Which community foundation serves San Francisco and does it make cash grant awards to nonprofits? That's really important because not all community foundations do make grants. And my answer came up within a matter of seconds. Not surprisingly, the San Francisco Foundation serves San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area, and it does mention it offers grants in various sectors, such as arts, health, housing, community development. And what I liked about the ChatGPT and Gemini and many of the AI chatbots that I'm seeing now, as opposed to even a year ago in the summer, well, summer of 2023, is that I'm getting sources cited. And what I do is I'll go to some of these sources to get more information. So first of all, here are some good ideas of where to go to find more sources, more data. But also, when you start asking more detailed questions and maybe about statistics in your community, and you have to cite a source and you want to when you're creating your grant proposals, you can utilize those sources as long as you've checked that they are indeed true. AI is not perfect and there's still what's called hallucinations where you will get made-up sources. And I only say that because it was very common in the early days, all of, you know, maybe 2 years ago now, not even 2 years ago, but it's less common now.
So, let's say I want to dig a little bit deeper. I want to know which organizations have been funded by the San Francisco Foundation. And this is really part of that bigger terminology of prompt engineering, is how do you get from this level to this one, to this one, to this one to get to the point where you get information that's usable. So, it's great, they make cash grants. But now I want to know, is my organization going to be funded. So, who else has been funded? That's my question. The answer comes up. It's by no means completely a full answer. I'm sure they fund many organizations. But here are at least three that are listed. And this gives you a starting point where you can then go to the Bethel Heritage Foundation or Buen Dia Family School to see how much maybe they got funding for or what specific program. But already, as I look at this slide, I see that early childhood education is a priority.
Now, let's jump into national foundations because 100,000 national foundations is a lot. And, you know, I love to search new projects through Instrumentl because I can really dial down my location, my subject matter. All of that. I can also utilize this to help me out as I can ask ChatGPT which national foundations are most likely to fund nonprofits working with women experiencing domestic violence. The reason I put this question in here is I've had a very long time client where I've consulted and coached with them on their domestic violence program. And so, I know which grants we've been going for, which ones they've received. So I'm very happy with this answer because it listed the Allstate Foundation, the Mary Kay Ash Foundation. It listed the Office on Violence Against Women. This is a federal grant by the way. So, these are all ones that are absolute legit sources of funding for the programs I'm looking at. So, this gives you a starting point. This way, you can utilize Mary Kay Ash Foundation, go right to their website, or you can go to Instrumentl and download data from there, but it tells you quite a bit.
Now, let's go another level deeper. Here's the next step. Allstate Foundation. Well, let's see if they might be interested in Buffalo, New York. Okay, we're switching geographies here. Has Allstate Foundation funded any organizations in Buffalo, New York? Because I have a client in Buffalo. And the answer is, yes, they have. And it will specifically tell me that they've given $75,000 to support an organization called Women and Minority Entrepreneurs and also a $59,000 dollar grant. Again, I will always go to these sources or these organizations because I do want to make sure that the data I have is legit. But even without ChatGPT, I wouldn't have been able to draw that up quite as quickly. So, I like the very quick answers you can get.
What if I have a client in Buffalo, New York, and I want to know which grant-making foundations, notice my terminology, grant-making foundations, are most likely to fund nonprofits working to improve the lives of youth that are currently living in foster care. So, I got very specific, foster care, Buffalo, and I want grant\making foundations. And again, I took this slide actually from a presentation I gave in Buffalo, New York recently, I'm based in Rochester, New York, and I asked the people in the room if this looked legit to them. And yes, it did. In fact, Homespace Corporation was one of the clients in the room. And so, they give grants and get grants. So, it was legit. Same with their Community Foundation and Buffalo Urban League.
Now, one thing I recommend doing just for fun is try two different chatbots and see how they compare. Maybe you want to compare and contrast ChatGPT with Perplexity or Claude or Gemini, because I got some different results here. I asked Gemini the exact same question. Foster Youth and Foster Care in Buffalo, New York. And the very first bullet point is not terribly helpful. Local Foundations. But then Homespace, which appeared through ChatGPT. But then I got two new foundations and I thought these were more helpful than what I received from ChatGPT, The Children's Guild Foundation and the R. H. Foundation. And I looked those up, those looked really like our best prospects. And so, I think it's worth, and this is a free version of Gemini by the way, I think it's worth trying two different ones.
I would be curious just to pause for a moment and hear in the chat of those who are using any AI chatbots, which ones do you like the most? I’m just curious. This would be a great poll question, but I'm just going to ask you to put those in. And even though I'm going to continue on in the interest of time, it'll give other people an idea of who's doing what.
So, again, I'm going to dive deeper with Gemini and I said I got…let’s see…which ones are most likely to fund…Okay. Then I asked about youth programs in Buffalo, and I got even more. I got Kelly for Kids, which I'm familiar with, Children's Guild. So, you get the point. Also, use your other search tools, your 990s, your annual reports. The 990s are always critical in terms of the information they give about foundation mission, board of directors names, their total assets, because as we know, that 5 percent rule is critical. We can just look at the total assets on an IRS 990 form for any given foundation, take 5 percent, and you've got an approximate value of what they need to give out in the following year. I say approximate because there are some nuances to that IRS minimum distribution rule that I won't go into here, but that's a pretty good rule, the 5 percent rule.
I'm going to jump into a few more ways to use AI for maybe building some relationships once you do find some funders that you want to meet with and reach out to. We already talked about the letter of inquiry or the letter of introduction. If you are one of the people on this call tasked with also developing annual appeal letters, they can be very useful for developing those. And also thank you letters.
So I'm going to keep moving just because I want to make sure we have enough time to cover everything. But here's the one-page LOI. One-page letter of inquiry to the Rogers Foundation to request $20,000 for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Southern Nevada. And here's what I'm going to do. I don't know what the Rogers Foundation mission is. It came up in a search, so I purposely did not look it up. But I do know Big Brothers Big Sisters because I've worked with them over many years, the national. And I'm going ask Ms. LOI describe how our mission aligns with that of the Rogers Foundation, because it's what we do in an LOI, right? We want to make sure that we've got that really good alignment with a funder to start building that relationship.
Here's a screenshot from the first half of the one-page LOI. Fictional addresses. And that's alright. I like to have these as a placeholder. I can always then put in the information I want for the address. The Rogers Foundation is not on philanthropy lane, so I can add the proper address later. But, what I do like is the narrative that came up here, it talks about the core mission of Big Brothers Big Sisters, and it is word-for-word what comes from the Big Brothers Big Sisters website. It's perfect. I compared it with the mission of the Rogers Foundation. It is, again, spot on.
The second part of the letter talks about increasing, expanding mentorship capacity and a whole lot more. So, as I look at this LOI, it’s pretty good. I definitely, as I mentioned before, always read, edit, make sure the information is accurate, and also make sure that it reflects your voice, because what you'll find with these chatbots is, especially when you're starting out, certain terms keep coming up over and over again. For a while, I saw the term unleashed and unlocked come up a lot, supercharged, you know, these aren't typically words that I use in conversation or in professional letters. If you do, that's fine, but it's not in my writing style. So, I do go through and very closely edit.
This is also a good time to talk about one…two things actually, two cautions. One being data privacy. Don't put anything in your prompt bar that is confidential information. So, for example, I would not put any kind of private donor information or donor assets or anything that can't be public or for someone's eyes to see. And that's just, at this point, that's what I would do. Without going off into a tangent about other private software companies where data is not shared, you know, those would be safer. But when you're using ChatGPT, Gemini, any of those very popular chatbots, I would not put anything in to the prompt bar that you couldn't share with a coworker, for example. So, that's the first thing.
The second one is that of bias. And I worked in the last few years in particular with a group that was really working in a diverse population and it was very important to use very respectful language as it always is in any application. So, there is bias in how some of these chatbots work because they were trained on billions of parameters of data that came from years and years of what has been available electronically. And so, that alone can contain some bias. And there's been some instances of racial bias, gender bias, marginalized groups being biased in language. So, again, I would caution you to read language and make sure that it reflects how you want to communicate.
And third, let's talk a little bit about using AI for building funder relationships. So, beyond the letter, what else can we use it for? Well, I know the Instrumentl, I know that 990s, they will give you a list of board members and donors. You might want to go a little deeper with that AI even and say, okay, well, is anyone on the Ford Foundation board of directors affiliated with Rochester, New York, where I live? And I'm very familiar that there is someone here that is affiliated with the Ford Foundation. But my first go around at chat GPT didn't get me the results I expected. It instead gave me a history and the connections between Henry Ford and two others to Rochester, New York. So I asked again. I said, instead of board of directors, I said, is anyone on the Ford foundation board of trustees affiliated with Rochester, New York? And now I got the answer that I knew would be coming. And that was, yes, Ursula Burns was the former CEO of Xerox Corporation. And then it mentions a lot about her.
So, you can find out more, even about…let's say you go to Instrumentl and you get a list of board directors, but you want to know, do they have any connection with your city, do they have any connection with your nonprofit, or if you are, let's see, the Marine Science Institute is here. Do they have any past history of interest or giving with oceanography, science, marine, put in some keywords. You can start to get some information where you may have a little more insight Into how you're going to build that first connection with your funder, whether that be through email, phone, meetings, letters, it doesn't matter, but it will help you in your research.
And here's another really fun use, the Elevator Pitch. You know how sometimes you've got the contact name of who you want to call for funding and you want to introduce yourself, and you don't want to run down that gauntlet of speaking for 5 minutes straight and meanwhile the funder on the other end is kind of running out of patience maybe. You want to be able to grab them right away with what's called the Elevator Pitch. That short 1 or 2-minute introduction of who you are, what you do, what your organization stands for and why you're calling, why you align with this particular foundation, why you're making the call. So, you could enter a whole bunch of information in a prompt bar and ask your chatbot to help you develop an elevator pitch that you could say in two minutes or less, or an elevator pitch in writing that contains no more than X number of words. You get to set your parameters. I have a fun little blog on my Grants4Good site on how to say it in 20 seconds or less. If you want to check that out, it essentially helps you develop a value proposition for your work to essentially sell to a funder. So, elevator pitch is another great way to utilize this.
I want to jump to the chat real quick. What are people using for…Rachel, do you mind? What kind of chatbots are people using?
Rachel: It kind of ran the gamut. I saw a lot of ChatGPT and definitely some folks using Claude. I saw someone using Mistral AI, which was a new one for me.
Margit: I don’t know that one. Okay.
Rachel: Some folks using perplexity. But yeah, predominantly it seems like ChatGPT is the major one.
Margit: It's extremely popular. It's the first one on the scene. So, we'll see what happens over time. But I can tell you just in the first six months to a year that there have been thousands of software companies. I was beta testing many of the newest chatbots that have come up, and there's several that I really like that are kind of an all-in-one bundle deal or kind of fun to work with. So, definitely do your research out there. But when you are just getting started, you're in a tight time crunch, my best advice is try one or two of these and use them to get with Instrumentl’s prompts, with some of my ideas, and also anything else that you can do. It's really just limited by your own creativity. And I have to remind myself that I have a little Post-it note on my monitor that says, how can AI help? Because sometimes I get stuck and I think, wow, I've got so much on my plate today and I'm forgetting that there's this tool out there that might be able to save me some time and do it really well.
I want to move on to my short offer, I won't spend a lot of time on this. Many of you have been in my All About Grant Writing Program. I recognize some names on the call today. So, hello to everybody out there who's been through the program. You know that it's a self-paced online program all about grant writing. So, if you need help, whether you're starting out or you're just not getting the results you want, this is on my website. Go to www.Grants4Good.com and you'll get a link on the All About Grant Writing Program and how to work with me. It's used to help you get six, seven-figure grants or more, it helps you save time, and it's me helping you every step of the way because new this year, I've incorporated small group coaching. The reason I did this is because we’ve always had live Q & A's as part of this course, but I find that people consistently have questions that come up with AI and how can it integrate with our grant writing efforts. What can it do that I'm not even thinking about, how can it help with project budgets, can it. And so, these are the kinds of things we talk about at our monthly small group coaching sessions, and that is included free with the course. So you would get eight modules the moment you’ve signed up to do at your own pace, and we would get to work together. So, I'm doing something extraordinary that I don't usually do too, and that's I'm offering this at 40%. I know we're nearing the end of summer. And maybe you've still got some time for summer learning, but whether you do or not, when you sign up for the course, you have it for life. So, if you want to take advantage of the coupon code, use appropriately, GPT40. So, GPT40 will get you 40 percent off until August 20th. So, if you have any questions at all, if you're wondering if this is right for you before you make the investment, definitely reach out to me. You're going to have my email and contact information. But I would love to see a big influx of some more people in the course and to really to have some fun with our group coaching sessions. And with that, I'm going to hand it back to Rachel, who's going to show about your newest feature.
Rachel: Thank you so much, Margit. Hold on one sec. Let me make sure I'm getting my correct desktop here. There we go. Wow. I feel like I was jotting down notes as you went to because there's so much to learn. There's probably still more we could cover, and we have a few questions that we'll get to just a moment. As a reminder to folks, I've been collecting those in the chat. So if you have a question that you'd like us to cover in just a moment, I'm going to get there in just a second. Please do add those. But as Margit mentioned, we do have a little surprise for you all today. And some of you who are current Instrumentl users might have heard about this. But For folks who are kind of new to the space here, we are working on a pretty cool tool. It's going to be Instrumentl’s AI grant writing tool. It's pretty incredible to witness. It's essentially going to take your words, your excellent proposals that you've worked so hard on many times over and incorporate those directly into a funders application. So you can apply all those great tidbits that you've worked on over many proposals into your next application. Some early users who have been helping us beta test the product and now are helping us kind of get it to this next stage have said that they just have really enjoyed this. Someone said they sat there and squealed in their office with just excitement of how great their draft was. And someone else shared that it's saving them about 40 percent of the time they normally spend. I have a really quick video. It's about a minute long. It just shows a quick overview of what this looks like, so you can get a sense in Instrumentl.
[video clip] Hi there! Welcome to the new Instrumentl AI Grant Writer. It's a new tool from Instrumentl now in its beta phase. The new AI Instrumentl Grant Writer will make writing proposals a lot faster. In fact, early customers say it's saving them up to 40 percent of the time they normally spend writing private grant proposals. So, here I am on Instrumentl. I'm going to give you a quick overview of how the tool could work for you and your organization.
Now, you're probably familiar with all of these saved grants on your tracker. I have the Dunlap Williamson Fund Grant saved on my tracker. It's from the Community Foundation of Central Georgia. I've got my familiar grant page here with information about the grant opportunity, the funders giving history. And now, with the new AI Grant Writer, I have a button that says continue application. And when I click on it, I'm taken to the grant opportunities application form. So now, with the new AI Grant Writer, you'll have applications for every private grant on Instrumentl. And not only that, when you click on these different questions, for example, Project Name, over on the right side, Instrumentl is helping you answer these questions. And it's doing it through AI and it's also retrieving the last time that you answered this question or a similar question so that you don't have to spend all of that time searching through your documents. So, to add my project name, I'm just going to click the add button here and it automatically populates. And of course, it works for things like project name and request amount and contact information, but it can also work for some of the more tricky questions, like summarize your organization's mission statement, current program, and the benefits to the community. That is a mouthful. Over on the right side, you'll see the recommendations for how Instrumentl things. You should answer that question. You can click add. And you can see here, when I added my blurb, I'm actually one character over the funder's max character count. So, we let you know when that happens. You can edit directly in this field to meet the character count.
Rachel: I'm going to pause it there because we could dive in a little bit deeper, and actually this video is a little behind on our current updates. Now, the Instrumentl AI tool actually helps you edit your character count as well. So, in that current iteration, it was just warning you you’re over. Now you can actually ask it to directly just cut down on your character count there. So, it's a really cool tool. I have shared the link in the chat box. One thing I will clarify here. If you're a current Instrumentl user, great. You can just go ahead and fill out our interest form and one of our grant advisors will get back to you on how you might be adding this to your account. I believe there's a special promo for this month as well. So, I encourage you to explore that as we near the end of August. If you haven't used Instrumentl yet, and you want to check this out, there is that signup link. We’re asking you to use Margit's link today. That just will give you that special discount as well. So, you can click that link there and fill out the try 14 days free box that comes up from there.
I want to get into questions because we're nearing the end of our hour. And I have a couple. I'm going to bring Margit back up, so that she can answer these as well.
Valerie was curious, and some people did comment in the chat, so thank you for adding your thoughts here. If you are writing a grant proposal, and you are needing to use things with like numbers or statistics, can you trust what the AI is generating there?
Margit: Well, if you're asking it for numbers and statistics, I would always check the data first. You can ask for that. And then I would look at the sources to make sure it's accurate. I have experimented with census information and it's been accurate. I've asked for graduation rates of certain school districts that I found to be accurate. And then sometimes I'll go to that site to get even more information. But I think as a rule of thumb, I would always check just to be sure, because, you know, as grant pros, we've got to cite our sources. We don't want to make those kind of mistakes.
Rachel: Yeah, that's a good tip. And yeah, I think some folks commented that they ask for the AI also to cite their sources.
Margit: Yeah. I saw that in the comments. I love that. Yep.
Rachel: Okay. So we have another one here. Bobby John is asking, a lot of grants ask for a certain amount of characters for an answer, not number of words, and they've sometimes had trouble getting ChatGPT to give a correct response. Does anyone have tips on this?
Margit: Yeah, I’ve seen a problem with that too. At times it may get close but not exact. And I wonder if part of it is because sometimes with online forms, even, you know, I'll look at Microsoft Word and I'll know that that's 500 characters, but the online form may say it's 545. And so, sometimes spaces are included and sometimes it just counts differently. I think it's better with words, but you can do approximate characters. Yeah. It doesn't always work down to the actual single character.
Rachel: I've noticed that as well.
Margit: I have tried it with Perplexity though. So, it might be worth trying that or Gemini. But I know ChatGPT isn't great at it.
Rachel: Yeah, that's been a funny one for me too. I've struggled with that nuance.
Amy was curious, can we ask ChatGPT at all, any of the other chatbots here, to search 990s for us?
Margit: Yes. I have…yeah, you can upload a PDF. There's actually a program, and I heard about this at a conference I went to last year, called ChatPDF. But I know that ChatGPT and some of the others can do it too, is if you upload a 990 and you can ask it questions based on that, you should get answers. I think Perplexity was best at this. When I recently, and I see that Elizabeth is here from Buffalo, when we spoke in Buffalo early in the summer, and we tried a few different ones and Perplexity did a good job of it. But it's worth always trying because really every week these chatbots change. They change all the time. So, definitely upload a 990 and ask it to give you some information. Maybe to summarize…What it can't do is summarize the average gift amount because it's not going to be able to take that PDF and do the math of all the giving it's done, but you can ask it things like who is on the board of directors, what are some names of organizations that this foundation has given to. So, play around with that.
Rachel: Yeah, that's a great tip. Justin had a thought here, and I've seen some people adding to the question here in the chat, do you recommend creating custom GPTs for different tasks? What are your thoughts here and your approach?
Margit: Custom GPTs. Yeah, I would. That's why I have the paid version, is I like to have my conversations grouped so I don't have to start from scratch every time. So you can do that in ChatGPT. I haven't tried it in any of the other chatbot, so I can't speak to those. But it can be helpful, yeah.
Rachel: And then, Victoria was wondering, if I'm new to grant writing, is this too advanced? Like, where would you recommend someone start? I guess if they're kind of in maybe more than novice phase of their grant seeking career?
Margit: I think this is going to be really helpful for people starting out in grant seeking. I would say you definitely want some comprehensive instruction on grant writing. So, maybe check out the All About Grant Writing Program. But you can definitely use AI to help you get started. Just don't rely on it 100 percent. So, in other words, what you can do is, and I recommend trying this, is when you see a request for proposals, copy and paste each question one by one into the chatbot. So maybe use the exact wording the application is saying when it asks you to write a need statement that makes the case for why you need grant funding support. Use that exact wording, put it into the prompt bar, and ask ChatGPT, or any other chatbot, help me answer this question. Put the question in. And then you provide a little more information about your organization, your project, your mission, and see what it comes up with.
Rachel: Love that.
Margit: Those who are new to grant writing, those are some things you can play around with. Yeah.
Rachel: Awesome. You are just such a wealth of knowledge, and I know other folks had questions. I'll try and curate those and add them to our Event Resources page, and maybe, Margit, I can send you those and you can answer them to be synchronously…Yeah. And then I can add those responses. We're getting close to the end of our time and I want to respect everyone's busy schedules today. So, loved having you. And thank you again for taking the time with us.
Margit: Thank you so much. Yeah. Great. Great to be here. And I wish you all the best. Contact me with questions. I'm here for you.
Rachel: Awesome. As mentioned, I'll make sure to share Margit’s info. I did drop the feedback form link in the chat. I'll do that one more time. Thank you so much to everyone for being here. As a reminder, this submission of your feedback form will get you access to this special little prompts resource that will add to what Margit has already shared a plethora of and you could also be entered to win some coffees or tea or whatever you might partake in for your office.
We also want to highlight, we've got some other fun events coming up. You can see our main events calendar at the link I'm about to drop in the chat. We also are currently opening early bird registration for a virtual summit that we're hosting in September. We're very excited about that. So, if you are extra interested in joining that, we're going to highlight the successes of high-performing nonprofits with some of our awesome partners across the sector. So, please do sign up for that today if you are interested. We'd love to see you there. Otherwise, have a great rest of your Tuesdays, everybody. It was so fun learning with you. Reach out to us if you have any additional questions, and we'll see you next time.
Margit: Thanks again. Bye-Bye.
Rachel: Bye! Thanks folks. I'll drop some of those last links in the chat just one more time in case we missed anybody. Thanks everybody. See you next time.
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