About this Workshop:

Learn to love grant writing by leveraging one of the most powerful tools available. This workshop will teach you a hands-on approach to grant writing that works for you, instead of against you.

Most people dread grant writing. The research takes forever, the narrative sections feel impossible, and by the time you hit submit, you're not even sure the proposal sounds like you anymore. In most rooms, we can simply say the words SF424 and a cold chill crawls down the nonprofits spines!

AI can fix that, but only if you use it well. Used carelessly, AI produces generic, bloated writing that reviewers spot instantly. Funders are reading hundreds of proposals, and they know what lazy AI writing looks like and it actively counts against you.

Used correctly, AI helps you research faster, organize better, and write proposals that still sound like your organization at its best. It can challenge your assumptions, make sure you are aligning with the RFP and the funders mission and reduce the process to a fraction of the time you are spending now.

This is What We Do:

We know this works because we do this ourselves. FoundersForge recently won a $182,000 grant using the exact process we'll teach in this workshop. This isn't theory. It's the workflow we use from start to finish.

What We'll Cover:

• Breaking down a funding opportunity: how to read an RFP and figure out what the funder actually wants

• Researching with AI: gathering data, citations, and community context without hallucinated sources

• Building your organizational knowledge base so AI writes from your real story, not a made-up one

• Drafting narrative sections that keep your voice and your brand intact

• Avoiding AI slop: the words, phrases, and patterns that scream "a robot wrote this," and how to prevent AI from using them

• Budgets and logic models: where AI helps and where it absolutely doesn't

• Review and polish: using AI as a critic to pressure-test your proposal before the funder does

• Building a repeatable workflow so your next grant takes a fraction of the time and your team can use the tools too

You'll leave with a working process you can apply to your very next application, whether you're a founder, a nonprofit leader, or the person at your organization who got voluntold to write grants.

AI Tools Discussed:

Our workflow is mostly AI tool agnostic. We will take about some specific tools like Claude Design but most of the process translates easily from Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. We will be covering each of these and how we use multiple tools to check our results, even at the free tier space. However, we'll also be talking about Claude for Nonprofits, OpenAI for Nonprofits and why you should seriously consider one of these team accounts.

Why do we charge?

This is a hands-on workshop with multiple FoundersForge team members working alongside you, and we'll keep answering your questions after the event to make sure you get the most out of it. As a nonprofit ourselves, we charge to cover our costs so we can keep delivering this level of support at a high standard. That's it. No upsell waiting at the end. Our goal is to empower other nonprofits by teaching AI skills that make them extremely competitive.

About FoundersForge

FoundersForge is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit entrepreneur center based in Johnson City, Tennessee. We provide free mentorship, education, and community for early-stage founders across Northeast Tennessee and rural Appalachia. Our job is simple: help the people building things here get the resources, skills, and support they need to win. We envision an economic thriving Appalachia through entrepreneurship and innovation. You can learn more about us at: FoundersForge.com and about the FoundersForge AI Academy.