A food bank that wanted AI for grant writing, and got the policy first
Staff were already pasting things into free AI tools, including donor names. We wrote a one-page policy, then built a drafting assistant that can only quote the food bank's own approved facts.
This shows the kind of work we do. It is not a client engagement, and the business in it is invented.
- 40grant applications a year now drafted from one approved library
- Half a dayper application, down from about two
- 0donor records the drafting tool can reach
Where it started
The problem
Grant applications were eating the development director's year. Forty of them, most asking the same questions in a different order, each due on a Friday.
Staff had started using free AI tools on their own. One draft came back with a statistic about local hunger nobody could source. Another had been written from a spreadsheet of donor names pasted straight into a chat window.
What changed
What we did
Policy came first, because the problem had already arrived. It covers which data can go into which tool, and what a person must check before anything is sent. It fits on a page, and the board signed it at their next meeting.
Then the useful part. We built a library of approved answers from the food bank's annual report and the program descriptions the board had already signed off, and a drafting assistant that writes from that library and nothing else.
Every figure in a draft carries its source. A figure without one is highlighted in yellow, and the development director decides whether to find a source or cut the sentence.
Donor data stays out entirely. The assistant can't reach the donor system and was never meant to.
Built with
- Microsoft 365
- SharePoint
- Azure AI Search
- Power Automate
Services in this job
AI Consulting & Strategy
Where AI pays for itself, and where it won’t
AI Agent & Workflow Automation
Agents that do the job, with a log of every step
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