$15,000 a year.
That’s what we paid a grant writing consultant. And for a small nonprofit, that’s not a line item - that’s three scholarships.
Three first-generation college students who get tuition support, professional development, and a network of people who believe in them.
So when I tell you we deleted that line item, I want you to understand what it meant.
It wasn’t a cost-cutting decision. It was a stewardship decision - and the results changed how we operate.
You’re already the expert. That’s the problem.
When we started Level Up Cincinnati, hiring a grant writing group made sense. We were new to the landscape. We needed help navigating it.
The way it worked: we’d meet monthly, sometimes bi-weekly during busy grant cycles. They’d ask me questions. I’d pull information. They’d write a draft. I’d review it. I’d flag corrections. They’d revise. I’d pull more files. More meetings. More revisions.
And here’s what I didn’t realize for a long time: I was still doing most of the thinking.
The consultant needed me to explain our mission, our outcomes, our students, our financials. Every cycle. I was the subject matter expert. They were the middleman. And the middleman wasn’t saving me time. They were adding steps.
This isn’t a knock on grant writing consultants. If you’re just getting started, outside help can make sense.
The real issue is bigger than who writes the grant. It’s about what happens to the knowledge.
The moment that changed my math.
Going into our second year with the consultant, I tried something different. I pulled up a grant application and started answering the questions myself, using AI to help me draft, refine, and proofread.
The first time I did it, the process was simple. Write a draft response, check it, let AI help with the language and framing, refine it again.
And I realized something that surprised me.
The time I spent explaining to someone else how to write it was more than the time it took to just do it myself.
That one realization is the principle behind everything that followed. If you’re already the person with the knowledge, the fastest path isn’t finding a better writer. It’s finding a better process for getting what you know onto the page.
The principle that changed everything: institutional knowledge compounds.
Here’s the idea that matters most in this post.
Think about how most organizations handle grant writing, whether it’s a consultant, a freelancer, or even an internal staff member. The knowledge about your organization lives in different places.
Your program data is in one system. Your financials are in another. The narrative about your mission lives in someone’s head, or scattered across last year’s reports, or buried in a Google Drive folder no one has opened since the last application cycle.
Every time a grant comes up, someone has to reassemble all of it. If it’s a consultant, they ask you for everything from scratch. If it’s an internal grant writer, they’re bouncing between departments. If it’s you, you’re digging through your own files trying to remember how you framed something last time.
The result is the same regardless of who’s doing it: you’re rebuilding context from zero every cycle.
When you build a system where that knowledge is centralized and compounds, the opposite happens.
I started keeping previous grants organized (via Obsidian) in project folders. Every application, every narrative, every budget justification. When a new grant came up, AI could draw on all of it. The language, the framing, the data points, the specific way we talk about our coaching model. It all carried forward.
Every grant I wrote made the next one easier.
That’s compounding. And it’s the single biggest advantage of building this kind of system. The fact that your organization gets smarter every time you go through the process.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re replacing a consultant or improving how your internal team works. If your institutional knowledge isn’t organized in a way that builds on itself, you’re doing some version of starting over every time. And that’s where the real inefficiency lives.
Research before you write. That’s the other unlock.
Our grant success rate is close to 90%. We stopped applying to everything and started researching first.
Before we write a single word, AI helps us research the funder. Their values, their giving history, the size of grants they typically award to organizations like ours, what they’ve funded recently. We know before we start writing whether it’s a genuine fit and what a reasonable ask looks like.
This is a principle any nonprofit can apply today, regardless of what tools you use: spend more time deciding where to apply and less time writing applications that don’t match.
When you only apply where you’re a genuine fit, your success rate goes up and your wasted effort goes down. That’s not an AI insight. That’s a strategy insight.
The numbers behind the shift.
Using the grant writing service, we brought in $65,000 in foundation grants.
Since doing it ourselves, we’ve brought in $465,500:
- Year one: $95,000
- Year two: $143,500
- Year three: $227,000
Year over year growth of 27%, 51%, and 58%.
Notice the growth curve. It’s not flat. It’s accelerating. That’s the compounding at work. The process gets better because the knowledge base gets deeper.
Total time per application now: 1 to 2 days. Maybe 2 to 4 hours of actual work. Down from 30 to 45 days.
What this doesn’t solve for you.
You own the narrative. AI will give you a draft. You need to read it and make sure it sounds like your organization, not a template. The voice has to be yours. Back to the idea of compounding, the more you write - the more your future drafts will hit the mark on first pass.
You own the numbers. Financial figures, student metrics, impact data. You need those ready and accurate before AI ever touches them. AI has gotten better at working with data, but verifying it is still on you. Always.
The preparation is the work. At the end of each year, we build a comprehensive program summary. All the wins, all the challenges, student metrics, financial data, key projects. That takes real effort. It’s not glamorous. But it’s what makes everything else fast. The speed you see in a 2-hour grant application is built on a foundation of organized, accurate information.
If you skip the preparation, AI will just help you write mediocre applications faster.
The tools will change. The principles won’t.
Here’s what I used this year: Claude, Obsidian, ChatGPT, Wispr Flow, NotebookLM, Google Drive, Salesforce, foundation directories for research. All free or close to it.
But I want to be direct about something. By the time you read this, some of these tools will have changed. New ones will exist. Some of the ones I’m using now might not even be the best option anymore.
That’s how fast this space moves.
The principles are what transfer:
Centralize your institutional knowledge so it compounds.
Keep your past work organized so it feeds your future work. Don’t let it live in someone’s head, walk out the door with a vendor, or scatter across departments where no one can find it.
If you’re already the expert, build a process that lets you get it down directly.
The fastest path to a great grant application isn’t finding a better writer. It’s giving the person with the knowledge a better system.
Research before you write.
Time spent on the front end deciding where to apply is worth more than time spent writing applications that don’t fit.
Those three ideas eliminated a $15,000 annual expense and helped us raise $465,500 in grant revenue.
They’ll work whether you have a consultant, a grant writer on staff, or you’re the ED doing it yourself at 11pm. And they’ll work whether you’re using the tools I listed above or something that doesn’t exist yet.
Three scholarships.
I keep coming back to this.
$15,000 was three scholarships.
Three first-generation college students who now get the support system that their peers with college-educated parents take for granted.
That money doesn’t go to a consultant anymore. It goes to students. And the grants we write ourselves bring in seven times more on top of it.
Every dollar we don’t spend on overhead is a dollar that goes directly to a student. That’s the math that matters.
This is the second post in The $0 Department: What Happens When a Nonprofit Stops Hiring and Starts Building. Subscribe to follow the full series.
Level Up Cincinnati empowers first-generation college students through mentorship, scholarships, and professional development. 100% of donations go directly to student programming. Learn more at https://levelupcincinnati.org