It helped me revise some project outcomes today, and I learned stuff. The written outcomes I submitted were pretty shit and probably a core reason why the grant got rejected. Between GPT and a Grant Professionals Association federal grant-writing training I’m doing right now, I feel like I’m in a wonderful learning feedback loop where I can cross-reference and integrate my learnings.
Obviously I can Google the proper way to write objectives, but it’s useful to have a tool that can troubleshoot. In one case, we’re submitting a (previously rejected) federal grant under the priority of “combatting violent crime.” This is a victim services grant, so I explained to GPT that we don’t control the outcomes of prosecutions, etc. so I wasn’t sure how to approach promised outcomes. GPT gave me good feedback on how to adapt the original overly broad objective to a services-focused objective that connects survivors with resources to exercise their legal rights and pursue justice options.
I also asked it, like, hey, how do you handle it when your outcome is something you’re already doing? It gave me a pretty comprehensive response.
It’s like having a grant consultant to provide me unlimited on-the-job training. I am discovering that my work is actually more complex than even I realized and that there are countless ways I could improve my workflow. Keep in mind, I’ve been writing corporate and foundation grants for 16 years, with the occasional federal narrative, but I’ve only been managing federal grants for four years - and until recently, I never had any training. Because you have to write pages and pages of narrative, one could erroneously conclude that writing a federal grant is about, well, writing. But it’s much more about planning, development strategy, partnership outreach, project design, evaluation, etc. You could fill a book with the stuff I don’t know yet. And that’s where I think AI is going to have the most useful application: to teach me the stuff I don’t know, specific to my work, as I’m doing it.
They key thing for me is to have continued (actual expert) input through ongoing training to ensure what I’m learning from GPT is in line with standard practice. It’s the interplay between these two resources that I think is going to have the strongest impact.