Grantmaking is broken.

Community-based organizations often rely on competitive grants, philanthropic gifts, and fundraising to maintain fiscal solvency. Yet, writing a competitive grant takes a specific set of skills and a significant block of time.  Pilot work we conducted with a major funder using an advanced machine learning model found that we could only predict funding decisions with about a 58% accuracy. Practically, whether something was funded either came down to a coin flip OR, more likely, some factors were unaccounted for in how people made decisions.

Resources are inequitably distributed.

This is inequitable. This is unfair. Hours of labor are devoted to a project with an uncertain payout.

We aim to innovate a solution to this problem from two angles. From a funder’s perspective, we aim to provide a suite of tools that can help them examine their portfolio’s textual elements using natural language processing and other predictive modeling. This will help them to be more reliable in how they decide on proposals and help them to examine critical content gaps.

From the grantee perspective, we aim to develop a mathematical suite of tools that uses both the results of the predictive model and also principles of game theory to determine whether specific proposals should be pursued. We will develop metrics that help people to decide what level of effort is worth pursuing a proposal given explicitly identified variables. In essence, we want to use AI and game theory to put the odds back in favor of the grant writer. This helps to democratize the professional grant-writing process, which may be out of reach of many organizations.

What Dawn Chorus can do for you?

For the prospective grantee, we can provide feedback on grant narratives to help you identify areas to improve and increase your chances of success.

For funders, we can comprehensively analyze your portfolio and help you identify your trends and blind spots.