An update on no-win, no-fee
We're not doing it anymore.
OK, but what on earth are you talking about?
Fair question.
A few months ago, we wrote a couple of posts about offering an AI bid-writing tool for charities to use for grant applications on a no-win, no-fee basis. I guess you could say the reaction was mixed.
We thought it would be useful to update everyone on the changes we've made, and what we'll be doing going forward.
Why the change?
This model was suggested by a lot of the charities we were speaking to. However, as it turned out, when the rubber hit the road, the charities we worked with didn't actually want it.
When people were accessing the AI tool, we offered some different payment options:
- A one-off fee
- A subscription fee
- A 2% of the grant value no-win, no-fee model
In practice, no one picked number 3.
The few people who did seemed to have done it almost by accident. For the charities we want to support, our "innovative new model" was met with surface-level enthusiasm, but ultimately resounding indifference. So we figured there's not much point in offering it.
In fact, we realised this pretty quickly, and we quietly dropped it back in July.
Instead, for the last 4 months, we've been offering the AI writer completely free, with no-strings attached. This has been really useful. 100s of charities have now tested the tool, and given us extremely valuable feedback on how to increase the quality of the output and make it easier to use.
What now?
We're moving to something much simpler: a flat fee of £150 / month for as many grant applications as necessary.
The tool has also quite dramatically improved. Over the summer, we added some fundamental improvements to the AI, and to the user interface, and some really useful new functionality:
Searching the internet
Pippin (our AI writer), now has access to the wider internet. It will take the question in the application, and then search for relevant contextual evidence. This saves you time if you're looking for stats about your local area, or for research about the problem you're trying to address.
It does all this automatically, and references where its found evidence, statistics or case studies:
Grant reviewing
We also provide a funders with a system to accept and assess grant applications. From this, we have seen that the number of grant applications clearly written with AI has dramatically increased.
Often, this is obvious because when AI doesn't know the answer to something, it will either "hallucinate" or be incredibly vague. For example, applications will say "we will work with local partners" or "we'll use various social media channels" instead of being specific about exactly what, who, how and why.
To address this, we've now added an auto-reviewer. While it might look like the AI marking its own homework, we've trained the reviewer to be particularly critical whenever the output is vague or generic, and it will prompt you to add additional information that the AI was missing when it wrote the first draft. Encouraging users to engage with the tool and not just copy and paste the answer overwhelming funders.
Affordability
A flat fee clearly has its advantages. It's easier to budget for, easier for us to manage, and definitely less controversial.
However, while it's cheaper than a lot of alternatives, whether that's traditional fundraising or other AI writing tools, we know it does put our tool out of reach of the small, local, grassroots charities that we spend most of our time working with.
To try and address this, we're doing a couple of things:
Making some stuff free:
At plinth, with whatever we've done, we've always had the most generous free plan for smaller charities and community organisations. We want to make sure we're doing exactly the same here. So we're providing the following without any payment or contract:
Project Feedback
We've spoken to local infrastructure organisations to find out what sort of questions they ask their community organisations to help improve VCS grant applications.
Pippin acts as a mentor asking questions to strengthen proposals.
Eligibility checker
Pippin scrapes funder guidelines' and criteria's in order to match whether an organisation's proposal is eligible for the applications.
Suggestions are made to ensure a proposal is aligned with a funder's requirements.
Two Full Length Questions
We know this is all very new, so we want people to 'try before they buy'.
Before any payment is required organisations can see a preview of the outputs generated for two questions.
Partnerships:
As well as providing some tools for free, we're also partnering directly with larger organisations so we can offer discounts or free access for smaller organisations.
Partnering with Idox
We have partnered with Idox's grant search: My Funding Central. By integrating plinth's AI Grant Writer onto their funding dashboard we aim to streamline the application process so organisations can quickly (1) Find a grant (2) Use Pippin's AI Grant Writer for a first draft.
With the aim to build capacity amongst grassroots, and smaller organisations, we are offering an 80% discount for all organisations with a turnover of up to £30,000. So for £30, the charities can apply for an unlimited amount of grants over 1 month.
Working with infrastructure organisations, funders or umbrella bodies:
We're also working with a number of infrastructure organisations and local funders to provide access to the tool to smaller organisations. This works as credits, where infrastructure organisations can bulk buy access to the tool for the groups they work (at a steep discount). Individual organisations can then use those credits for a month at a time.
What that means is, if you're in Haringey, Yorkshire, South Tyneside, Arun & Chichester or Kingston, you can access to the tool for free. We're hopefully adding more areas and partnerships soon.
If you are from a larger infrastructure organisation or funder, and would like to partner with us on this, please do get in touch.
This will be the last post for a while about AI bid-writing. We've been busy building other AI tools for the charity sector that we're extremely excited about, we'll be telling you about those very soon.
