Automated Nonprofit Funding Opportunity Research and Outreach
Advanced~520h estimated$65,000/yr value
What they need
Automatically discover relevant grant and funding opportunities for civic-dialog.org, then generate tailored pitch emails to funders, reducing manual research and drafting time so more outreach can happen each week.
Build brief
Problem
The staff member at civic-dialog.org — a nonprofit focused on automation and AI education for other nonprofits — manually researches funding opportunities, identifies funder contacts, and writes individualized pitch emails from scratch. Each email takes approximately 2 hours, limiting outreach to 2–
Current process (200 min/run)
- 1Search for funding opportunities (currently manual Googling across various sources)(60m)
- 2Visit funder website and identify a relevant contact person(20m)
- 3Research the opportunity details to assess fit for civic-dialog.org(20m)
- 4Draft a tailored pitch email explaining civic-dialog.org and why it is a good fit(90m)
- 5Send the email to the funder contact(10m)
Tech stack & integrations
Web scraping / grant database APIs (e.g. Candid/Foundation Directory, Instrumentl)AI/LLM integration (e.g. OpenAI API) for email draftingEmail automation (e.g. Gmail API, SendGrid)Python or Node.jsPrompt engineeringContact discovery (e.g. Hunter.io, Clearbit)Workflow orchestration (e.g. n8n, Make, Zapier)Data storage (e.g. Airtable, Google Sheets)
Full build specification available after claiming this project