New and Now: AI-Powered Grantmaking with YourCause

Main Takeaways

• Pain: Grants teams are managing more applications, more complex forms, and higher expectations for fast, consistent, and informed decision-making, all while trying to reduce manual review time and administrative burden.
• Innovation: AI Application Summaries and Form Intelligence help administrators and reviewers work more efficiently by summarizing application content and improving application form questions with AI-assisted suggestions.
• Solution Delivery: These complimentary features are available to customers who complete the required generative AI opt-in process, giving organizations more flexibility to adopt AI when they are ready.

Grantmaking teams are under growing pressure to move faster without sacrificing quality, fairness, or control. Administrators need to build effective application forms, collect the right information from applicants, support reviewers with clear context, and keep programs moving through each stage of the grant lifecycle.

But when teams are dealing with long applications, unclear questions, and manual review processes, the experience can slow down quickly. Reviewers spend too much valuable time searching for key details, administrators need to revise forms repeatedly to improve clarity, and applicants face unnecessary friction when questions are confusing, repetitive, or difficult to complete. For organizations managing multiple programs, regions, or funding priorities, this administrative burden can limit efficiency and make it harder to focus on strategic impact.

Practical AI Innovation for Grantmaking

YourCause from Blackbaud is continuing to bring practical, responsible AI innovation to grantmaking teams with two complementary capabilities: AI Application Summaries and Form Intelligence.

Form Intelligence helps administrators strengthen the application experience before submissions ever begin. As teams create or update forms, the feature provides AI-generated suggestions that may help improve the structure, clarity, and usefulness of form questions. The feature makes useful recommendations that administrators can review, accept, refine, or ignore based on their program needs. This makes Form Intelligence especially valuable for organizations creating new programs, refreshing existing forms, or managing complex application processes where clear questions and thoughtful design can improve both applicant experience and downstream review.

AI Application Summaries help teams move faster once applications are submitted. Instead of requiring reviewers to read every response in full before forming an initial understanding, AI generates a summary-style view of the application content so users can quickly identify key themes, priorities, and applicant-provided details. This is not meant to replace human review or decision-making; it is designed to give teams a faster starting point so reviewers can spend less time searching and more time evaluating.

Both AI Application Summaries and Form Intelligence are complimentary features for our grantmaking customers, but they require the customer to complete the generative AI opt-in process before they can be enabled. This opt-in approach is intentional and aligns with Blackbaud’s responsible AI practices, giving customers control over whether and when generative AI functionality is activated for their organization.

Together, these innovations help solve a very real grantmaking pain point: too much administrative effort spent preparing forms, interpreting application responses, and equipping reviewers with the context they need. By applying AI in targeted, practical ways, we are helping teams improve form quality, accelerate review readiness, and make grant workflows easier to manage. The result is not AI for the sake of AI, but to help administrators and reviewers save time while maintaining the human judgment, governance, and accountability that effective grantmaking requires.