The Impact Issue #112: Your Best Applications Are Buried In Your Former Colleague’s Folders

Happy Friday! Welcome to The Impact.

Over the last two weeks we've been pulling back the curtain on the shadow work economy — the informal, manually maintained systems that hold most grants operations together. We started with the big picture, then looked at what shadow work costs at the prospecting stage.

This week we're moving into the apply stage,  and the single biggest time drain in our entire survey of 1,000+ grant professionals: re-answering the same questions, in different formats, for different funders, over and over again.

5.6 hours a week. Every week.

Not because grant pros aren't good at their jobs. Because the content they've already written isn't organized in a way that makes it easy to find and reuse. This week we're getting into what that looks like — and how to build a content system that works as hard as you do.

Let's get into it!

Don’t Miss Out!

If your nonprofit runs on QuickBooks Online, this one's worth forwarding to your finance team.

QBO Fundamentals for Nonprofits May 19–21, 2026 | 2:00–4:30 PM ET

Gregg Bossen, a QBO expert of 25+ years and the nation's leading authority on QuickBooks for nonprofits, is covering the full picture of nonprofit accounting in QBO, from setup to reporting.

Over three sessions, Gregg will cover:

• Setting up QBO specifically for nonprofits
• What's new in QuickBooks 2026
• Tracking restricted grants, pledges, and program expenses
• Essential reports for your board and auditor

Grant pros: Day 3 (May 21st) is especially relevant — it goes deep on tracking restricted grants and auto-allocating expenses, the kind of financial visibility that makes your reporting conversations with finance a lot easier.

Use code INSTMAY70 to save $70 on registration.

👉 Register Now!

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Pitfalls and Pointers

Most grant pros have written some version of the same organizational narrative, program description, and budget justification dozens of times — but because that content lives across old proposal drafts, email threads, and shared drives, every new application feels like starting from scratch.

The average grant professional spends 5.6 hours a week re-answering the same questions in different formats.

That's almost entirely a systems problem, not a skills problem.

⚠️ Pitfall: Your Best Content Is Buried Where No One Can Find It

• The strongest version of your organization's program narrative is probably in a proposal from last year — that no one can find without digging through a shared drive or asking the person who wrote it.
• Every new funder requires a slightly different format, word count, or framing, but without a centralized content library, that adaptation starts from zero every time.
• When a colleague leaves, their best writing leaves with them, along with the institutional knowledge of what worked with which funder and why.
• Time spent reconstructing content that already exists is time not spent on the strategic work that moves proposals forward.

💡 Pointer: Build a Content Library Your Whole Team Can Actually Use

The goal isn't to write less. It's to stop rewriting what you've already written well.

• Start with the strongest content you have. Pull your strongest narrative responses, program descriptions, budget justifications, and boilerplate from the last two to three years and organize them in one shared, searchable location.
• Tag content by funder type, program area, word count, and date so anyone on your team can find the right version quickly — without having to ask.
• Treat every strong proposal as an asset. When something works, document why and make it easy to adapt for the next opportunity.
• Consider using AI tools strategically to scale it, while maintaining your own voice. Once your content library is organized, AI tools can help you reformat, condense, and tailor existing content for new funders in a fraction of the time.

But AI is only as good as the content you feed it, which is why the library comes first.

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Expert Perspectives

🏆 Fielding Jezreel on Using AI to Scale Your Grant Writing — Without Losing Your Voice

Building a content library gets you organized. AI is what helps you scale it. But most grant pros aren't getting the full benefit, because they're not optimizing their use of AI.

Fielding Jezreel, Grant Consultant and Strategist at Jezreel Consulting, has seen it firsthand:

"AI, easily, is a way to get your time back. Load your information into a project, and you should be writing one hour a week instead of eight. But people treat AI like Google. It's not Google. It's a new skill set. You need to learn how to use it — and that takes 10 or 15 hours of testing and refining."

The grant pros getting the most out of AI aren't using it to generate content from scratch. They're using it to adapt, condense, and reformat content they've already written — faster and with less cognitive load.

The content library is the foundation. AI is what can make it scale.

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Networking Nook

💻 Webinar: Fundraising Consultant Expo

May 26, 2026 | 1:00 PM ET | Free

The Fundraising Consultant Expo is a free virtual resource and learning event. Facilitated by nonprofit and fundraising experts, get fundraising strategy that most organizations never get access to.

You'll learn directly from consultants who work with nonprofit organizations on high-level strategy to secure funding all day, every day.

Attend one session, two sessions, or build your own half-day learning experience.

✅ Save your spot now - it’s free!

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To check out more recent and upcoming live events, go here.

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Ready to Stop Guessing?

….and start making smarter, more strategic funding decisions? With Instrumentl, you’ll get access to real-time funding opportunities, expert insights, and the tools you need to build a more sustainable grant strategy. 

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