Grant Writing

Draft and refine grant applications with LouEllen, who knows your organization.

Overview

The grant writing feature pairs a document editor with LouEllen. Share your application questions, and responses get drafted using your Reference Materials, memories, and connected integrations as context.

How It's Different from ChatGPT

If you've tried writing grants with ChatGPT, you know the drill: paste your questions, get a draft full of hallucinated statistics, spend an hour cleaning it up, feed it more facts, ask it to cut the word count, realize it introduced new redundancies, repeat. It works, but it takes a long time.

GrantLoop splits the job up. When you ask for a grant, LouEllen sends out a researcher per question to gather sourced material, writes every answer without handing it off, then hands the draft to a second set of readers who grade each answer against the question it was meant to answer and against the word limit. Whatever they reject gets fixed and sent back round.

You'll see Researching actions appear in chat while that's happening. How much gets farmed out depends on the size of the job.

What comes back is a real draft rather than a starting point: answers written in your organization's voice from your own materials, each one inside its limit. It opens with a short internal briefing that isn't part of the submission: who the funder is, the angle taken, and a short list of what's left for you. That list is the honest part. Some things only your organization can settle, like next year's budget figure or which of two programs an ask is really for, and those get flagged rather than invented.

Creating a Grant Writing Project

  1. Click New at the top of the sidebar
  2. Choose Doc
  3. Name it (e.g., "Ford Foundation 2026" or "State Arts Council LOI")

Or ask in chat: "Create a new grant writing doc called 'Smith Foundation Spring 2026'."

Writing Drafts

Ask LouEllen to draft content. Your Reference Materials and connected tools get searched for relevant information before any writing starts.

Basic — Let LouEllen figure it out:

"Here are the application questions for the Smith Foundation. Please draft responses."

Your available data sources get searched — Reference Materials, Google Drive, SharePoint, or whatever you've connected — and relevant reference material turns up without any direction. You don't have to say where to look.

Intermediate — Give specific guidance:

"Draft responses to these questions. Include specific statistics and at least one participant story. Reference our 2025 program evaluation for outcome data."

Advanced — Combine with other features:

"Look through our Google Drive for our last two applications to the Smith Foundation. Use those as a style guide. Then draft this year's application, making sure to highlight our new community garden program."

Editing and Revising

After a draft is generated, you can ask for specific sections to be refined:

  • "Make the second paragraph more concise"
  • "Look through our Google Drive and find that story about the student in our 2024 Riverside Foundation application — the one about overcoming food insecurity. Add something like that to the narrative section."
  • "Rewrite this to emphasize community partnership rather than program expansion"

When edits are proposed, you'll see an inline diff showing what will change. Click Accept all to apply or Reject all to discard. Nothing changes in the document until you do — and proposed edits are saved, so navigating away doesn't lose them.

Proposed edits are saved automatically — if you navigate away and come back, your pending edits will still be there waiting for your review.

Word and Character Counts

Grant applications often have strict limits. Drafts can be measured against them:

  • "How many words is the project narrative section?"
  • "Count the characters in the first three paragraphs"
  • "This section has a 500-word limit. Is it under?"

Counts are verified before drafts are finalized, so you're less likely to run into surprises.

Creating Budgets

LouEllen can generate Excel budget spreadsheets with working formulas, input tabs, and matching fund calculations. Your organization's budget style is learned by searching through your Reference Materials and connected integrations.

"Make me a $50,000 budget for a community gardens program, please."

For the full guide — including how to use matching funds, pull from integrations, and get the formatting right — see Budgets.

Best Practices

  1. Upload reference materials first — Grants come out dramatically better with 100+ pages of context
  2. Teach LouEllen with Memory — Set up standing instructions for your writing preferences
  3. Iterate — Ask for revisions, provide feedback, refine until it sounds like you