FundCore — the AI grants desk for UK charities
Drop in your website and FundCore learns what you do. It builds your case for support, brings you four trusts worth applying to every month, writes the applications from your own evidence, and tracks every submission through to the thank-you. Grants, and nothing else — not a fundraising platform with a grants module. A trusts fundraiser costs £28,000–35,000 a year; this is £500 a month.
Built for UK charities with roughly £500k–£5m income and no dedicated trusts fundraiser — where the CEO or Director is writing the trust applications personally, at night.
The four things it does
Four jobs, in the order the work actually happens. Each one hands finished work to the next, and what comes back at the end makes the next round better. Theo, Iris and Nell are the officers credited for the work inside each stage.
- 1. Your organisation context. Give it your website address and it reads your site along with what is publicly on record about you, then comes back with a profile — what you do, who you help, where you work — for you to correct. Upload the documents that describe you best: pitch decks including their speaker notes, impact reports, strategies, past applications. PDF, PowerPoint, Word or plain text. Anything you correct yourself is locked, and later research will not overwrite your own words. The web is used for what you do, never for how much of it — every figure comes from your own records. Theo, Case & Evidence Officer.
- 2. Your case for support. The ten questions every funder asks, answered once and reused in every application, one case per project. A draft is offered for every question, so you correct a draft rather than face a blank box. Where a figure is missing it emails the person who would actually know — usually the programme lead, not the fundraiser — and chases once. A consultant charges £2,000–5,000 for this work; it is included. Theo.
- 3. Finding grants, and filling them in. One action: find four trusts for this month. Matching runs on what you do, who you help and where you work — geography being the filter that rules out most of a national list, since most UK trusts fund one area only. Your own watchlist and lapsed funders come first, then 360Giving and the Charity Commission register. Each of the four arrives with the reasoning shown and any eligibility concerns flagged; the same four stay put all month, and earlier months are never repeated. Then you paste in that funder's own form — copied from their portal or their Word document — and your case is answered into it: their questions in their sections and their wording, live word counts against their limits, the attachment checklist, and a source reference under every figure. There is no API to read a UK trust's questions out of, so it works in the direction that exists. Live figures from your CRM are an enhancement inside a draft, not a setup step before you can start. Iris, Grants Officer.
- 4. Tracking submissions. Everything after “sent”, which is where applications actually get lost: the acknowledgement chase when a funder has gone quiet, the thank-you and reporting schedule on an award, and on a decline the request for feedback that almost nobody sends. Plus the reports a funder is owed once they have said yes. One weekly sitting, approve-all. Nell, Submissions Officer.
The loop is the product. What was won, what was declined, what the funder said and what the programme actually delivered all flow back into your evidence library, so your third grant cycle is measurably better than your first. Tools that write from a blank page every time cannot do that.
One case, every funder's version of it
The Package is yours and it grows: the case for support, the cited evidence library, a structured budget, and the boilerplate every UK application asks for anyway — charity number, trustees, filed accounts, safeguarding and financial policies.
The Application is a render of that Package against one funder's questions, word limits, eligibility rules and attachment list. Not a new document — a projection of the one you already own.
What personalises the writing
Three things you bring that no database holds. First, your own documents — the pitch deck, the impact report, the strategy. A deck's speaker notes are often the most useful thing in it, because that is where the argument lives rather than the headline. Second, your past applications: the only sample of how your organisation writes when it is asking for money, ranked so the ones that were funded are imitated first — voice only, never their figures, which are out of date the moment they are filed. You can mark which ones won at any time, not just when you upload them, because nobody knows the outcome on the day they file a bid. Third, your funder watchlist: the trusts you already know, including the ones that funded you before your CRM existed. Those are checked before anything found automatically.
Why you can put your name to it
- Nothing leaves without a human. Research, drafting and summarising never leave the building. Sending, CRM write-back and report submissions all queue for approval. Deleting anything cannot be automated at all.
- Every claim shows its working. Each figure carries a source reference, including honest staff-reported provenance. Gaps are reported, never invented, and a funder can be shown where any number came from.
- We never send from your mailbox. The Gmail and Microsoft 365 connections are read-only. Approved emails leave from your own verified domain, with your signature and your reply-to.
- No external wealth screening, ever. The ICO fined eleven UK charities for it in 2017 and the sector remembers. CRM writes are activities plus a narrow allow-list, on approval only. Your data is not training data and is not sold.
Pricing
One product, one price. No tiers, no per-seat maths, and nothing metered by the word. No setup fee. 12-month minimum term, or annual in advance. One published fair-use limit: four new applications a month, rolling over, up to 48 a year — redrafting one you have already started is unlimited.
- FundCore — £500/month, or £5,500/year with one month free.
- Everything included: organisation context and document upload, your case for support, four matched trusts a month, application drafting, submission tracking to the thank-you, Salesforce, NPSP or Beacon data (or CSV from anything else), the approval queue with source citations, overnight runs, and an outcome ledger of what was applied for and what was won.
- What you keep: any application's answers download as a file with their sources attached, and the whole tracker downloads as a spreadsheet — including on a cancelled account.
- Sales framing worth knowing: one won £10,000 grant pays for the best part of two years.
- Founding partners: three months free in exchange for weekly feedback, a case study and a logo. That is an exchange, not a discount — the list price never moves.
Above roughly £300 a month you are out of self-serve territory, so the front door is a conversation rather than a card form — and the harvest needs that conversation anyway.
Frequently asked questions
- Does it actually submit the application?
- No. UK trusts run on portals, PDFs and email with no API to submit against — and none to read their questions out of either, so you paste their form in and it is answered into their wording and their word limits. You get a per-funder answer sheet ready to paste back or download as a file; you submit, and Nell owns the six months of silence afterwards.
- What if we don't have a case for support?
- Most charities this size don't, which is why building one comes second — after it has read your website and your documents, so it drafts what it can evidence before asking you anything.
- How does it know anything about our charity on day one?
- You give it your website address. It reads your site and the public record, proposes a profile for you to correct, and that is enough to start matching trusts. Then you upload the documents that describe you best.
- How does it find trusts?
- One action: find four trusts for this month, matched on what you do, who you help and where you work. Your own watchlist and lapsed funders first, then 360Giving and the Charity Commission register. Reasoning shown on each, previous months never repeated.
- Will it send anything without me?
- No. Everything outward-facing waits in your approval queue with its sources attached.
- How does email sending work?
- From your own verified sending domain, added with a few DNS records at onboarding. The mailbox connection itself stays read-only.
- Which systems do you connect to?
- Salesforce including NPSP, and Beacon, plus CSV and Excel import from any other CRM. Read-only Gmail and Microsoft 365, Google Drive and SharePoint. Direct file upload for PDF, PowerPoint, Word and text. And 360Giving and the Charity Commission register for discovery.
- Is our data secure?
- Encrypted in transit and at rest, never sold, never used to train AI models. Larger organisations can bring their own model provider key.
Getting started
Start with a call: thirty minutes on which programme you are raising for and which trusts are already in play. If it isn't a fit, we will say so on the call.
Book a call: support@fundcore.org