Is your charity invisible to funders? The rise of proactive grantmaking and what it means for you

Open calls are getting more competitive. Success rates are falling. And a quieter shift is underway in how some funders find the organisations they want to support. Many charities are not yet prepared for what that means.

For most of the last thirty years, the grantmaking process has largely worked in one direction: funders publish a call, organisations apply, panels decide. That model is under pressure. Not just because of rising application volumes or shrinking budgets, but because the information environment that made it necessary has fundamentally changed.

A growing number of funders, particularly larger trusts and foundations with programme staff, are now beginning to identify organisations proactively, alongside open calls. Rather than waiting to see who applies, they research the field, build a picture of who is doing relevant work and approach organisations directly. It’s a more relational model and in principle a better one. But it depends on something many small and medium-sized charities still struggle with: being easy to find and easy to understand from the outside.

Not every funder is using AI tools in a formal way. But prospect research is becoming faster, more digital and more data-led, and in some cases AI-assisted. A programme officer or grant adviser uses digital tools to scan public registers, open grant datasets and organisational websites, assembling a briefing on potential grantees in minutes rather than days. The AI isn’t making funding decisions. It’s helping a human research organise, summarise and compare public information at speed. Charities whose public information is clear, consistent and verifiable are more likely to be identified early and taken seriously.

This is the gap we are seeing in practice. Charities with strong track records and genuinely compelling work are being missed. Not because their work is weak, but because their public presence is inconsistent, incomplete or structured in ways that make them difficult to match to funder priorities. The good news is that this is entirely fixable and very little of it require technical expertise.

Digital visability: a shift in the sector

This isn’t happening in a vacuum. The wider conversation about AI and digital visibility is already live in the UK charity sector and it’s accelerating. CharityComms, for example, has written about “The Great Decoupling”: the growing separation between search engine impressions and actual website clicks as AI-generated summaries increasingly answer users’ questions without them ever visiting a charity’s site. The implication is clear. If your information isn’t clear for AI to read and cite, you’re becoming less visible even when people are searching for exactly what you do.

The Directory of Social Change has made a similar point, arguing that GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is not a technical trick, so much as a reward for clarity, relevance and usefulness. The shift from traditional SEO, optimising for search engines, to GEO or AEO, optimising for AI-powered discovery tools, is not just about marketing. It is about whether your organisation communicates in a way that digital tools, as well as human readers, can understand and trust.

What has received much less attention in this conversation is the specific relevance to grant funding. The question of how charities can ensure they are visible not just to donors or service users, but to the programme officers, advisers and trustees who are increasingly using AI tools to map the landscape before they make a call. That is the gap this piece is trying to address.

What funder AI is actually looking for

Think of it as a diligent research assistant: able to scan official registers, open datasets and your website in seconds, then assemble a briefing for a human decision maker. Its role is not to decide, but to help a grant officer, adviser or trustee assess the field more quickly. In practice, that means it is likely to look at questions such as these:

Who you are. Charity Commission register data often provides the starting point: your legal name, registration number, trustees, filed accounts and areas of operation. If your website says one thing and the register says another, that inconsistency becomes a red flag before anyone has read a word of your work.
Who already funds you. Many UK funders publish awards to the 360Giving open data standard, which means funding history is publicly visible via GrantNav and other such databases. Existing funder relationships are a strong credibility signal but only if they’re visible. If you’ve received a grant from a 360Giving publisher, that relationship is already part of the public record and part of what an AI tool will find when it looks you up.
Where you work. Geography matters enormously to place-based funds. If your geographic footprint isn’t clearly stated, you may simply not appear when a funder searches for organisations working in your area.
What outcomes you deliver. Funders are increasingly looking for clear, consistent outcome data that reflects the ‘What Works’ approach to evidence. This doesn’t mean a randomised controlled trial. It means being able to state what changes for whom and what evidence you have to support that claim.
Whether you are easy to trust. Safeguarding policies, EDI commitments, financial summaries, trustee details are the basics of due diligence. If they are hard to find, incomplete or out of date, the process slows down and confidence drops.

What you can do about it

None of this requires a data science team. It requires clarity, consistency and a small amount of structured effort. Here are some of the practical steps we recommend:

1. Get your identity right across all platforms. Your registered charity number should appear in your website footer and ‘About us’ page in the exact format that search and AI tools expect (“Registered charity: GB-CHC-123456” for England and Wales, “SC0####” for Scotland) with a link to your official registry page. Use the same organisation name consistently across your website, register entries, directory listings and social profiles. Consistency makes it easier for both people and digital tools to match your organisation accurately.
2. Build a simple Impact and Learning page. State three outcomes you track, the indicator for each and your most recent results. Add a short note on what you changed and why. This mirrors the evidence approach funders value and is far more useful, to both humans and AI tools, than an annual Impact Report buried in a PDF.
3. Show your geographic footprint clearly. List the boroughs, postcodes or regions where you deliver work, name local partners and mention any presence in local service directories. If your local CVS or council uses the Open Referral UK standard for service directories, ask to be included.
4. Make your grants history visible. If you’ve received awards from funders who publish to the 360Giving standard, consider linking to your GrantNav profile or referencing those grants clearly on your website. Previous funding is not proof of quality, but it is a useful signal when a funder is building an initial picture of your work.
5. Keep your due diligence information current and accessible. Check that your Charity Commission or OSCR entry matches your website on trustees, objects and contact details. Publish brief, dated summaries of your safeguarding, EDI and financial position somewhere easy to find. These are often the materials that shape early confidence with a funder.
6. Create a small public data room. A single page, perhaps under /about/data or a similar heading, can bring together your registry entry, latest accounts, a one-page budget summary, your outcomes information and a named contact. If it is clear, current and internally consistent, that one page can materially improve how quickly a funder understands and trusts your organisation.

A note on language

You don’t need clever optimisation. You need clarity. Put amounts, locations, people served and timeframes in plain English, with numbers that reconcile with your annual report, website and any grant applications. Avoid jargon. Short sentences with dates and numbers serve both human reviewers and AI tools far better than elegant prose that say very little.

The wider shift in digital discovery is real, but the practical implication for charities is simple: organisations that present clear, consistent and verifiable public information will be easier to find, easier to understand and easier to back. In a more proactive funding environment, that matters.

How Craigmyle can help

For many charities, the issue is not lack of substance but lack of visibility. The task is not to reinvent the organisation. It is to make the strengths already present easier for others to see.

At Craigmyle, we often find that charities are doing stronger work than their public presence suggests. The gap between what an organisation does and what a funder can quickly discover about it is often significant, but also relatively straightforward to close.

We support charities with practical work in this area, including website and register audits, outcomes frameworks, GrantNav trail reviews and trustee briefings on how AI may be affecting grant prospecting and due diligence. If you would like to understand where your organisation currently stands, and what is worth prioritising first, a short conversation is usually the right place to start.
Get in touch with us at first@craigmyle.org.uk or call 01582 762441 to arrange a free 20 minute call