As featured in
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£240,000
Biggest grant won using Raiser so far
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£0
What it costs your charity. Now and always.
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Raiser
Built by fundraisers, for fundraisers
Let's be straight with you about AI bid writing.
There are a lot of tools out there promising to write your grant applications for you. Some of them are expensive. Some are cheap and cheerful. Most of them produce the same vaguely impressive, completely hollow output — because they don't know anything about your charity. They know how grant applications tend to sound. That's not the same thing.
AI bid writing has also made the whole system worse in a specific way: funders are now drowning in more applications, generated faster, that are harder to distinguish from each other. Some have closed their doors entirely. The volume is up. The quality is down.
Here's what we actually think: we've AI-ed the wrong thing. Making grant applications faster to write doesn't fix grant applications. It just means funders receive more of them — generated faster, harder to tell apart, and increasingly assessed by AI on the other side. Both ends of the same broken system investing in opposite ends of the same broken process. The real answer is to replace it, not automate it.
We wrote about this properly in Fundraising Magazine — you can read it here →.
But here's the honest reality: the system hasn't been replaced yet. Grant application forms still exist. Deadlines still arrive on Tuesday morning. Small charities still need to get bids out the door — without a bid writer on staff, without a freelancer budget, and without weeks to spend on it.
So we built the best bid writer in the sector — and made it free. Because one day you won't need it. That's kind of the whole point.
A bid writer that actually knows your charity.
Generic AI tools know how grant applications are supposed to sound. Raiser's bid writer knows you.
Every application is drafted using your Impact Story™ — the living record of your charity's work, people, projects, outcomes, and evidence that you build and update inside Raiser. When a question asks you to describe your impact on young people's mental health, the bid writer doesn't improvise. It draws on what you've actually recorded: the sessions you've run, the feedback you've gathered, the outcomes you've tracked.
The result reads like your charity wrote it — because in the most important sense, it did.
Bid writer — grant question and draft answer from your Impact Story™ (coming soon)
The more you put into Raiser, the better your bids get.
This is the part that makes Raiser different from every other bid writing tool on the market.
Every piece of information you add to your Impact Story™ makes future bids better. Not in a vague, theoretical way — in a direct, concrete way. A quote from a beneficiary, logged today. A session that ran last week with twelve attendees. A report you filed last month. An outcome you tracked this morning.
The more your Impact Story™ reflects the living reality of your work, the more accurately and compellingly the bid writer can answer a funder's questions. You're not feeding it data just to keep it happy. You're building the record of your impact that will serve you in every funding conversation, report, and relationship you'll ever have.
Build your Impact Story™ once. Let it work for you every time.
What the bid writer actually gives you.
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Drafts tailored to each funder's questions.
Paste in the question. The bid writer drafts a response grounded in your Impact Story™ — your language, your evidence, your voice.
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Answers that sound like you.
Because it knows your charity, the output doesn't read like a generic grant application. It reads like a charity that knows what it's doing and why it matters.
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You're always in control.
The bid writer produces a draft. You review it, edit it, and decide what goes in. No application goes anywhere without you reading it. Think of it as a very well-briefed colleague who does the first draft, not an autopilot.
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One click to the form, not one click to submit.
We're not building a tool that submits applications for you. The bid writer helps you write — because your name is on it, and you should stand behind every word.
Bid writer interface — draft, edit, and review before you submit (coming soon)
We're building the world where you won't need this.
While you're using our bid writer to get applications out the door, we're also building something that makes the whole process unnecessary: a world where funders come to your Impact Story™, rather than you going to their application form.
As more funders join Raiser, more will be able to find and approach charities directly — based on verified impact evidence, not polished applications. The bid writer is a bridge to that world. It helps you survive the current system while we replace it.
Every charity that builds a rich Impact Story™ on Raiser is helping make that future arrive faster. The data builds up. The common language for impact gets richer. Funders start to trust it.
The grant application is the hand loom. We're building the power loom. In the meantime, we're making the hand loom as good as it can possibly be — and giving it away for free.
Charities already winning funding with Raiser
£5,000
Raised from a local funder
“I didn't think I could get a bid in on time, but Raiser made it possible. Having all of our previous material in one place, plus the fundraising expertise baked in, meant we could quickly and simply put our request to the funder — and it worked!”
Mark Hornsey, Co-Artistic Director, Babbling Vagabonds
£240,000
Core grant over two years
“We're now seeing a massive increase in our capacity to win funding. We're celebrating a big win recently — a £240,000 core grant award over 2 years, written using the Raiser approach.”
Simon Wallwork, CEO, Buxton Crescent Heritage Trust
£10,000
National Lottery Heritage Fund
“We used Raiser to help bring together the school, the church, and the PTA for a project marking the school's 150th anniversary. We ended up securing £10,000 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.”
PTA Member (name changed for privacy), Primary School PTA
Even the funders think the old way is broken.
“As a trust-based funder and champion of grassroots and small charities, I feel frustrated by the funder-fuelled norms of application processes and impact reporting. Raiser is a much needed leveller and has the potential to reform an inequitable system that gets in the way of facilitating brilliant, impactful work.”
Kate Symondson
The Symondson Foundation
The sector's best free bid writer. Actually free.
Other grant writing tools charge hundreds of pounds a year. Some charge per application. Raiser's bid writer is completely free — for every charity, forever.
We can do this because funders pay for the platform, not charities. Our business model means our incentives are aligned with yours: we do well when charities raise more money. Making you pay for bid writing would be exactly the wrong thing.
Raiser is completely free for charities. No trial. No card. No small print.
Here's what you get, free, from day one:
- Bid writer powered by your Impact Story™
- Unlimited draft applications
- Your full Impact Story™ — unlimited impact cards, projects, outcomes
- Grant pipeline and deadline tracking
- Access to the community funder database
- Updates and improvements as we build them
Questions we get a lot
How is this different from just using ChatGPT?
ChatGPT knows how grant applications sound. Raiser's bid writer knows your charity — your projects, your outcomes, your beneficiary evidence, your language. The output isn't generic. It's grounded in who you actually are. The better your Impact Story™, the bigger the difference.
Do I have to review everything before it's submitted?
Yes — and that's intentional. The bid writer drafts. You review, edit, and decide what goes in. Your name is on every application and you should stand behind every word.
What if my Impact Story™ is just getting started — will it still be useful?
Yes, even with a basic Impact Story™ the bid writer has more to work with than a blank page. As you add more — impact cards, project details, outcome evidence — it gets significantly better. Starting now means your bids six months from now will be noticeably stronger.
Is this actually AI? I'm a bit wary of AI tools.
Yes, it uses AI — but not in the way most AI tools do. It's not generating content from nothing and hoping for the best. It's drawing on specific, structured information you've provided about your charity. You're always in control of what goes in and what gets submitted.
Will funders be able to tell it's AI-written?
Because it's drawing on your specific Impact Story™ data rather than pattern-matching on generic grant applications, the output reads like your charity — not like a template. That said, we'd always encourage you to read and edit every draft before submitting. The bid writer is a starting point, not a finished product.
Is this actually free? What's the catch?
No catch. Raiser is free for charities because we believe the burden of fundraising admin should shift off your shoulders. We're paid by the funders using our platform to find and fund high impact causes like yours!
For more on how we approach AI, see our building philosophy →.
Still have questions? Email us at hello@raiser.uk — we actually reply.
Get the next bid out the door. Then help us make it the last one.
Create your free account, start building your Impact Story™, and use the bid writer to get your next application done — faster, and better than starting from scratch.
And as you do, you're building the record of your impact that will matter long after the application form is gone.