001 / SYSTEM DESIGN

GrantOps

A volunteer grants committee went from manual research to pre-vetted, structured leads — then the same system became a repeatable offering for other schools.

RoleNonprofit systems design & buildout
ForPrivate K–8 school (volunteer grants committee)
Year2026
ToolsCustom GPTs · Google Apps Script · Trello

01 — THE PROBLEM

Six volunteers were losing hours to manual grant research with no staff budget to spare.

02 — CONSTRAINTS

What the system had to respect.

01Had to protect volunteers' limited time, not add to it
02No dedicated staff budget to lean on
03Every approval and submission stays a human decision
04Needed a written handoff so onboarding never depends on me being in the room

03 — THE SYSTEM

A workflow people can follow.

01

Vet

One agent checks every grant against a detailed eligibility framework and outputs a structured Trello card.

02

Route

Approved leads move through the pipeline automatically — Apply Now to Drafting in Progress to Review Ready.

03

Draft

A second agent handles drafting, with every human-judgment step staying manual by design.

04

Document

A Google Sheets database behind a key-authenticated Apps Script endpoint keeps infrastructure at zero, with a written handoff guide for volunteer onboarding.

05

Package

Once proven for one school, the same architecture became GrantOps — customized per deployment with matched voice and knowledge files.

04 — DECISIONS

The choices that made it practical.

Decision 01

Protect the time, not just the process.

The system exists to give volunteers back hours, not hand them a new tool to learn.

Decision 02

Humans keep the judgment calls.

Every approval and submission stays manual by design — automation handles the research, not the decision.

Decision 03

Built to repeat, not just to work once.

The same architecture became a flat-fee offering the moment it proved itself for one school.

05 — RESULT

A volunteer grants committee went from manual research to pre-vetted, structured leads — then the same system became a repeatable offering for other schools.

70+Grants vetted
6Volunteers, zero staff budget
ZEROInfrastructure overhead — Sheets and Apps Script

Six volunteers, no staff budget

A six-person volunteer grants committee at a small private K–8 school was losing hours to manual grant research and triage. Busy parents, no dedicated staff, and a process that ate the little time they had.

A two-agent GPT system now handles the work with a clean separation of concerns — one agent vets and routes, one agent drafts — while every approval and submission stays a human decision. The grants committee went from manually researching every opportunity to receiving pre-vetted, structured leads they can act on in thirty minutes or less.

From one school’s fix to a repeatable offering

Small schools buy from people they trust, not off a landing page, and generic AI tools don’t know what makes a specific school fundable. Once the system proved itself, it became GrantOps — the same architecture, meaningfully customized for each deployment: knowledge files, voice matching, the angles that make a specific school fundable.