Foundation launches AI tool to speed up funders’ financial due diligence

Author Sharlene Gandhi

After 12 months in development, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation has launched a new AI tool to help philanthropic funders speed up financial review processes for the non-profits they are making grants to.

Grant Guardian – which is free to use for philanthropic institutions – provides funders with a risk assessment after non-profits submit their own financial documents.

The tool solves “inconsistent reporting formats, manual data entry, and time-intensive analyses,” the Foundation wrote on its website.

The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation is one of the only foundations to be making grants to projects that use AI for social and community development.

Researchers from Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and Project Evident found that nearly half of funders report using some time of AI in their work.

However, it is not clear what the split is between organizations using free, online tools like ChatGPT, embedded AI functionalities like Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, or custom tools learning from internal data.

When it came to receiving grant applications that had been supported by AI, over half of funders said they did not know whether they had received applications created by generative AI.

This research by Candid also found that two-thirds of funders “haven’t decided whether to accept AI-generated grant applications.”

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  • Sharlene Gandhi is the Future of Good editorial fellow on digital transformation.

    Sharlene has been reporting on responsible business, environmental sustainability and technology in the UK and Canada since 2018. She has worked with various organizations during this time, including the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business at Lancaster University, AIGA Eye on Design, Social Enterprise UK and Nature is a Human Right. Sharlene moved to Toronto in early 2023 to join the Future of Good team, where she has been reporting at the intersections of technology, data and social purpose work. Her reporting has spanned several subject areas, including AI policy, cybersecurity, ethical data collection, and technology partnerships between the private, public and third sectors.

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