Skip to content

NightShiftAgents for Grant Writing & Nonprofit

Every eligible grant, found the day it posts. Every report deadline, tracked before it costs you the renewal.

Grant work is mostly research, assembly and calendars, done by people who were hired to do the program. NightShiftAgents scans Grants.gov — including forecasts, weeks before a round opens — plus the state agencies and foundations that fund work like yours, every night, against your eligibility profile, backward-plans each deadline into working milestones, and assembles first-draft narratives from your own boilerplate. It researches and drafts. A human writes the final narrative and a human submits. Always.

Night Shift is set up for your industry. Written for an executive director, development director, or independent grant consultant. Runs on your machine, with your accounts.

The problem

The money you lose is not the grant you did not win. It is the one you did not find, and the report you filed late.

  1. 01

    A perfect-fit foundation opened a cycle three weeks ago. You found it four days before the deadline, on a listserv. You wrote it in a weekend and it showed.

  2. 02

    Every application starts by opening the last one and hunting for the paragraph about your service population. The boilerplate exists in eleven documents and none of them agree on the number you served last year.

  3. 03

    You won the grant. Eighteen months later the interim report was due on a Friday nobody had on a calendar. The program officer was kind about it. The renewal conversation was not.

A working day

The same day, before and after.

Before

  1. 7:30 AM

    Inbox. A board member forwarded an RFP. Due in nine days. You do not know yet whether you are eligible.

  2. 9:30 AM

    Start the narrative. Open four old proposals to find the needs-statement paragraph. Three different versions of last year's numbers.

  3. 11:00 AM

    Budget table. The last one is in a spreadsheet with a broken formula. Rebuild it by hand.

  4. 2:00 PM

    Program meeting. Someone mentions the state grant's interim report. Nobody knows the date.

  5. 4:30 PM

    Funder research for a new prospect. Two hours in Candid. One page of notes.

  6. 8:00 PM

    Instrumentl digest arrives. Forty listings. You skim ten, save two, and will not look at them again.

After install

  1. 7:30 AM

    Morning brief. Overnight scan found three new opportunities matched to your profile, scored, with the reason each one matched and the one eligibility question to check. The forwarded RFP is already on the list: eligible, deadline in nine days, milestones drafted.

  2. 9:30 AM

    Open the assembled first draft. Needs statement, organization background and program description pulled from your boilerplate library, each paragraph tagged with its source and the date the number was last verified.

  3. 11:00 AM

    Budget table is built from your template and last year's actuals. Lines you have not confirmed are marked 'confirm', not filled in.

  4. 2:00 PM

    Program meeting. The reporting tracker shows every deadline for every active award, with the interim report in six weeks and a working milestone next Monday.

  5. 4:30 PM

    Funder brief for the new prospect was drafted overnight: giving history, board overlap, typical award size, last three grantees like you, and the source for each fact.

  6. 8:00 PM

    You do not read the digest. The scan will read it at 3 AM and tell you what matters.

Your night shift

The Grant Writing & Nonprofit roster.

Each agent runs on a schedule and leaves a file. Your Agent Improvement Plan picks which ones go live first.
  • Daily new-grant scan

    nightly · 3 AM

    Reads Grants.gov, Instrumentl, Candid and the state and municipal portals you name. Matches each new listing against your eligibility profile — geography, budget size, program area, 501(c)(3) status, prior-award requirements — and scores fit. Writes one line per match with the reason and the open question. Includes forecasted rounds before they post, and throws out anything that charges a fee. Discards the rest and says how many it discarded.

    grant-scan.md
  • Deadline calendar with backward-planned milestones

    on pursue · daily refresh

    For every opportunity you mark 'pursue', builds the working calendar backward from the deadline: letters of support requested, budget confirmed, draft to reviewer, final to ED, submission buffer. Puts the milestones on your Google Calendar as holds.

    deadline-calendar.ics
  • Draft narrative assembly

    on pursue · overnight

    Maps the funder's questions to sections in your boilerplate library and assembles a first draft, paragraph by paragraph, with the source document and the last-verified date on every fact. Marks every place where it had nothing to use. It never writes a number it did not find in your files.

    draft-<funder>-v0.docx
  • Budget-table builder

    on pursue

    Builds the budget in the funder's format from your template and your last approved budget. Personnel lines use your current salary schedule. Anything not in your files is marked 'confirm' and listed at the top.

    budget-<funder>.xlsx
  • Letter-of-inquiry drafting

    on request

    Two-page LOI from your boilerplate, in the funder's stated length and format, with the ask sized to their typical award range. Held in your Drafts.

    loi-<funder>.docx
  • Funder research brief

    on request · overnight

    Giving history from 990s, typical award size, geographic pattern, board overlap with yours, three recent grantees most like you, and the program officer's name if published. Every fact cited to its source.

    funder-brief-<name>.md
  • Reporting-deadline tracker

    daily · 7 AM

    For grants already won: every interim and final report date from the award letter, with a working milestone four weeks out and a reminder two weeks out. This is where most organizations actually lose money, so this agent nags.

    reporting-tracker.xlsx
  • SAM.gov registration watch

    weekly

    Checks your SAM.gov registration every week and warns you at 60, 30 and 14 days before it expires. Renewing is free; it never renews anything for you.

    sam-status.md

What it hands you

The three files that matter most here.

  • Nightly grant scan: matches, scores and the open question on each
  • Reporting tracker for every active award
  • Morning brief with milestones due this week

Previews show the file format with sample rows. They are not a customer's data.

Sits on top of

The software you already run.

No migration. The agents read from these and write files and drafts back to you.
  • Grants.gov
  • Instrumentl
  • Candid / Foundation Directory
  • State and municipal portals
  • Salesforce NPSP
  • Bloomerang
  • Google Drive
  • Google Calendar
  • Simpler.Grants.gov
  • USAspending (past federal awards)
  • State pass-through agencies
  • SAM.gov (registration watch)

Where it looks

The sources it checks every night.

  • Grants.gov and Simpler.Grants.gov for federal opportunities, posted and forecasted.
  • USAspending, to see which programs paid organisations like you in your state, so a round can be predicted before it's posted.
  • The state agencies that re-grant federal money locally.
  • Funders who gave to organisations like yours.
  • Your state, local, community-foundation and corporate programs.
  • Any subscriptions you already pay for.

SAM.gov is where your registration lives — not where grants are posted. We watch the registration, and federal contract set-asides if you want them.

Read this part

What it does not do.

We are scrupulous about this line because overclaiming here would be dishonest and, for you, dangerous.
  • It does not submit anything. Not a proposal, not an LOI, not a report. A human logs in and submits.
  • It does not sign anything or certify anything on your organization's behalf.
  • It does not write the final narrative. It assembles a first draft from your own words and marks the gaps. The argument, the voice and the final numbers are yours.
  • It does not invent a figure. If the number of people served last year is not in your files, the draft says [confirm], and the brief tells you it is missing.
  • It does not register you in SAM.gov, Grants.gov or any portal, and it does not manage credentials.
  • It never shows you a 'grant' that charges a fee.
  • It does not talk to funders. It drafts the email; you send it.

What this replaces

Priced against payroll, not software.

The role
Contract grant writer, per application
NightShiftAgents · Night Shift tier
Monthly cost
$2,500$3,000 to $8,000 per federal or major foundation application, or a retainer around $2,500 a month
$397Founding rate $397 a month for 12 months (standard $497); optional setup call $199
Works nights and weekends
No
Yes. That is the point.
Asks before spending
Usually
Always. Six-line card.

A good contract grant writer writes the final narrative and knows the program officer. The agents do neither. What they do is find every opportunity, build every calendar, assemble every first draft and track every report, which is most of the hours a contract writer bills you for.

Market figures are typical ranges for this role, not a quote. Your Agent Improvement Plan uses your numbers.

The catch

What owners in your industry ask first.

Questions

Frequently asked.

How does it know what we are eligible for?
The intake builds your eligibility profile: legal status, budget size, geography, program areas, populations served, prior federal awards, indirect rate, and anything your board has ruled out. The scan applies those rules. You can edit the profile in your company file at any time and the next scan uses it.
Where does the boilerplate library come from?
During install we read your last several proposals from your Drive, break them into sections, and tag each fact with its source and date. You review the library once. From then on the agents draw from it and tell you when a fact is more than twelve months old.
What if the funder's portal is not one you support?
Many state and municipal portals have no feed. Where we cannot read one automatically, the Agent Improvement Plan says so and we set up a weekly check that reads the page as published. If we cannot read it at all, the plan tells you that too.
Can it track reports for grants we won before we started?
Yes. During install we read the award letters you have on file and build the tracker from their reporting schedules. If a letter is missing the dates, that award is listed with 'schedule unavailable' so you can chase it.
Who is this for: a nonprofit or a consultant with many clients?
Both. A consultant installs one crew per client, each with its own eligibility profile and boilerplate library, and gets one combined morning brief. Pricing for multiple clients is on the pricing page.
We're a consultant who helps small businesses find grants. Does this work for many clients?
Yes. Each client gets their own grant profile — where they're based, what they do, award sizes, what they can't meet — and the nightly scan runs per client. You get one board across all of them, with each client's deadlines and SAM.gov status.

Under 15 minutes of questions. Then your grant writing & nonprofit night shift runs.

You get a written Agent Improvement Plan the same day: which of the agents above, in what order, and what it costs. The industry is already filled in.