Frequently Asked Questions

    Everything you might ask before trusting us with your grant program.

    47 answers covering setup, matching, AI drafting, pipeline, pricing, security, and support. If something isn't here, ask us directly.

    Section 01

    Getting started

    Setting up your workspace and seeing value in the first session.

    Mavenly is an AI grant workspace for mission-driven organizations. It brings grant discovery, proposal drafting, pipeline tracking, deadlines, funder relationships, and outcome reporting into one system, so a small team can run a grant program without stitching together spreadsheets, shared drives, and calendar reminders.

    Nonprofits, universities, and other mission-driven organizations applying for grants, plus foundations and grantmakers who review applications and collect grantee reporting. The workspace adapts to whichever side of the table you sit on.

    Most teams are productive in about fifteen minutes. You create an account, describe your organization's mission, focus areas, geography, and budget range during onboarding, and Mavenly immediately begins scoring funders against that profile. Uploading a few past proposals to the content library makes drafting noticeably stronger on day one.

    No. The 14-day guided trial starts without a credit card. It mirrors the Starter plan — 2 users, 10 active applications, 50 funder matches, 25 AI drafts — with previews of the premium tools. You only enter payment details when you choose a plan.

    Yes. Invite teammates from the Team page and assign roles. Seat counts vary by plan: Starter includes 2 seats, Professional 5, Team 15, and Enterprise is unlimited.

    Yes. Upload past proposals, boilerplate, budgets, logic models, and 990s into the content library. Mavenly indexes them so AI drafting reuses your actual language rather than inventing new copy.

    Section 02

    Grant discovery & matching

    How opportunities reach you, and why they were selected.

    The public federal directory is built from the grants.gov opportunity feed, which syncs nightly so newly posted and amended opportunities appear without manual work. Inside the workspace, matching also draws on foundation and private funder profiles.

    Each opportunity is scored against your mission statement, program areas, service geography, organization type, budget size, and prior awards. Every match shows the reasoning behind its score, so you can see exactly why something surfaced instead of trusting an unexplained number.

    Yes. You can dismiss matches, save opportunities to a watchlist, and rate AI output. That feedback narrows what surfaces next and keeps the queue focused on realistic opportunities.

    Yes. Discovery supports filters for deadline window, award size, funder type, and eligibility, and your filter selections persist between sessions so you return to the view you were working in.

    Mavenly flags eligibility signals it can read from the opportunity — applicant type, geography, and stated restrictions — and surfaces them on the match. Final eligibility is always a judgment call you make against the funder's own guidelines.

    Section 03

    AI drafting & proposals

    What the AI writes, and how it stays in your voice.

    Each section is drafted from your content library, the funder's voice profile, and the specific RFP requirements. The result reads like your organization rather than generic AI text, and you edit everything in a full rich-text editor before it goes anywhere.

    Drafting is grounded in the documents and data you provide. Anything the system cannot source from your library is left for you to supply, and every draft is meant to be reviewed by a human before submission. Treat AI output as a strong first draft, never as a finished application.

    Yes. Paste or upload your draft and Mavenly will critique it against the funder's priorities and the RFP's stated criteria, flagging thin evidence, missing requirements, and weak framing.

    The compliance checklist parses the RFP's requirements — page limits, required attachments, mandated sections, formatting rules — and tracks which are satisfied as you write.

    Yes. Proposals export to formatted documents for submission or internal review, and funder reports export as PDF and DOCX.

    Section 04

    Pipeline, deadlines & reporting

    Managing applications after the draft is written.

    Every opportunity moves through Discovery, Drafting, Submitted, and Awarded stages on a board. Stage counts, requested amounts, and upcoming deadlines update in real time as work advances, so the whole team sees the same picture.

    Yes. Mavenly sends deadline reminders and shows a calendar of upcoming submissions and report due dates, plus in-app notifications for what needs attention.

    Mavenly compiles funder reports from your real outcome data. Adjust the reporting period and progress against each grant's outcome targets recalculates automatically, then export the report for the funder.

    Yes. The funder CRM records interactions, stewardship reminders, and program-officer notes so relationship history sits next to the application record instead of in someone's inbox.

    Section 05

    Pricing & billing

    Plans, changes, refunds, and invoices.

    Starter is $49/month, Professional is $299/month, and Team is $799/month, with annual billing discounted. Enterprise pricing is custom. Full plan comparisons are on the pricing page.

    Your workspace becomes read-only: your data, documents, and pipeline all remain intact, but new creation actions pause until you pick a plan. Everything is restored immediately when you subscribe.

    Every plan carries a 14-day money-back guarantee. If Mavenly isn't the right fit, contact us within 14 days of payment for a refund.

    Yes. Manage your subscription from the billing portal inside Settings, where you can change plans, update your payment method, download invoices, and cancel at the end of the current period.

    Annual billing is discounted on every paid tier. For larger institutions and multi-team deployments, contact enterprise@mavenly.ai to discuss pricing.

    Section 06

    Security, privacy & data

    How your grant data is protected and handled.

    No. Mavenly's AI provider commitments include no training on Customer Data and zero data retention, and those commitments are written into the Terms and Privacy Policy rather than being informal assurances.

    Every record is scoped to your workspace with row-level tenant isolation enforced in the database, so one organization's data is never reachable from another's session. Details are on the security page.

    Yes — in transit and at rest. Access to production systems is restricted and audited.

    Not yet. Mavenly publishes its security posture, controls, and sub-processor list openly today, with SOC 2 Type II targeted roughly 18 months after launch. We'd rather state that plainly than imply a certification we don't hold.

    Yes. Our Data Processing Addendum covers GDPR roles, security measures, and sub-processors, and is available to review before you sign up.

    Yes. You can delete documents and records inside the workspace, and request full account deletion at hello@mavenly.ai.

    Section 07

    For foundations & grantmakers

    The grantmaker side of the platform.

    Foundations get reviewer-facing evaluation support that keeps scoring consistent across a review panel, plus tools that turn grantee reporting into portfolio-level impact narratives.

    Yes. Foundation reviewers sign in through a dedicated foundation login scoped to evaluation and impact views rather than the full grantseeker workspace.

    Mavenly checks scoring consistency across reviewers and flags where assessments diverge sharply on the same application, so program staff can resolve differences before a decision.

    Section 08

    Account & support

    Getting help and reaching a person.

    Open Help & Support from the sidebar. It includes a searchable FAQ, a step-by-step getting-started guide, and module-specific walkthroughs.

    Email hello@mavenly.ai for general and support questions, enterprise@mavenly.ai for larger deployments, and press@mavenly.ai for media inquiries. You can also use the contact form.

    Use the reset link on the sign-in page and you'll receive an email to set a new password.

    Yes. Larger organizations can get guided onboarding and migration support — reach out to enterprise@mavenly.ai to arrange it.

    Section 09

    Document Vault & compliance

    Where funder-required documents live, and how they stay current.

    A secure, organization-scoped store for the documents funders ask for — IRS determination letters, Form 990s, audited financials, insurance certificates, board rosters, and governance policies. Files are private to your workspace and organized by a nonprofit taxonomy that ships pre-configured, with custom categories and tags for anything specific to you.

    Yes. On upload, Mavenly identifies the document type and extracts structured fields for common compliance documents — fiscal year, total revenue, program expense ratio, auditor opinion, policy period. Extracted values are shown for review so you can correct anything before it is relied on, and they become searchable across the workspace.

    Every document supports versioning with a Draft, Final, or Superseded status, required approvers, and a full history. Only approved final versions are attached to applications, and external sharing uses tokenized links that expire rather than email attachments.

    Yes. Registrations, certifications, and insurance are tracked against their expiry dates, and role-based alerts go out before a lapse can make an application ineligible. The funder-readiness checklist also shows live gaps against what funders typically require.

    Section 10

    Budgets, outcomes & governance

    Tracking the money, the results, and the record of both.

    Yes. Each award can carry a budget with line items, committed amounts, and actual expenses, with burn-rate and variance signals that show months in advance whether a fund will underspend. Receipts and supporting documentation attach to any expense.

    Yes. Set thresholds that require a written justification, route larger expenses to an owner or admin for approval, and block spend that would exceed a line-item cap. Owners and admins can override a rule, but only with a recorded reason.

    Define output and outcome indicators with units, value types, and targets, then enter period results as the work happens. Funder-required indicators can be locked so their wording and targets cannot drift, and interim or final evaluation reports are generated from the real data in PDF or Word.

    Yes. The Activity Log is append-only and hash-chained, so entries cannot be edited or deleted after the fact. It streams in real time, supports saved views by section, actor, result, and flag status, and exports to CSV for auditors and board committees.

    Yes. Organization Memory has per-section AI access controls, so sensitive governance or personnel context can be excluded from AI reasoning entirely. Admins can also lock EIN, legal name, and the IRS determination date — attempted changes are blocked and written to the Activity Log.

    Still have a question?

    Email hello@mavenly.ai or start a workspace and see how Mavenly handles your actual funders.