Field Notes
Essays, case notes, and product writing on the work of mission-driven organizations.
Field Notes is where Mavenly's team thinks out loud — about grant funding, AI in nonprofit operations, product decisions, and the people doing this work. Updated regularly. Best read with coffee.
Recent field notes.
21 posts · Updated weeklyThe compose problem.
Why generic AI fails at grant writing — and what we learned building a specialized one.
A grant proposal isn't a document. It's a translation problem — converting the work an organization actually does into the language a specific funder uses to evaluate it.
The Mavenly Team · April 24, 2026
What we owe grantmakers .
Foundations are not the enemy. They are the infrastructure.
Nonprofit-tech often treats foundations as adversaries — a friction layer to be optimized around. That framing is wrong on the merits and operationally counterproductive.
The Mavenly Team · April 17, 2026
Notes from 27 design partners .
The five questions every development director asked us — and what their answers revealed.
Before we wrote a line of production code, we sat down with 27 development directors at HBCU-adjacent nonprofits across the Southeast.
The Mavenly Team · April 10, 2026
The three-week draft.
A practical framework for scoping a foundation grant in three weeks, not three months.
Most foundation grant timelines slip because the early scoping work is invisible. A simple framework — origin, alignment, ask, plan — collapses three months into three weeks.
The Mavenly Team · April 3, 2026
On theory of change .
Theory of change is the most misused phrase in the nonprofit world.
Most 'theories of change' submitted to funders are descriptions of activities, not theories. The distinction is the difference between asking funders to trust you and asking them to evaluate you.
The Mavenly Team · March 27, 2026
Building in the open .
Why we're building Mavenly in public — and what that actually means.
'Building in public' is overused. For us it means specific things — sharing roadmaps with customers, publishing security posture before we have to.
The Mavenly Team · March 20, 2026
The renewal trap.
Why renewal grants are easier to win — and harder to use well.
Renewal grants have ~3× the conversion rate of new ones. But the same characteristics that make them easier to win also make them seductive.
The Mavenly Team · March 13, 2026
When AI shouldn't draft.
There are sections of a grant application AI should not write. Here's how we decide.
Compose can draft anything. That doesn't mean it should. Some sections — particularly community context and lived-experience narratives — are areas where AI introduces more risk than benefit.
The Mavenly Team · March 6, 2026
Inside the HBCU portfolio.
A year inside the HBCU Endowment Fund's grant pipeline — what we saw, and what changed.
For 12 months, we shadowed the HBCU Endowment Fund's grant operations. Eighteen funders, $4.2M raised, 73% conversion on submitted applications.
The Mavenly Team · February 27, 2026
The budget narrative .
How to write a budget narrative that actually justifies the budget.
Most budget narratives describe what the money is for. The good ones explain why each line item is the right shape — why this many staff, this much overhead.
The Mavenly Team · February 20, 2026
On declining grants.
When to decline a grant — and how to do it without burning the relationship.
Most nonprofits accept every grant offered. That's how they end up running programs that don't fit their mission. There are good reasons to decline.
The Mavenly Team · February 13, 2026
The capacity problem.
Limited staff capacity is not a staffing problem — it is a sequencing problem.
Almost no small nonprofit has a dedicated researcher, writer, and compliance specialist. The organizations that still win consistently are not the ones that hired three people. They are the ones that stopped doing the work in the wrong order.
The Mavenly Team · September 4, 2026
Finding the right opportunities.
Grant information is scattered on purpose. Here is how to search it without losing your week.
Federal portals, state agencies, foundation 990s, corporate giving pages, and paid databases each hold part of the picture and none hold all of it. The fix is not a better search box — it is a standing system.
The Mavenly Team · August 28, 2026
Reading eligibility correctly.
Most eligibility mistakes are made in the first ten minutes — and discovered in the last ten days.
Eligibility is rarely one criterion. It is five overlapping ones — entity, geography, program, financial, and registration — and organizations usually check only the first two.
The Mavenly Team · August 21, 2026
Reading the funder .
Attractive is not the same as aligned — how to read what a funder is actually buying.
The most common wasted application is one submitted to a funder whose stated priorities the organization matched, and whose actual funding behavior it did not.
The Mavenly Team · August 14, 2026
Taking apart the application .
Complex applications are not hard to write. They are hard to assemble.
A federal application is thirty to sixty discrete deliverables with different owners, formats, and lead times. Treating it as a writing project is the reason it goes badly.
The Mavenly Team · August 7, 2026
Readiness before the ask.
The grant you lose to an expired registration is the cheapest loss to prevent.
Missing policies, stale financials, and lapsed registrations disqualify organizations that would otherwise have won. None of it is difficult work. All of it is work with no deadline attached.
The Mavenly Team · July 31, 2026
A repeatable system .
Every proposal should not be a blank page — building the system underneath the writing.
Needs statement, objectives, work plan, evaluation plan, budget. Five components with known structures that most organizations reinvent from scratch every cycle.
The Mavenly Team · July 24, 2026
Evidence you already have.
You probably have more outcome data than you think — it is just not in a usable form.
Small organizations rarely lack data. They lack a collection habit, a definition of what counts, and a place where the numbers survive staff turnover.
The Mavenly Team · July 17, 2026
Budgets that survive review.
An uncompetitive budget usually is not too expensive — it is unexplained.
Budgets get cut in review by people looking for a defensible reduction. Lines with visible logic survive. Lines without it are the easiest thing in the world to trim.
The Mavenly Team · July 10, 2026
After the award .
Winning the grant starts the harder job — reporting, effort, audits, and amendments.
Compliance failures rarely cost you the current award. They cost the renewal, the next award from the same agency, and occasionally the funds themselves.
The Mavenly Team · July 3, 2026
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