Why fundraisers are switching from ChatGPT to Localgiving

If you apply for fundraising at a small UK charity, CIC or community group, you have probably tried ChatGPT to help draft grant applications. We completely understand. It is free, it writes fluently, and it can save an hour or two on the first draft.

But seven specific things separate ChatGPT from Localgiving, and any one of them is enough reason for a fundraiser to switch.

1. ChatGPT does not know which UK funders are open right now

When you ask ChatGPT 'who funds youth sport in South Wales?' it gives you a confident, fluent list. Some of those funders are real. Some closed three years ago. Some only fund projects over £500k. ChatGPT does not check, because ChatGPT does not have access to the live UK funder database.

Localgiving does. Our AI toolkit is wired into the Charity Commission register, 360Giving's grant data (1.47 million grants from 358 active UK funders), and a continuously updated index of open funding rounds. When we tell you a funder is open, they are open. When we tell you they fund youth sport in South Wales under £100k, that is from their last 10 awards, not a guess.

2. ChatGPT does not know your charity

ChatGPT writes a generic grant application that could be anyone's. We know firsthand that there’s an increase in bland, generic applications that do little to really capture the spirit of community impact. To make it yours, you have to paste in your charity's history, your income, your beneficiaries, your impact data, your previous grants. Every time. For every application.

Localgiving pulls your charity's profile from the Charity Commission register, your fundraising history from our own platform, your sector classification, your geographic reach. The AI knows what your charity looks like before you write a single word. Your draft starts as yours.

3. ChatGPT does not know what the funder is looking for

Funders publish their priorities, their preferred language, their evaluation criteria, the kinds of projects they have funded before. ChatGPT cannot read most of that.

Localgiving's AI toolkit reads the funder's last five years of awards, their published guidance, their criteria, and tailors your application to match. We have seen this lift application success rates because the structure and language of the bid speaks to the funder, not to a general audience.

4. ChatGPT can make things up. Funders reject made-up bids.

Large language models hallucinate. They invent statistics, they invent funders, they create quotes from beneficiaries who do not exist. A fundraiser using ChatGPT has to fact-check every single line of every draft, or risk submitting a bid that contains fabricated information. Funders that catch this reject the application and remember the charity.

Localgiving is built on something called a RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) framework. That means our AI is grounded in real funder data and your real charity profile and is explicitly instructed not to fabricate anything it cannot trace back to a source. If we cannot confirm a fact, we do not write it.

5. ChatGPT trains on what you tell it. Your data becomes theirs.

When you paste your charity's beneficiary stories, impact data, financial details and strategic plans into ChatGPT, that information may be used to train future versions of the model. In practice, you have no way to know what happens to your data after you hit send. For trustees, this is a real concern: sensitive information about vulnerable beneficiaries or unpublished strategy should not be leaking into a public AI model.

Localgiving uses enterprise-grade AI models configured with Zero Data Retention (ZDR) settings. None of your data is stored, retained or used to train any model. Your charity's IP stays your charity's IP. Now and forever.

6. ChatGPT costs more for the same job

This sounds counterintuitive because ChatGPT is free at the basic tier. But the moment you try to use it seriously for grant writing, you hit two costs: you either limit how much context you feed it (and the output gets worse), or you pay for the higher-tier API or Team plan to handle longer documents.

Localgiving costs £39 per month. We achieve this by condensing the data we work with into a vector database, deduplicating it, and retrieving only what is relevant to your specific application. Same quality of information, a fraction of the compute cost, and better for the environment too.

7. Funders trust what has been reviewed by a human. Our system insists on it.

ChatGPT will draft your application and you can submit it without ever looking at the output. We know you wouldn't do this, but some hard pressed fundraisers do. Funders are getting good at spotting it, and they reject those applications quickly.

Localgiving's workflow ensures a human-in-the-loop review at every stage. The AI drafts, you review, you edit the bits only you can write (latest impact numbers, specific project detail), then you submit. The bid that lands on the funder's desk truly captures yours work, commitment and community.  That is why funders trust what comes through Localgiving.

We looked at 2,205 charities who pay for Localgiving. 84% had already won at least one grant before joining us. The average grant they win on the platform is 28% larger than the UK sector mean. They were already professionals. Localgiving made them faster, safer, and more accurate.

ChatGPT is a clever generalist. Localgiving is built for one job.

ChatGPT was built to do everything reasonably well. Localgiving was built to help UK charities win the grants they should be winning. That focus shows up in the funder data, the charity profiles, the funder-specific drafting, the anti-hallucination controls, the data privacy, the cost discipline, and the human-in-the-loop workflow.

If you are spending time on grant applications, you should be using a tool built for the job.

£39 a month, cancel anytime, free for the first 14 days. Simple. 

---> Try Localgiving free for 14 days. Cancel anytime.

Localgiving is a leading online fundraising platform and grant delivery partner, focused on supporting small charities, CICs and community organisations. Since 2010, we've helped thousands of groups across the UK raise tens of millions of pounds and make a meaningful impact in their local communities.