Plinth for grantmakers

Every grant, from first form to final report

Plinth runs the application form, the due diligence, the assessment, the agreement, the payment and the monitoring. AI does the first read of every document and register, and shows the reasons and sources behind each judgement, so your team spends its time on the decisions.

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Used by

  • Point North
  • Steve Morgan Foundation
  • Rank Foundation
  • Lincolnshire Community Foundation
  • Souter Charitable Trust
  • Young Camden Foundation

Ask Pippin

Questions people ask us first

Pippin is our AI assistant. It can get things wrong, so check anything important with our team.

What's in Plinth for grantmakers

  1. 01

    Applications

  2. 02

    Due diligence and assessment

  3. 03

    Awards and payments

  4. 04

    Monitoring and impact

01

Applications

Forms that screen out ineligible applicants before anyone on your team has to read them.

Eligibility and funding portals

Only eligible applications reach your assessors.

  • Screen with rules, with AI reading answers against your criteria, or both.
  • Restrict a fund to a radius, a boundary, a ward or local authority, or an area drawn on a map.
  • Require a previous grant from another of your funds.
  • Put several funds behind one funding portal. Applicants answer a short screening form and are sent to the fund that fits, or told that none does.
  • Duplicate applications are flagged by organisation name and registration number.
I love the form! It's simple and effective. And as a fundraiser I am familiar with lots of different formats, this is way the best I have come across.

Alice Margey

Grants and Trusts Fundraiser, Yellow Submarine, applying to a funder on Plinth

Application forms

Build the form you want, in stages if you need them.

More on application forms
  • Choose from 26 question types, including uploads, tables for budgets and a Charity Commission lookup that fills in the organisation's details.
  • Or upload your guidelines or an old spreadsheet and AI drafts the form for you to edit.
  • Run several stages, such as an expression of interest then a full application, each with its own dates, assessment form and emails.
  • Applicants keep every application and progress report in one account.

02

Due diligence and assessment

AI reads every document and checks every register. Assessors start from a cited draft.

AI due diligence

Registry data and document checks on every applicant, before anyone opens the application.

  • Registry data is pulled for each applicant: the Charity Commission (trustees, income history and flags such as insolvency or an interim manager), Companies House, OSCR and the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland.
  • Each uploaded document is checked by a prompt written for its type. Accounts are read for reliance on a single income source, deficits, reserves, balances that don't carry forward and payments to trustees.
  • Anything that matches your list of what you won't fund is raised as a high-severity issue.
  • An optional deeper check searches the web, screens sanctions lists and looks up past grants on 360Giving, then rates seven areas from governance to safeguarding, with the source behind each rating, for your team to review.
  • Reputation checks look for fraud, regulatory action and adverse press, and list every source they read.
More on AI grant management
Plinth has been genuinely transformational. It has dramatically improved the speed and efficiency of our assessments without sacrificing quality. A key example is that a single fund manager can now complete all assessments for their programme, ensuring consistency and maintaining high standards.

Sharon Gollan

Head of Grants, Point North Community Foundation

Scoring and panels

Scorecards drafted for your assessors, with the reasoning shown.

  • Pippin drafts an answer to each scorecard question, with its reasons and quotes from the application that support them.
  • Invite external assessors by email, assign applications in bulk or at random, and hide AI drafts from them if you want independent scores.
  • See score totals by section and by assessor, and send clarification requests that reopen an application for the applicant to edit.
  • Share a read-only panel page showing the applications you choose.

03

Awards and payments

From decision to money in the bank, with every step logged.

Payments and fund balances

Know what is committed, paid and returned on every fund.

  • Each fund tracks its total, awarded, paid and returned amounts.
  • Set payment schedules, with conditions such as a monitoring report being received.
  • Export a payment run as a CSV for your bank, or push it to Xero as bills.
  • AI checks an uploaded bank statement against the bank details the applicant gave, and reconciles payments against your bank or accounting export.
  • Choose which staff can mark a payment as paid.
For the first time, we've been able to standardise the recommendation reports we present to trustees.

Paul O'Neill

Development Director, Steve Morgan Foundation

Agreements and letters

Your own templates, filled in and signed online.

  • Upload your Word templates. Placeholders are detected, and letters are generated as Word or PDF, one at a time or in bulk.
  • AI drafts acceptance, rejection and feedback letters from instructions you set for each fund.
  • Grant agreements are signed online with as many grantee and funder signatures as you need, and you can see when the grantee first opened theirs.

04

Monitoring and impact

Reports that come in on time and get read.

Monitoring

Every return read against your checks, and the whole portfolio on one page.

  • Set report deadlines per grant or in bulk, with reminders before each is due and a calendar feed of what is coming up.
  • AI reads each return against your checks (by default: budget on track, delivery on track, and risks and safeguarding) and marks each one pass, concern or fail. Your overrides are kept.
  • A trustee summary shows every grant on one page as a traffic-light grid.
  • Grantees who run their services on Plinth draft their reports from the registers and surveys they already keep.
More on monitoring
Plinth has revolutionised our data management. It allows us to create bespoke reports for donors, incorporating the specific data they are interested in.

Sharon Gollan

Head of Grants, Point North Community Foundation

Impact reports

Reports for trustees and donors built from your own grant data.

  • Build an impact report from applications, monitoring returns and payments, with Pippin researching and drafting.
  • Export to PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel or a social media carousel.
  • Export your grants in the 360Giving format for publishing.

Donor funds

For community foundations managing funds on behalf of donors.

  • Hold endowment and current funds with balances, fees and statements.
  • Fund a programme from several donor funds, split award by award.
  • AI shortlists live applications that fit a donor's themes, places and audiences.
  • Donors sign in to see their funds and the impact reports from what they paid for.

Integrations and security

Works with the systems you already have, under the controls your auditors expect.

  • Two-way sync with Salesforce, import from Blackbaud Grantmaking, and payments to Xero.
  • SAML single sign-on and two-factor authentication.
  • Every export of sensitive data is logged, and grant records keep their version history.
  • A public API for funds, applications and payments.
  • AI models run in Google Cloud's London and Belgium regions.
More on integrations
The onboarding experience was exceptional. Tom and the Plinth team were highly engaged, responsive, and open to feedback. … In over two decades in the sector, it's one of the most positive onboarding experiences I've had.

Paul O'Neill

Development Director, Steve Morgan Foundation

Case studies

All case studies

Guides

See it working with your own data.

Priced by how much you give out each year, from £7,500 a year for up to £1m. See pricing

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