In Great Grants, a program is a reusable description of a specific initiative your organization runs — a youth-mentoring program, a community food pantry, a job-training course. Programs are where the substance of your grant applications lives. When the AI drafts an application for you, it draws directly on the program you link to it: the summary, the documents, the people served, the location. A rich program record produces a specific, compelling first draft. A thin one produces a generic draft you’ll have to rewrite.

Time invested in a program record pays off on every application that follows. Write a summary that covers need, activities, population, outcomes, and credibility; load it with your best past and future documents; quantify who you serve and where. Do it once, well, and every first draft Great Grants writes for you starts from your strongest material.

Why programs matter so much

Grant applications ask, over and over, some version of the same questions: What do you do? Who do you serve? What results do you get? What will the money fund? Funders don’t award grants to organizations in the abstract — they fund specific work.

Great Grants mirrors this reality. Your Organization Profile covers the organizational basics (legal info, mission, focus areas, financials), and your programs carry the project-level detail that answers most application questions. When you start an application, you link a program to it, and the AI uses that program’s detail to fill in the application’s sections and questions. The quality equation is simple: detail in, quality out.

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AI Draft — an auto-generated starting point

For brand-new organizations, Great Grants can generate a starting program automatically from information you've already provided — your website, your Focus Areas, and any Form 990 or past-grant document uploaded during onboarding — without you doing anything extra. This appears as an AI Draft: an unpublished, clearly-labeled program (per-field purple "AI Draft" badges) that only you can see, sitting in a "Complete your AI drafted Program" review screen. You can accept and publish it as-is, edit any field first, or discard it if it's not useful. It never counts toward your published programs, is never used to draft applications, and is never visible outside your organization until you publish it. Great Grants only ever offers you one of these, and only if you haven't created a program yet.

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Two ways to start a program

Great Grants gives you two ways to create a program — pick whichever fits what you have on hand.

Create from Document Fast Track. If you already have a grant proposal, annual report, program brochure, strategic plan, or IRS Form 990, upload it and let AI do the first pass.

1. Click My Programs‍
2. Choose Create Program from Document Fast Track‍
3. Upload a PDF, DOC, or DOCX (up to 50MB), or a JPG, PNG (up to 25 MB) and Great Grants extracts what it can: title, summary, geographic focus, duration, budget, people served, partnerships, point of contact. For multi-page image documents, select or drop all images at once.
4. Review every field, fill in anything left blank, and click Publish Program; that's the moment the program is actually created and the source document is attached to it.

Create Manually. Prefer to build the record yourself, step by step? Choose Create Program Manually and work through the guided form described below.

1. Click My Programs in the left navigation.
2. Click Create New Program.
3. Complete the program fields (detailed below).
4. Click Save.

Both paths land you at the same program record with the same fields; Fast Track just gives you a head start. You can always edit any field afterward, whichever way you started.

You can return and enrich a program any time — and you should, as your program evolves, produces results, or generates new documents. At this time, you cannot regenerate an existing application after a program record is updated or modified. Changes to programs do not automatically appear in linked applications. Applications need to be archived first, and then generated from that Opportunity Details page (Start AI Draft).

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What to put in each field

Program Title

Use the name the program actually goes by, stated plainly: “Fresh Start Reentry Mentoring,” “Eastside Community Food Pantry.” If the name alone doesn’t convey what the program does, favor clarity over branding — a reviewer (and the AI) should understand the work from the title and first sentence of the summary together.

Program Summary

This is the single highest-leverage field in Great Grants. Everything the AI writes about this program starts here. A strong summary covers, in a few paragraphs:

• The need: What specific, substantiated problem or gap in services does this program address? Ground it in your community’s reality — funders fund projects that address a real and pressing need, not activities in search of a purpose.
• The work: What does the program actually do, concretely? Describe activities, frequency, and duration — “weekly one-to-one mentoring sessions for 12 months,” not “we support youth.”
• Who it serves: The population, described the way funders describe it. Precise beats vague: “reentry services for formerly incarcerated adults in underserved neighborhoods” will always outperform “we serve our community.”
• The outcomes: What changes because this program exists? Include measurable results if you have them — participants served, completion rates, changes in knowledge, attitude, or behavior. Funders think of outcomes as their return on investment.
• What makes it credible: Staffing, partnerships, years in operation, an evidence-based model — whatever demonstrates you can deliver.

Language matters here. Terms that resonate with funders — evidence-based (backed by research), trauma-informed (sensitive to lived experience), community-based (rooted where people are), underserved populations (serving those most in need) — belong in your summary when they’re true of your work. Use them precisely, not decoratively: a claim like “innovative” or “transformative” without supporting detail actively weakens applications.

Past Documents

Upload prior reports, past grant applications, evaluations, brochures — anything that describes the program as it has actually operated. These documents give the AI (and your teammates) source material with real numbers, real stories, and your organization’s own voice. Past applications are especially valuable: they contain your best previous answers to the very questions new applications will ask.

Future Planning Documents

Upload plans, budgets, logic models, and proposals for what’s ahead. Applications constantly ask forward-looking questions — goals, timelines, sustainability plans, budgets — and this is where the AI finds those answers. If you have a program budget for the coming year, include it.

People Served

Record who benefits and roughly how many. Be as specific as your data allows: “approximately 250 K-8 students in the Riverside school district annually” gives the AI a concrete figure to use everywhere an application asks about reach.

Location

Where the program operates. Many grants are geographically restricted, and applications nearly always ask about service area — the specific neighborhoods, cities, or counties, not just your headquarters address.

Before and after: a summary upgrade

Weak: “Our mentoring program helps at-risk youth in our community reach their potential.”

Strong: “Fresh Start pairs 75 middle-school students in the Riverside district — most referred by school counselors for chronic absenteeism — with trained adult mentors for weekly one-to-one sessions across the school year. Since 2022, 82% of participants have improved attendance, and 9 in 10 families report stronger school engagement. The program is staffed by two coordinators and 40 screened volunteer mentors, in partnership with Riverside ISD.”

Same program — but the second version gives the AI (and any funder) a need, a number, a method, an outcome, and a partnership to work with.

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A quality test: could a stranger write your grant application?

Here’s the standard to aim for. Imagine handing your program record to a skilled grant writer who has never heard of your organization. Could they answer these questions from your record alone?

1. What problem does this program address, and how do you know it’s real?
2. What exactly does the program do, and on what schedule?
3. Who is served, how many, and where?
4. What outcomes has it produced, and how are they measured?
5. What would new funding pay for?
6. Why is your organization the right one to run it?

If the answer to any of these is “they’d have to ask someone,” that detail belongs in your program record. That’s precisely the position the AI is in — it can only be as specific as what you’ve given it.

Keep programs current

A program record is a living asset, not a one-time form. Build these habits:

• After every reporting cycle, add the latest outcomes data and reports to Past Documents.
• When plans change — new sites, expanded capacity, revised budgets — update the summary and Future Planning Documents.
• After every submitted application, consider whether new language you wrote belongs back in the program summary for next time.

Teams that maintain their program records find that each application gets faster and better, because the platform is drawing on an ever-richer source.

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The Program Health Check

Great Grants continuously checks every program against an eight-point completeness rubric and surfaces what's missing in three places, so you're never surprised by a thin AI draft:

1. On the program page itself. If any rubric item is unmet, an amber banner appears above the program fields, listing exactly what to add — in priority order.
2. When you publish. If you try to publish a program with gaps, a dialog lists what's missing and gives you the choice to Publish Program Anyway or Continue Editing Program. This is a soft check, not a hard block — the only hard requirements are Title, Description, and at least one Geographic Focus area.
3. When you start an application. If you select a program with gaps in the Add Programs step, you'll see a warning naming the weak sections before you proceed, with the option to Improve Program Details or Continue Without Changes.

The eight things the check looks for: at least one Geographic Focus area, at least one Partnership, a substantive Description (not just long — genuinely specific), at least two content-rich supporting documents, a Program Budget, a Program Duration, a complete Point of Contact, and at least one People Served entry. This is the same list this article already walks you through building — the Health Check just tells you, at a glance, which of those you haven't finished yet.

Troubleshooting: “The AI draft is thin or generic”

This is the most common frustration for new users, and it almost always traces back to program detail. The AI draws on your organization profile and your programs. If your draft reads generic, add or enrich a program — a detailed summary plus supporting documents — then start the application again. The difference is usually immediate and obvious.

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