You’ve spent six hours on a grant report. You’ve carefully described your program activities, documented your outcomes, explained any budget variances, and crafted language that makes everything sound like it went according to plan (even the parts that didn’t). You upload the PDF, click submit, and move on with your life.
Here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: there’s a decent chance no one will actually read it.
Funders know this too. Program officers are buried under dozens of reports, each one a carefully managed narrative designed to make the funder feel good about their investment. The reports get skimmed for red flags, filed for compliance, and rarely surface again unless something goes wrong. Meanwhile, the real story (what’s actually working, what’s struggling, where the organization needs help) often stays hidden behind polished language and safe framing.
Grant reporting, as it exists in most places, is performative compliance. Nonprofits perform accountability. Funders perform oversight. Everyone checks a box. And the system keeps spinning.
What If Reporting Were Actually Useful?
The Houston Endowment decided to try something different. In a pilot program launched last year, they replaced written reports for their civic engagement grantees with recorded Zoom conversations. Program officers and grantees talked through progress, challenges, and outcomes in 45- to 90-minute virtual meetings. Grantees received discussion questions in advance and gave permission to be recorded. Zoom’s AI tools transcribed the conversations, and staff reviewed the transcripts for accuracy.
The shift wasn’t just about saving time (though it did that too). According to staff at the foundation, oral reports captured nuance that written reports miss. Follow-up questions, storytelling, and context are the kinds of things that get lost when you’re trying to summarize a year’s work into text boxes. When you’re actually talking with grantees rather than just reading their reports, patterns emerge that would otherwise stay buried.
The pilot worked well enough that the endowment is now expanding it to other programs.
What I Wish I’d Had as a Program Officer
When I was a program officer at a healthcare foundation, our grant management system only allowed grantees to upload Word documents or PDFs. Reports went into the system, and that’s largely where they stayed. If I wanted to identify patterns across our portfolio (what themes were emerging, what challenges were showing up repeatedly, what new developments I might be missing) I had to open each file individually, read each report, and rely on my own notes and memory to connect the dots.
I would have loved an AI tool that could surface patterns across dozens of reports. Something that could flag new issues I hadn’t noticed, recall historical context from previous grant cycles, or help me see connections between grantees working on similar problems.
And honestly, I would have appreciated AI meeting summaries even more. I’ll be blunt here: sitting through a call while simultaneously tracking patterns, formulating follow-up questions, taking notes, and actually listening is not where my brain excels. I’m neurodivergent, and real-time processing while also managing my own anxiety about what I’m going to say next means I miss things. I’d finish a site visit or a check-in call and realize later that I hadn’t fully absorbed half of what was said. AI wouldn’t replace my judgment, but it would help me catch what I missed while my brain was busy doing twelve other things.
Conversations reveal things that written reports don’t. I learned more in a 30-minute phone call than I ever did from a polished narrative. But I didn’t always have the capacity to retain and synthesize everything in real time. AI could have helped bridge that gap.
Where This Gets Complicated
This approach isn’t without complications. First off, trust matters. Grantees in the Houston pilot were initially concerned about whether AI could capture the essence of their work, or whether something important would get lost in translation. The foundation’s existing relationships with these organizations made the transition smoother. If you don’t have that foundation of trust, asking grantees to be recorded might feel invasive rather than collaborative.
There’s also an equity question. The Houston Endowment’s approach works in part because they’re providing additional capacity-building support, including funding to help cover technology costs. Not every foundation is doing that. If oral reporting becomes the norm but only well-resourced organizations can participate effectively, we’ve just created a new barrier.
And let’s not ignore the broader hesitation around AI in the nonprofit sector. Many foundation and nonprofit leaders don’t fully understand the technology yet, and concerns about accuracy, privacy, and bias are legitimate. More than 80 percent of foundation leaders worry about data and privacy risks, and they’re right to take that seriously.
What To Do With This Information
If you’re a foundation, you don’t need to adopt Houston Endowment’s exact approach. But you should be asking whether your current reporting requirements are actually useful or just performative. Are you getting information that improves your grantmaking, or are you collecting documentation to check a box? Consider whether oral reporting (with or without AI) might work for at least some of your portfolio. Start small, build trust, and be transparent about how you’ll use the information.
If you’re a nonprofit, there’s an opportunity here beyond waiting for your funders to change. AI tools can help you synthesize your own work. You can talk through a project (either by voice-to-text or just typing stream-of-consciousness into a tool) and have AI help organize themes, identify patterns, or draft sections of a report. It won’t replace your judgment, but it can reduce the paralysis of staring at a blank page.
This is still early days. AI in grant reporting isn’t a magic fix, and it won’t work everywhere. But if it means fewer hours spent on reports that no one reads and more time spent on actual conversation and learning, that’s a shift worth watching.
This post was inspired by reporting from Stephanie Beasley in The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.