Funding Futures: How AI for Public Health Grants Could Be a Lifeline – Part 1
Written by: Nicole K Sowers
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is emerging as a powerful ally for public health agencies, streamlining the often arduous grant application process and helping agencies secure much-needed funding.
Nightingale Notes by Champ Software is an EHR system dedicated to public health. At Champ Software, we’ve been exploring AI’s potential to complete public health grant applications. In part 1 of this blog series, we describe experiments with AI for local public health grants. Those experiments yielded promising results, particularly in generating comprehensive and well-structured outlines for grant responses. In part 2, we discuss AI as a Strategic Partner in Grant Acquisition.
The landscape of local public health is constantly evolving, and in times of budget constraints, securing funding for vital individual, family, and community services becomes more critical than ever. As budgets tighten, many public health agencies scramble to maintain essential programs. Utilizing AI for local public health grants isn’t about replacing the human touch, but rather augmenting it, allowing dedicated public health professionals to focus their expertise where it matters most – serving their communities.
The Grant Gauntlet: A Familiar Challenge
Grant writing is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, requiring thorough research, persuasive narratives, and strict adherence to guidelines. For understaffed public health departments facing budget cuts, dedicating time to this process is often a luxury, leading to missed opportunities and reduced critical services for vulnerable populations.
What We Tried: Tools Using AI for Public Health Grants
There are new AI tools every day. We looked at just a few, like https://www.grantable.co/, which is one of many paid tools. But we started simply in our experiments with AI for grant applications. Our Champ Software clients usually don’t have the funds to acquire paid software, so we started with a free version of Google Gemini. To illustrate what a Gemini prompt response can give you, we used a prompt of :
Following is the result from Gemini:
You create a grant response by strategically feeding the grant application's various sections into the AI prompt. A "prompt" to Gemini is essentially an instruction, a question, or a piece of information you provide to the AI, telling it what you want it to do or what kind of output you're seeking.
For instance, you can copy the problem statement or program description from the grant and prompt Gemini by saying, "rewrite this to be more concise and compelling for a funder," or "strengthen the emotional appeal of this paragraph to align with our mission."
You can also prompt Gemini to summarize lengthy guidelines by copying the text and asking, "summarize this grant's guidelines, highlighting key funder priorities."
Additionally, you can provide a funder's website URL and prompt it to "identify the key funder priorities from this website." You can even draft initial responses for specific questions, using your organization's existing data and reports as context, by prompting it with something like, "Draft a response to the question 'Describe your program's impact,' using the following outcomes data: [paste your data here]."Remember to review and refine Gemini's output thoroughly to ensure accuracy, alignment with your organization's voice, and adherence to all grant requirements.
That’s a pretty good way to help us understand the basics of using Gemini prompts and applying them to a grant application.
How Did AI Do for A Public Health Grant Application
We found a grant on grants.gov that aligns with grants our local health departments may apply for. Each section of the grant was copied/pasted into the prompt with some instructions like: Leave placeholders to customize the agency name, be genuine and concise. Here are two examples of the results:
Next, the Project Activities instructions from the grant application were copied into the Gemini prompt with instructions to be clear and concise, focus on software acquisition, community collaboration, data analysis and documenting outcomes. Here is the result:
Each section of the grant was copied into the Gemini prompt. The results did need some editing to make them unique and tell the story of the agency, but it was a good start!
In the second blog in this series, AI: A Strategic Partner in Grant Acquisition, we explore how AI can enhance efficiency and effectiveness in grant writing.
Sidenote:
The illustration for this blog post was generated by Google Gemini with a prompt of “draw an image illustrating how AI can help public health”.The first attempts had odd and misspelled text on them, so we asked it to “remove all text”.
![AI for public health grants example result 1 is:
Executive Summary
[Your Local Health Department] is seeking funding from the Drug-Free Communities (DFC) Support Program to implement a comprehensive substance use prevention and intervention program. This program will leverage cutting-edge software to track substance use trends, intervention outcomes, and identify effective strategies to reduce substance use among youth in [Your Community]. By utilizing data-driven insights, we aim to strengthen our community's capacity to prevent and reduce substance use, ultimately creating a healthier and safer environment for our youth.](https://www.champsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Exec-Summary.jpg)
