GrantForge

A full-lifecycle grant writing engine for Claude.

From finding the right opportunity to a submission-ready application — discovery, eligibility triage, cited research, drafting, budgets, and a mock-scorer review, all in your organization's voice.

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Overview

Grant writing is slow, repetitive, and unforgiving: the same organizational boilerplate rewritten for every funder, requirements scattered across 60-page NOFOs, budgets that must reconcile to the dollar, and reviewers who score against rubrics you never see.

GrantForge streamlines that entire process for the people doing the work — nonprofits, schools, universities, local governments, and companies pursuing federal, state, foundation, and corporate funding. Every draft passes through a built-in house style that removes AI writing patterns, and every application is graded by a mock reviewer before it goes out.

Table of Contents

• How It Works
• The Workflow
• Deliverables
• Installation
• Getting Started
• Components
• Repository Layout
• Responsible Use
• Contributing
• License

How It Works

GrantForge learns your organization once, then reuses that knowledge on every application:

1. Set up once. A guided interview builds your organization's dossier — identity and registrations (EIN, UEI, SAM), mission and programs, capacity and leadership, financials, past awards, and impact metrics. Upload past applications and GrantForge extracts answers from them into a reusable answer library, and learns your writing voice from your samples.
2. Work the pipeline. Everything lives in a .grantforge/ folder that persists across sessions. Each completed application makes the next one faster — winning language is harvested back into your answer library.

The Workflow

Run the whole lifecycle with /grantforge, or invoke any stage directly by just asking:

Stage	Say	What Happens
Discover	"find grants for us"	Searches Grants.gov, state portals, foundations, and corporate givers; returns a ranked, verified shortlist
Intake	"respond to this RFP"	Parses the announcement into a requirements matrix; eligibility check; go/no-go recommendation
Research	"research this grant"	Builds a cited evidence base (need data, intervention evidence) and funder intelligence (990s, giving history, priorities)
Draft	"draft the application"	Writes each section against the funder's verbatim prompts, within limits, in your voice
Budget	"build the budget"	Excel budget workbook plus a matching budget narrative, with verification math
Review	"are we ready to submit?"	Compliance audit, mock-scorer grading against the rubric, and a requirements-to-response compliance matrix
Track	"what's in our pipeline?"	Deadlines, statuses, win rate; harvests winning language back into your answer library

Deliverables

• Word documents formatted to the funder's rules
• Portal-ready plain-text sections with character counts
• Excel budget workbooks with a matching budget narrative
• A compliance matrix proving every requirement was addressed

Installation

No API keys, accounts, or MCP servers required — research uses built-in web search.

Claude Code (CLI)

claude plugin marketplace add ddanntheman/GrantForge
claude plugin install grantforge@grantforge-marketplace

Or try it for a single session without installing:

git clone https://github.com/ddanntheman/GrantForge.git
claude --plugin-dir ./GrantForge/plugins/grantforge

Cowork / Claude Desktop App

Download dist/grantforge.plugin, then open it in a Cowork chat and click Save plugin (or install via Settings → Capabilities → Plugins).

Other Environments

plugins/grantforge/ is a standard Claude plugin directory (.claude-plugin/plugin.json, skills/, commands/). Place it wherever your environment loads plugins from. The nine skills are self-contained markdown and work individually if the target only supports skills.

Getting Started

Connect a folder where GrantForge should live (your grants folder), then say "set up GrantForge". Setup takes one guided conversation; uploading past applications and reports speeds it up considerably. After that, start anywhere in the workflow — paste an RFP, ask for discovery, or run /grantforge.

Components

Component	Purpose
/grantforge	Lifecycle orchestrator — runs the full workflow end to end
grant-setup	First-run interview; builds the org profile, answer library, and voice profile
grant-discover	Finds and ranks open funding opportunities matching your profile
grant-intake	Parses RFPs/NOFOs into a requirements matrix; go/no-go recommendation
grant-research	Cited evidence base and funder intelligence (990s, giving history)
grant-draft	Section-by-section drafting against the funder's verbatim prompts
grant-budget	Budget workbook and budget narrative with verification math
grant-review	Compliance audit, mock-scorer grading, compliance matrix
grant-tracker	Cross-session pipeline: deadlines, statuses, win rate
house-style	Shared writing standard; strips AI writing patterns from all prose

Repository Layout

.claude-plugin/marketplace.json   Claude plugin marketplace manifest
plugins/grantforge/               The GrantForge plugin (source of truth)
  .claude-plugin/plugin.json      Plugin manifest
  commands/grantforge.md          /grantforge lifecycle orchestrator
  skills/                         The nine skills
dist/grantforge.plugin            One-click installable for Cowork / Claude desktop

Responsible Use

GrantForge drafts, researches, and checks — it does not submit. Every application still needs a human who knows the organization to verify facts, figures, and commitments before it goes to a funder. Treat the mock-scorer review as a rehearsal, not a guarantee.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. If GrantForge helped you win (or lose) a grant, feedback on what worked and what didn't is especially valuable — file an issue describing the funder type and where the output fell short.

License

Released under the MIT License.

Copyright © 2026 Drew Danner