Case Studies
ROI on AI: Real Results from GoodAgents Training
What clients are actually delivering — across grant fundraising, corporate partnerships, impact reporting and CEO-level strategy.
How to measure ROI
Four honest measures, in the order they typically show up. Each shown below with a real example from our client work.
Time saved
UK charity staff on a £45,000 salary cost around £22 per hour fully loaded. A £690 half-day training breaks even at around 31 hours recovered across the team. Most teams clear that in week one.
Opportunities unlocked
The applications that didn't happen before. The prospects that stayed cold. The impact reports that were late every year. Harder to price precisely, often the most transformational.
Pipeline income increased
More applications submitted, more corporate proposals sent, bigger top of funnel. Measurable in the CRM within weeks.
Actual income increased
The slowest to materialise and the hardest to attribute cleanly. Grant decision cycles alone run 6–12 months. Programmes need to run. Relationships need to bed in.
Note of caution: AI is an enabler, not the outcome
A poorly directed fundraiser with AI is a more productive poorly directed fundraiser. The clients below are getting results because they are good at their jobs, know their charities, and know what quality looks like. The training multiplied what they could already do. Final outcomes always depend on the human team.
The case studies
Grant Fundraising
The Mulberry Centre
Catherine Williams, Trusts and Foundations Fundraiser, works three days a week and carries the entire grant pipeline for a small cancer support charity.
- •Large grant applications: 2–3 days compressed to 1–2 working sessions
- •Funder due diligence on a complex trust: Hours compressed to 30 minutes
- •Data-to-budget conversion: Days compressed to minutes
ROI
£82,000 in grant application value submitted or ready to submit from a single part-time fundraiser in three weeks. Training and tool costs recovered several times over within the first month.
“Jose's training has genuinely increased our capacity for trust fundraising. Research that used to take hours now takes minutes, and first-stage drafts are much quicker to pull together. That has freed up valuable time to focus on the part that really matters: shaping a stronger proposition, sharpening our evidence and thinking more carefully about the right project and realistic ask for each funder. For a small charity like ours, with one part-time trusts fundraiser, it has given us a much stronger starting point and created more opportunities to show the value and impact of our work, while still keeping the human judgement and oversight good fundraising depends on.”
Corporate Fundraising Team
The Felix Project
A 4-week intensive workshop with the corporate fundraising team (Will Savage, Louise Self, Matthew Gray).
- •Prospect research: Hours compressed to minutes per company
- •Proposal drafting: First drafts tailored to specific briefs in 30 min instead of a full day, pulling directly from existing knowledge in SharePoint
- •Volunteer communications: 60% productivity gain through AI-assisted drafting
- •Fundraiser confidence and proposal quality: Up within one week of training
ROI
At 20 corporate prospects per month and 3 hours saved per brief, approximately 60 hours per month recovered across the team. At £25 per hour fully loaded, around £1,500 per month (£18,000 per year) in time alone, excluding proposal drafting savings and the pipeline value of increased corporate activity.
“The Co-pilot training was excellent. I have been using it for only a week and have already seen time saved and an improvement in my proposals. It has made me more confident as a fundraiser.”
“A brilliantly structured workshop that transformed how our team approaches AI and workflow automation. I highly recommend it!”
Impact Reporting
Lord's Taverners
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The youth cricket and disability charity engaged GoodAgents to accelerate their annual impact reporting process.
- •Impact report strategy, analysis & content generation: Sped up by 80%
- •Timeline: Months compressed to weeks
- •AI role: Heavy lifting on data analysis, first drafts, narrative structure
- •Human role: Editorial control, strategic direction, final quality
ROI
A traditional annual impact report typically consumes 80–100 hours of senior staff time. An 80% reduction recovers approximately 70–80 hours per report. At £25 per hour fully loaded, around £1,750–£2,000 in direct time recovered per cycle, before accounting for uplift in donor engagement from shipping on time.
“Using AI this year has activated a sense of new creativity, stretching our ambitions to showcase our impact in a way that we haven't done before. As we adopt AI slowly but surely, this is a great case study for us to showcase its benefits to all Lord's Taverners employees.”
What other clients are saying
Quick reactions from charity leaders we've worked with.
“Excellent content delivered exceptionally well. The training was very useful for staff across different departments and everybody learned something new. I particularly liked that we were encouraged to try out the tools during the session and had the opportunity to ask many questions.”
Simmi Woodwal
CEO, The Honeypot Children's Charity
“It's already paying off and I'm looking forward to exploring how else both I and Little Village can make even more use of AI tools to bring more value to our work.”
Sophie
CEO, Little Village
What we see consistently
- •Grant applications: 2–3 days compressed to 1–2 working sessions
- •Funder research: 4–6 hours compressed to 30–45 minutes per prospect
- •Corporate prospect research: Hours compressed to minutes
- •Budget and data work: Days compressed to minutes
- •Impact reporting: 80% faster end-to-end
- •Opportunity capture: Fundraisers pursuing applications they would previously have declined
- •Error detection: Material mistakes caught before submission
The pattern is consistent. The training and embedding matter more than the tool. Good workflows, built around the actual work, multiply what one person can do. Human judgment, direction, and quality control remain non-negotiable.
Want results like these for your team?
Book a free 30-minute clarity call and we'll talk through where AI could move the needle for your charity. No pitch, just honest advice.
Explore the services behind these results
Each of these case studies came from one of these engagements.