A utility company's community foundation was running on the equivalent of one full-time employee, five staff members each spending 20 percent of their time on intake, application review, communication, and the steady stream of inbound calls from grant applicants asking about status.
The process was entirely manual. Applicants had no self-service option. Staff had no way to scale. The foundation's impact was being limited by its own administrative overhead.
Scott Meyer used Chipp and Zapier to build a grant management system with a public-facing AI chat interface for applicant inquiries, a form-to-Google-Sheets intake pipeline, AI-powered application ranking against the foundation's criteria, and Gmail drafts ready for human approval before any award is sent.
The foundation's operational burden dropped from the equivalent of one full-time employee to 0.3 FTEs, freeing staff to focus entirely on recipient selection rather than administration.
A secondary use case, automating land title research using the same Chipp and Zapier stack, is projected to save the company six figures per year.
The initial foundation deployment expanded into company-wide adoption of the AI stack, multiplying the return on the original investment.
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