I run a smaller staffed non-profit (the Moravian Board of World Mission) that works with partners in about 40 countries, and grant requests come to us in every format you can imagine. Photos of handwritten notes, Word docs, submitted in a handful of different languages. For years that meant one of us sitting down to transcribe, translate, and file each one digitally. Then pull out and manually log summary details for evaluation by our grant committee.
So I built a routine for it in Town, and honestly it has been one of my favorite things to hand off. I forward the photos or the Word doc to my Townie, and it takes it from there.
Here is how it works:
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I forward the request (handwritten photo, Word doc, whatever showed up) to my assistant with a simple key phrase “this is a grant request”.
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I get back a clean, instant summary of what is being asked, translated if it came in another language.
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It pulls the relevant details and logs everything straight into Coda, our grant tracking system. No manual data entry.
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It drops the supporting background and documents into a Google Drive folder, then links that folder to the grant row in Coda, so every request has its materials one click away.
What used to be tedious transcribing and filing now just happens. For a team as small as ours, that is real time back, and it means we get to spend it on the mission work instead of the paperwork.
If you handle any kind of intake that arrives messy and has to end up structured, I would give this pattern a try. Happy to answer questions if anyone wants to build something similar.