Civic & Government /Drafting interactive demo field guide · 9 min

Submission Drafter

Read a grant round notice and its guidelines, then turn the requirements into a structured first-draft submission your grants officer reviews.

Open the live demo

theater/demos/civic-gov_submission-drafter.html · sandbox · read-only

Open

FIG. 1

The live demo, running on fabricated data. Open it to step through the full flow — every output is shown for a person to approve before anything happens.

How it would work

Reads the round notice and its attached guidelines, extracts every requirement with the page it came from, drafts the sections and a budget request, and lays it all out for a grants officer to approve before anything is lodged.

Input 01

The notice + its attachments

A funding-round notice plus its attached program guidelines, eligibility criteria and budget template — the round's grant cap, co-contribution rule, eligible councils, required sections, weightings and closing date.

Agent 02

Extracts, cites, drafts

Pulls each requirement out of the notice and attachments with a source citation against it, scores its read-confidence, drafts each required section to its word limit, and builds a budget request with the matching council co-contribution.

Output 03

A draft, with its working shown

A structured first draft — every extracted requirement with its source and confidence, a budget request, and an eligibility caution flag — held for the grants officer to edit, approve or reject before it is lodged.

Where it works well

It does the requirement transcription every round, in full, and cites where each figure came from.

That reading happens again for every round — and it is where deadlines get missed and eligibility gets misread.
Best for a small team running many rounds at once against tight closing dates: a grants officer juggling infrastructure, sport and library rounds.
The officer starts from a structured draft with the requirements mapped, so the recaptured hours go into the argument, not the PDFs.

The slow, invisible cost in a council grants team is not the writing — it is the transcription. Every round arrives as a notice plus a stack of attachments, and someone has to read all of it and pull out the cap, the co-contribution ratio, the eligible councils, the sections, the weightings and the closing date before a sentence of argument is written.

Where it works badly

It is confidently wrong when you point it at the wrong round's documents — and the citation makes the wrong figure look authoritative.

The citation tells you where it read a figure; it does not tell you the figure is current to this round.
Weak where the source is weak — scanned-image PDFs, requirements that contradict each other across documents, or criteria written in prose rather than stated plainly.
If most of your rounds are bespoke one-offs with no stable structure, the draft gives you less than your officer's own reading already does.

The honest test

Open your last three rounds' source documents. If you could not have extracted the cap, co-contribution and closing date from them yourself without ringing the funding body, neither can the tool.

Hand it last round's guidelines, or a generic program page instead of the specific round notice, and it extracts the wrong cap, the wrong co-contribution ratio and the wrong closing date. Each one carries a source citation, so it looks checked. That is the trap.

What it doesn't do — and shouldn't

It drafts and flags. A grants officer approves. That boundary is deliberate.

WHAT IT DOES

Surfaces each requirement with the document and page it was read from

Scores how confident it is that each figure was read correctly

Flags eligibility gaps — co-contribution evidence or a council resolution missing

WHAT IT WON’T

Decide which project to put forward

Judge whether the project will actually win the round

Lodge anything in the grants portal

A grant submission commits a council to a co-contribution and a project, and councils are public bodies accountable under the Local Government Act 2020 and bound by the Public Records Act 1973 for what they keep. A wrong cap or a missed eligibility condition wastes an officer's week or commits ratepayer funds on the wrong basis. The accountable officer stays on the decision because the consequence lands on the council, not the tool.

What your data has to look like

The current round's documents, stating the requirements in a form that can actually be read.

Typical readiness

across orgs we see, before the first job

The specific round notice for this round

Usual weak point

Program guidelines as machine-readable text

Needs shaping

Eligibility criteria naming the eligible councils

Needs shaping

A budget template with line items

Usual weak point

A reliable way to know it is the current version

Needs shaping

The real first job

The weak point is almost always currency: the "current" guidelines are whatever someone downloaded last time, the notice is fine but the attachment is a scanned PDF, and nobody owns which version is live. Getting the right round's documents to the team reliably, in a readable form, is usually the real first job — larger and more valuable than the drafting layer on top. Once the inputs are clean and current, every round after that is faster and right by default.

Right fit if…

You run many grant rounds a year against tight closing dates

You can point to the specific, current round notice and its attachments today

Your rounds share a stable shape — cap, co-contribution, sections, weightings

Round documents arrive as clean, machine-readable PDFs, not scanned images

Walk away if…

Your "current" guidelines are whatever was downloaded last round

Most round material reaches you as scanned-image attachments

Every round is a bespoke one-off with no repeatable structure

You want a tool that confirms eligibility or lodges for you

Open questions

The worried-buyer questions, answered straight

It flags eligibility risks rather than hiding them — for example, that a council resolution evidencing the co-contribution is missing, or that the project type may sit outside the round’s scope. Those flags are warnings for your grants officer, not clearances. The tool never lodges anything; a person reviews every section and the eligibility position before it goes near the grants portal.

It reads the notice body and the attached guidelines, eligibility criteria and budget template, and cites the source for each requirement it extracts. If a figure is buried in a scanned image or contradicts another document, that is exactly where its read-confidence drops and a human has to confirm. Messy or scanned source documents are the usual reason the first job is fixing how round material is captured, not the drafting.

No. It does the mechanical first pass — pulling out the requirements, weightings and closing date, and roughing each criterion response and the budget. The judgement that wins grants — which project to put forward, how to frame community benefit, what the council will actually commit — stays with your grants officer. It recaptures the hours spent transcribing requirements so that time goes into the argument.

It only knows what is in the notice and attachments you give it for this round. Grant caps, co-contribution ratios, eligible-council lists and closing dates change between rounds and programs, so it must be pointed at the current round’s documents every time. It will not carry last round’s figures forward, and you should never assume it has — the source citation against each field is there so you can check it against the live notice.

The draft and the round documents stay within the environment we agree at setup; nothing is lodged or sent externally by the tool. A council is a public body bound by the Victorian Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014 and its information privacy principles, and submissions can contain council financial positions and project commitments, so data handling is scoped up front. The only outbound step — lodging in the grants portal — is a deliberate human action after approval.

Council records are subject to the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Vic) and overseen by the Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner, and under the Public Records Act 1973 councils must keep proper records of how decisions were made. Because the tool shows its working — the source and confidence behind every extracted requirement, and who approved the draft — it leaves an auditable trail rather than an opaque one, which is the right footing for a public body that may have to account for its decisions.

What it takes to build

4–5 weeks · 4 phases

Reused from template~65%

Bespoke to this skin~35%

stack · Claude · document parsing · review UI · Word

What it would cost

Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed dates.

Bite-sized first piece

One contained change, low risk

Pilot build

Most builds land here

Embedded support

Scale on proof

Considering this for your grants team?

The honest place to start is a bite-sized first piece — getting one round's documents into clean, current, readable form, then drafting against them. Tell us where it hurts; we'll play it back, scope it, and show you what's possible.

Book a call How we work