Pipeline execution for nonprofits with one development director
Your development director is the whole department.
Right now, grants worth pursuing get dropped before anyone has the hours to verify them. Not because they were wrong. Because one person cannot hold it all.
Sharke is the execution staff and verification behind your director: the pursue-or-pass call gets made before hours go in, and your director stops carrying the pipeline alone.
Find your funding gap →Where the pipeline is breaking
One person cannot be the whole pipeline.
Research, the pursue-or-pass call, the writing, the follow up. The work that gets cut is whatever was not due this week, and that is where the best long-term funders are.
The hours that do get spent are not all going to grants worth pursuing. In the pipelines Sharke has reviewed, about 1 in 4 had no documented path to funding at all, and there is no way to tell which from the inside.
Share of pipeline grants with no documented path to funding: based on grant pipelines reviewed by Sharke.
Once a second set of hands is on the pipeline, going back to one person carrying all of it stops looking like a plan.
Why waiting is already late
Next year's funding is being decided right now.
If your director waits until the grant is needed, the organization is already late.
The funders who will write checks next year are building those relationships this cycle. The programs renewing next year are reviewing who fits now. None of it waits for your director to find a free week. By the time the grant is on the list, the cycle is underway and the room is full.
Roughly 70% of foundations do not accept unsolicited proposals. That money goes where a funder already has a relationship. The cultivation that earns it starts months before the grant posts, not the week your director applies. Sharke surfaces the invite-only funders worth building toward now, so your director is cultivating next year's funding before this year's runs out.
Federal programs freeze and priorities shift, and a grant your team won before is no longer a safe bet to win again. When you need to replace that funding fast, there is no fast. The pipeline that catches the loss is the one your director started before it happened. Before your director sinks the 50-plus hours a federal reapplication takes, Sharke verifies whether that program is funding this cycle and whether you still fit it now.
Share of U.S. foundations that do not accept unsolicited proposals: Foundation Center / Candid.
What a verdict looks like
A real verdict, with the sources behind it.
Every verdict is built from the funder's own documented filings.
Who built it
I have spent my career replacing gut calls with data: how the largest financial institutions set their global IT footprint, when mergers and acquisitions create value instead of destroying it, and which grants are worth winning, at for-profit and nonprofit organizations from NIH, NSF, and USDA to Meta and Google. I have done that work across the private sector and the White House Office of Management and Budget, and I sign off on every Sharke verdict myself.
Collin Brown / Wharton MBA / Founder, Sharke.ai
Two ways forward
Give your director a team.
Right now, every funder, every draft, and every deadline runs through one person. The next grant on the list gets researched, written, and tracked by that same person, alone, unless something changes before it starts.
Sharke does the execution under your director's direction. It surfaces the grants and funders worth pursuing, verifies which have a documented path, drafts against funder requirements, and keeps the pipeline moving. Your director sets strategy and approves the work, instead of doing all of it alone.
- → Better-fit grants and funders surfaced, each verified
- → Drafting grounded in your own materials
- → Deadline and submission tracking
Bring the grants already in motion. We review where your pipeline has a documented path before your director commits more hours.
No contract. Cancel anytime.
Your director keeps the work in-house, with Sharke as the verification step before any hours go in. Self-serve is not another program to learn. No onboarding, no setup. You are verifying grants before a new system would have finished installing, and you stop committing staff time to grants that were never a match.
Beta signups begin June 22, 2026
No contract. Cancel anytime.
Grant work does not feel expensive, because you pay for it in hours, not cash. The hours are only half of it. The other half is the grants you never see, the ones that slip by while your team is heads-down on the wrong one. An organization with 50% of its funding from grants applies to about 1.5 grants a month, roughly 30 hours of skilled work each, close to 45 hours a month your director already spends. Outsource it and a grant consultant runs $50 to $100 an hour, $2,250 to $4,500 a month at this volume. Done for you starts at $250 a month. Self-serve is $149. Neither is a new cost. It buys those hours back, and cuts the ones going to grants with no path.
Consultant rate: $50 to $100 an hour, mid-level, 2025 to 2026. Application volume: an organization with about half its funding from grants, roughly 1.5 a month at 30 hours each.
Done for you is priced to how much of your mission rides on grants: $250 at about half, $350 at three-quarters, $450 at essentially all, with federal grants over $100k added per application. Founding rates are limited and rise once references exist. Self-serve is $149 a month your first year, then $199.
The problem is rarely the one grant already in motion. Find your funding gap and see what share of your pipeline can actually fund the year.
Not ready for either plan? Check one grant for $49, back in 24 hours. You never pay to be told no.
From a team that ran it
"We've always had more grants on our list than we realistically had capacity for, so most of the decisions came down to instinct and urgency. What surprised me was seeing which ones actually had a path and which ones just sounded promising. A few we were counting on really weren't there once we looked closer."
Director of Development · Housing services nonprofit · $2.4M budgetQuestions
Before you decide
When can we start?
You can book a pipeline review now. Self-serve signups open with the beta on June 22, 2026.
Our director already has a system. Is this one more thing to learn?
No. Self-serve adds the verification step before hours go in. With execution staff, Sharke does the work under your director's direction, so it takes load off instead of adding it.
Is this AI, or is a person involved?
Both. Sharke does the research and drafting, and every verdict is built from documented funder filings, 990s, award history, and eligibility, not AI guesses. With execution staff, the Sharke team runs the pipeline under your director.
Do we have to sign a contract?
No. It is month to month, and you can cancel anytime.
Your director is not the bottleneck.
Being the entire department is. Sharke fixes that, whichever way you choose.