Transforming grant writing with mytender.io

Meet The Society of St James

The Society of St James is a non-for-profit organisation based in Southampton, UK, with 400 employees dedicated to supporting vulnerable individuals and communities. The charity provides essential services including housing, support, and care for people experiencing homelessness, mental health challenges, and substance misuse issues.

The organisation's Business Development and Fundraising team plays a crucial role in securing funding through grants and tenders to sustain and expand their vital services. Before implementing mytender.io, the team faced significant challenges managing the high volume of funding applications while maintaining quality and consistency.

The Challenge

For the Business Development and Fundraising Manager, time is a scarce resource. Before using mytender.io, the process involved spending many hours pouring through pages of tender documents, often leading to other activities being dropped. The team described being overwhelmed, spending in excess of 100-150 hours per bid (or 20 hours per grant), and turning down opportunities due to capacity constraints.

Rushing led to inconsistent quality, and too much time was spent trying to meet word counts and understanding specifications rather than designing the service model. The team faced the challenge of not having enough resources, spending excessive time on compliance and formatting rather than strategic service development.

The Society of St James started using mytender.io in June 2025, and the software works alongside typical bid co-ordination seamlessly. The team leveraged key features including AI draft generation, Tender Insights, and custom prompts tailored to the charity sector.

Since implementing mytender.io in early 2025, the charity has reduced bid and grant preparation time significantly. The platform's AI-powered requirement extraction and draft generation has enabled the team to increase bidding and grant writing activities significantly without adding headcount.

The platform has transformed how the team approaches grants and tenders, saving huge amounts of time on analysis, documentation, win themes, and drafting. This has allowed Michelle to focus on quality, model design, and continuity rather than word counts and compliance checks. For a charity, it genuinely feels like having another 1.5 team members, backed by a team who are flexible, approachable, and incredibly helpful.

The results speak for themselves: The Society of St James now completes bids in 5-50 hours (down from 100-150 hours), representing an 80% time saving. The team can now handle 2 additional bids per month, and the win rate has improved to 40%, representing a 25% improvement. The platform achieves 90% AI accuracy, meaning most generated content is ready to use. The ROI was evident within 1 month, with the team capacity doubling and over £1 million in additional revenue secured.