NON-PROFIT CUSTOMER STORY

How a national conservation foundation protects wildlife with AI

As one of America's most impactful conservation institutions, this federally chartered foundation directs billions in grants to projects across the country, touching every corner of the natural landscape.

But their work isn't just about funding. It's about accountability.

For every dollar distributed, they must show where it went, what it accomplished, and why it matters. That means evaluating grant applications, assessing risk, and producing impact reports. That reporting burden was outpacing what any team could handle.

That’s where Vertesia came in.

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INDUSTRY
Non-profit, Wildlife Conservation

CHALLENGE
The Foundation’s grants administration team faced the challenge of manually synthesizing hundreds of disparate project documents ranging from spreadsheets and narrative reports to complex visual data, into comprehensive, impact-focused funder reports.

SOLUTION
The Foundation partnered with Vertesia to build a purpose-built AI application that transforms their most document-intensive workflows into fast, accurate, and deeply insightful processes.

THE CHALLENGE

Reduce labor intensive processes to focus on conservation initiatives

The Foundation’s mission depends on trust. And trust depends on transparency. The manual, document-heavy reporting process was slowing the team down, and limiting the organization’s ability to demonstrate the full depth of its conservation impact.

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Complex document reviews and summarizations

At peak volume, a single reporting cycle could mean thousands of pages of documentation. Reviewing it all thoroughly was practically impossible for any human team.

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Detailed program reporting

With so much material to cover, funder reports often were kept high-level, not fully detailing the breadth of what grantees had accomplished.

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Consistent analysis

Even the most experienced grants professionals, working independently on the same application, might arrive at different conclusions. That variability introduced risk and made it difficult to defend decisions with confidence.

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Grant application evaluation

Scoring incoming grant applications required deep expertise and significant time.

THE SOLUTION

Custom agentic AI applications, purpose-built for conservation

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Comprehensive funder report generation

The centerpiece of the solution is an AI-powered reporting engine, purpose-built around the Foundation’s specific workflows, templates, and institutional knowledge.

  • Automated ingestion: The Vertesia platform ingests all of the Foundation’s documentation (PDFs, spreadsheets, text narratives, images) including structured and unstructured content, and then an agentic workflow automatically applies accurate metadata, improves findability, and makes it usable in reporting.

  • Advanced summarization: A sophisticated AI agent, trained with the Foundation’s unique domain expertise, reads through each report in depth. The agent extracts critical information, identifies themes, evaluates success against stated metrics, and generates expert-level analysis ready for funder storytelling.

  • Intelligent report generation: Funder reports are generated with executive summaries, narrative overviews, thematic analyses, project-level accomplishment breakdowns, and both qualitative and quantitative assessments. The reports are downloadable and ready for review and distribution.

The result? What used to take days now takes hours.

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Automated grant application scoring

Before a single dollar is awarded, the Foundation must carefully evaluate incoming grant applications. Vertesia’s AI agents bring consistency and rigor to this process, applying the Foundation’s scoring methodology uniformly across every application, at high volume.

  • AI agents use the foundation's scoring rubric: Vertesia worked with the Foundation's grants team to translate their proprietary evaluation methodology into the agent's logic so every application is assessed against the exact same criteria.

  • Multiple grant applications are processed at the same time: The system applies the same rigorous evaluation to all grant applications identically, compressing what was once a slow, resource-intensive process into a fast, consistent pipeline.

The result? Vertesia's AI agents deliver uniform, methodology-driven scoring across every grant application at high volume, giving the grants team a consistent, rigorous first-pass evaluation.

Vertesia is a strategic partner, not just software

Building a solution this complex, across formats, edge cases, and deeply specialized domain knowledge, required more than great technology. Vertesia’s professional services team worked hand-in-hand with the Foundation through every iteration, bringing together AI architects, developers, and content experts to refine the agents.

THE RESULTS

Empowering the team to focus on high-impact initiatives and accelerating grant funding

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Richer, more compelling storytelling

AI-generated reports go deeper than any manually produced summary could at scale. These reports surface granular outcomes, thematic patterns, and measurable accomplishments that demonstrate the real return on conservation investment.

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Maximized funding potential

When funders receive clear, detailed, evidence-backed reports showing exactly how their dollars drove conservation outcomes, trust deepens, and continued or expanded funding can follow.

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Reports generated in minutes
Funder reports that previously required days of manual review are now generated in a fraction of the time.
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Powerful scale

The solution doesn’t just speed up an existing task, it unlocks analysis that was simply out of reach before. Reviewing up to 100 project reports across thousands of pages is a new organizational capability.

Human expertise where it matters most

By automating the heavy lifting, Vertesia allows the Foundation’s grants team to focus their expertise on the critical aspects of quality assurance, strategic judgment, and funder relationships.

WHY VERTESIA

How Vertesia impacted the Foundation

Vertesia didn't just speed up the Foundation's reporting capabilities, it unlocked something that didn't exist before: the ability to process 100's of complex grant reports across thousands of pages, consistently and at scale.

What once took days now takes 15 minutes. That's not just a productivity gain. That's a new organizational capability.

For a foundation accountable for billions of dollars in conservation funding, that's the difference between measuring impact and multiplying it.

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Partnering with Vertesia has greatly assisted our grants management process. Their platform helps us analyze complex submissions more efficiently and comprehensively, so our team can focus on evaluating the impact of each project and leave the manually intensive tasks to a standardized process within the Vertesia Platform.

Chief Technology Officer

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