Trovu Ltd asked us to design and build a service for UK charities and community groups: one that shows each charity the grants it can apply for now, puts them in order for that charity, and helps its team manage them from the first search to the report for its trustees.
This case study covers what Trovu asked for, what we built, and how we made sure it works for people with no technical background and very little time. Trovu is live at trovu.uk.
The brief
The people Trovu is for are fundraisers, trustees and volunteers in small charities. Many of them do fundraising alongside another job. The grants they need are spread across thousands of funders' websites, deadlines change, and a grant that looks right can turn out to be closed, or only for another part of the country.
Trovu asked us for three things:
- Find the grants that are open now, by reading funders' own websites every day, so a charity sees what it can apply for today.
- Match them to each charity, best first, by what it does, where it works and its size, saying why each grant fits.
- Give charities one place to run their fundraising: a short list, deadlines, budgets and reports, for the whole team, at a price a small charity can afford.
And the business around it: easy to sign up to, easy to cancel, and with plans that councils and local support bodies (CVSs) can buy for the groups in their area.
What we built
A service that reads funders' websites
Trovu's grant information comes from its own funding data service, on its own server. It reads each funder's grants pages, and AI picks out the facts a charity acts on: who can apply, where, how much, how to apply and the deadline. A quicker model reads every page first, and a more careful one checks the facts people rely on. When a listing site and the funder's own page disagree, the funder's own page wins.
It is joined to the Charity Commission register and to 360Giving's open data on grants already made, so Trovu knows each charity's work and size, and which funders have backed charities like it.
A grant finder that ranks for each charity
A charity picks itself from the register, or describes its work in its own words, and Trovu shows the grants open now in order, best first, each with a short reason it fits. Anyone can see their top three grants free, without signing up.
Everything after "this one looks right"
- A short list in the order the team chooses, and a simple tracker for each application: shortlisted, in progress, submitted, result.
- Budgets by financial year: each award lands on the line it pays for, and the grant finder can search for any line that still needs money.
- Notes and documents on each application, including notes spoken into a phone, with reminders before each deadline and deadlines on the team's calendar.
- Emails when a funder the charity follows opens a grant.
- Nine reports, from where things stand to who pays for what, each a PDF, or several together as a pack for trustees.
- Everyone on the team on one plan, seeing what the others changed.
The business around it
trovu.uk runs on Drupal 11 and CiviCRM 6. Plans are CiviCRM memberships, paid by card through Stripe and renewed automatically, and each payment reaches Xero as an invoice. Switching plan, updating a card and cancelling are each one click from the charity's plan page, and a cancellation can be undone.
Councils and CVSs get a page in their own name, where local groups apply for a free place and the council approves them, and a report on how the groups are getting on. Fundraising consultants can run a plan for each client and hand it over when the work ends. And charities can connect Trovu to Claude or ChatGPT and ask about grants in plain words.
How we worked
- People first. Every screen started from the job someone is trying to do, borrowing ways of working people already know from the apps they use every day, and was checked at phone and desktop width before anyone saw it.
- Measured, not guessed. A panel of experienced fundraisers judged more than 1,000 grants for sample charities, saying whether they would apply. Their answers are the yardstick for every change to the matching, and they found real faults, which we fixed.
- Looked after. A report each morning says how the service ran overnight, faults first. The cost of the AI is tracked every day. Backups are taken nightly, encrypted, and kept away from the servers.
- Open to everyone. Built to WCAG 2.2 AA, so it works with a keyboard, with a screen reader and on a small phone.
Where it is now
On 11 November 2026, Trovu was watching 3,447 funders and reading the grants pages of 1,946 of them. It listed 2,995 grants open now, and 93% of them had been checked in the previous 24 hours. Plans start at £9 a month.
What's next
A public directory of funders, and Trovu inside CiviCRM for charities that already use it.
Thinking about something like this for your organisation? Book a call.