A friend of mine who responds to RFPs told me that lately she’s being asked to tailor her responses to oddly specific specs. Exact word counts. Prescribed subheads. Very particular formatting requirements that have nothing to do with the actual quality of the idea being pitched.
This is happening, of course, because an algorithm increasingly scores, ranks and shortlists the proposal before a living, breathing human ever lays eyes on it. And if we assume that in a large number of cases a machine also played a role in cobbling together that RFP, and responding to it, we are now officially living in a world where a bot is talking to a bot.
This may sound like progress, and if your proposal were simply paperwork to be filed away, it would herald a great leap forward. But it’s not. It’s a sales pitch—one that will ultimately be read by a human being who presumably comes equipped with a brain, emotions, expertise, a sense of humour, the capacity to think critically, become catatonic with boredom, etc.
Whether you’re a purpose-driven organization trying to fundraise or secure a grant, or a business enterprise competing for a contract, the goal of a sales pitch is to make a sale. In every case, if you want to land the deal, besides having a captivating story, a head-turning argument, and the hard evidence to back it up, your submission has to leap off the page with enough personality to catch the eye of a sentient human being who’s either reading it for the first time or after a machine has ranked it, after having read fifteen others that all sound roughly the same.
“We are now officially living in a world where a bot is talking to a bot.”
Purpose-driven organizations tend to lapse into compliance-speak: producing proposals that sound as if they came off a production line, because, in a sense, they did. When you submit a proposal using safe, clinical, faintly academic language that has been engineered to offend no one, the problem is it doesn’t move anyone, either.
Businesses, consultancies in particular, tend to love consultancy-speak, and stuff their pitches with facts, figures and buzzwords. I’ve watched while genuinely bold catch-phrases and ideas are workshopped into oblivion by well-meaning consultants who edit by committee. They come up with a great idea, then immediately start backtracking, because ‘we need to appeal to this stakeholder’, or ‘we can’t risk alienating that one’. By the third round of edits, the pitch has been so sanded down, it might as well be beige.
But here’s the thing: in an attention economy like ours, possibly offending someone isn’t your biggest threat. Invisibility is. Radical candour beats compliance, corporate or consultancy-speak every time. Whether you’re pitching to an executive team wading through a pile of nearly identical commercial bids, a foundation board reviewing a stack of incredibly worthy grant proposals, or a donor scrolling through yet another fundraising appeal, you’re facing the same hurdle: sector buzzwords, talking points, or hyper-careful language simply don’t land anymore. We’re all so oversaturated with content that sounds the same, our brains have developed defences against it. Instead of making an impression, it reads like background noise and quickly fades.
This isn’t just a hunch. Researchers have long documented the “wear-out effect” of neural habituation and the active resistance that results: the more often we’re exposed to repetitive messages or familiar creative, the less attention we pay, and the less persuasive those messages become. In a world overwhelmed with predictable content, sounding different isn’t a creative luxury—it’s a competitive advantage.
“In an attention economy, possibly offending someone isn’t your biggest threat. Invisibility is.”
For the charitable sector, the issue becomes even more urgent because Gen Z is giving differently than previous generations, placing a premium on authenticity, transparency, and organizations that communicate like real people rather than institutions. Research consistently shows that besides genuine values and tangible impact, younger donors want organizations to speak with a distinctive voice before they commit their support. They have little patience for tired, compliant phrases that have lost their meaning. For charities still relying on generic fundraising language, that’s becoming an increasingly difficult standard to meet.
But even if you swap out a word or phrase here and there, if your pitch doesn’t take risks, and express your brand voice with personality and brio, it simply won’t stand out. You don’t have to be reckless to push the envelope. You just have to be specific, a little brave, and willing to sound as if an actual human being wrote the pitch—one who sounds confident and passionate about their values, ideas, and why they believe they deserve to win.
Humour and wit can go a long way, so don’t be fearful of injecting some into your pitch. Adding a witty opening line, or an unexpectedly candid, self-aware observation can quickly elevate a pitch from the prosaic to the genuinely surprising. The trick is to start thinking of incorporating humour as a strategy, not a risk. If used cleverly, judiciously, and intentionally, employing it can act as a pattern interrupt for the reader—an unexpected moment, a surprising phrase, joke, observation, or shift in tone that disrupts automatic attention and causes the brain to refocus. Used sparingly, it can pull a distracted reader back into your argument before they drift on to the next email or proposal.
Think about how quickly you can be yanked out of your doomscrolling reverie if you suddenly come across a witty post or hilarious meme. If you’re anything like me, you’ll laugh in appreciation at its cleverness and maybe even feel compelled to share it—and the feeling it evoked—with a friend. Or in a newsletter.
“If used cleverly and judiciously, humour and wit can act as a pattern interrupt and immediately capture the attention of a bored or distracted reader.”
Humour can cut through a reader’s defences in a way that AI slop or a perfectly polished paragraph never will, because it signals that a real thinking person, not a committee, or language model set to “professional”, wrote the content you’re reading. For instance, which of the following sentences is likeliest to wake you up?
We support vulnerable demographics through structured aid paradigms.
We leverage multi-stakeholder ecosystems to optimize systemic outcomes.
The red tape preventing families from accessing affordable housing is ridiculous. Here’s how we’re cutting through it.
As long as your pitch ticks all the big boxes—a hook that immediately captures the reader’s attention, a compelling story, a controlling idea, and a coherent message—who says you can’t throw in a small pattern interrupt like a candid admission or wry observation before seamlessly transitioning into the substance of your case?
But attention, once captured, is a quickly diminishing resource. It will vanish in an instant unless you spend your storytelling capital on a solid argument backed by airtight evidence and make a case for why you—and only you—are the right choice to meet the donor’s, funder’s or business’ unique priorities and needs.
Which brings me back to the bot-talking-to-bot problem. AI-assisted procurement increasingly evaluates proposals against consistent, structured criteria. Ironically, those same characteristics can make proposals feel interchangeable once they reach the human evaluators responsible for the final decision.
“Attention, once captured, is a quickly diminishing resource unless you can convince a potential client, donor, or funder why you are the right choice.”
Proposals that continue to rise above the pack will be the ones that satisfy the algorithm without surrendering their authentic brand personality and voice. They’ll check every compliance box while still retaining human oversight and sounding unmistakably human and true to the brand standing behind them. Authenticity will outperform AI-generated sameness every time.
So here’s my advice for business consultants, grant writers, fundraisers, and any bleary-eyed pitch team assembling a pitch deck at eleven o’clock at night: stop aiming narrowly for a technically perfect (i.e., completely forgettable) pitch and start creating one that’s catchy, memorable, and infused with a lively, easily recognizable human voice—recognizable because a fully awake, intentional human being wrote it.
