8 Ways Grammarly can help your charity

First impressions always count when it comes to written content on your charity’s website, emails, and social media channels, so having a useful proofreading and writing assistant in your charity’s digital toolkit is essential.

Your content not only needs to be credible and professional to engage potential donors or volunteers, but also written clearly and concisely so that your mission and goals are easy to understand. This is where Grammarly can help you.

What is Grammarly?

Grammarly is a popular writing tool that can be used to proofread written content and to improve the readability and style of your writing. The basic version of Grammarly is free to use, but there are also Premium and Business models available with additional features.

It is a great tool for charities to use to avoid any errors or misunderstanding in public facing and internal communications.

What can I use Grammarly for?  

1. Grammar, spelling and punctuation checker: As one of its key features, Grammarly helps to identify spelling, grammar and punctuation errors in your writing and provides suggested corrections. The free version provides a simple comment about what the issue is, but premium and business versions give more detailed explanations.
2. Style and tone checker: There are also suggestions to improve the readability and tone of your writing based on your audience. For instance, if you are writing a more formal document, or a casual social media post.
3. Expanding your vocabulary: Grammarly suggests synonyms and alternative phrases that can help you improve your writing. This can be beneficial for content writers or anyone creating content for your website.
4. Targeted suggestions: To get more targeted suggestions from Grammarly, you can specify the audience, level of formality, and intent of the piece of content that you are writing. You can add specific terms or names that you regularly use in your charity to your personal dictionary, so that these are not flagged as errors.
5. Plug in and mobile app: The browser extension is useful for checking writing in real time as you write emails, social media posts, or web content. You can also use the desktop application to upload text documents or paste in sections of writing to be checked (which is great for anyone that works offline), and the mobile app is best suited for writing on the go from your phone.   
6. Plagiarism detector:  This feature can check text against billions of websites and online sources to ensure text is original, which can be useful to check content before putting it live on your site.
7. Integration with other tools: By integrating Grammarly with other tools that you use, you can ensure that all your communications and writing is error free. You can integrate:
   Microsoft Office
   Outlook
   Google Docs
   Social media platforms (LinkedIn, Facebook etc)
8. Extra features: If you upgrade to Grammarly Premium or Business, you have access to advanced grammar and style checks and a broader range of vocabulary suggestions to help improve your writing. There are also suggestions for tone, formatting, ways you can improve your word and sentence variety, and recommendations for more inclusive language.

Take a look at our ‘Free content tools that every charity needs’ guide for more tips on how to improve your content and workflow.