Welcome to Inside Impact, Temelio's monthly video interview series where we sit down with leaders across the philanthropic space for honest, unfiltered conversations about what's working, what isn't, and where the sector is headed. No sales pitches, no jargon, just real conversations with people doing the work. Each month, we'll be exploring a mix of topics, from technology and operations to broader themes shaping philanthropy today.
For this episode, we're joined by Grace Chang, Product Lead at Temelio and the company's first-ever product hire, who joined the team about a year ago. Before Temelio, Grace spent much of her career in product roles at large and mid-sized companies across consumer tech and financial services. Her path into philanthropy technology started outside the 9-to-5: in 2020, she helped lead a grassroots fundraising effort for New York City's Chinatown that raised over a million dollars in under a year, an experience that included fielding a $2,000 grant offer from a family foundation and realizing she had no idea how to issue a receipt, report back, or even register as a nonprofit. That gap between the tools philanthropy needed and the tools it had stuck with her through years of nonprofit board service, eventually pulling her away from consumer tech and into building product for the social sector full time.
The $2,000 check that started it all.
Grace's introduction to philanthropy's technology gap wasn't theoretical. While running partnerships for a grassroots Chinatown relief effort during the pandemic, a stranger called offering a $2,000 grant from a family foundation, and then asked for a 501(c)(3) receipt and quarterly reporting. Grace had no idea what any of that meant, and no central resource to figure it out quickly.
"The faster we can get the money, the faster the impact is."
That urgency, and the realization that speed and infrastructure were both missing from the sector's toolkit, stuck with her through years of nonprofit board service in New York and Philadelphia, and eventually became the reason she left consumer product work for philanthropy tech full time.
A client's blunt feedback reframed how Temelio thinks about its own product.
Grace traces a recent shift in Temelio's product strategy back to a single sentence from a client: that Temelio, for all its modern features, is still fundamentally a data repository, a system of record that requires users to go do the work themselves to get real insight out of it.
"As modern and innovative as you guys are, [you're] still a data repository. It's a system of record. And I still need to go in and do the workflows in order to really get the insights from it."
That comment, paired with a recurring theme in client conversations about teams juggling multiple "sources of truth" across their GMS, email threads, and shared drives, pushed Grace, Maya, and co-founder Ruthwick to reimagine the platform from grants management toward grants intelligence.
Grants intelligence, in three phases.
Grace breaks the vision into three stages. Phase one is helping the platform better understand a foundation's data through features such as AI-generated proposal summaries, the MCP connector for building custom reports, and AI prompting for report generation. Phase two is contextualizing that data against peers to help foundations understand how its giving compares within its category. Phase three is connecting a foundation's own data with external research and academic literature to surface what's most impactful in a given program area.
"The unique benefit of being a grants intelligence system is that we are sitting on a lot of data across the industry."
In a risk-averse sector, the playbook is show, not tell.
Foundations, Grace notes, are often thoughtful and intentional to the point of moving slowly on new technology. Her approach isn't to wait for comfort to arrive on its own, but to put tools directly in front of people. The MCP connector launch is her go-to example: rather than releasing it and hoping for adoption, she sits down with clients, connects it to their own system live, and builds a report in front of them that would otherwise take hours.
"Instead of sort of throwing it out there and having people adopt it at their own pace, I like to show people what it can do... at that point, I see a lot of light bulbs go off."
A simple framework keeps prioritization from becoming a popularity contest.
With clients ranging from two-person family foundations to institutional funders with over 70 staff, Grace built a lightweight prioritization framework she calls REI: reach, impact, and effort. Every incoming request, whether from a client, from Maya, or from the Client Success team, gets evaluated on how many clients it touches (reach), how much it would unblock their day-to-day work (impact), and how much design and engineering effort it would take to build (effort).
"We take a really systematic approach to prioritizing the requests that come in."
Build versus partner comes down to where Temelio actually has the right to win.
Asked how she decides what to build in-house versus bring in through a partnership, Grace pointed to Temelio's integrations with Candid and Complēre as the clearest examples of partnering: both required years of specialized, deep domain work that Temelio wasn't positioned to recreate quickly or credibly. Native, best-in-class features like forms or the conflict-of-interest module, by contrast, get built in-house, because the effort is manageable and building it themselves gets it to market faster.
"It kind of depends on the feature... in those cases, we very much feel like a partnership with true experts was the right model to go with."
Grace's ask of the sector: stop settling, and ask for more.
Closing the conversation, Grace reframed the question of what philanthropy should stop believing about technology into what it should start demanding of its partners. Her ask is for foundations to bring their full wish list to the table, with conviction, instead of assuming certain requests are off-limits.
"Ask for more of your partners, of your technology partners, including us, and hold us accountable to it."
Inside Impact is a monthly video series by Temelio featuring candid conversations with leaders across foundations, corporate giving, and philanthropy tech. New episodes every month at trytemelio.com.
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