The Crayon Initiative boosts social reach by 20% and cuts grant writing time by 98% using Vee

About The Crayon Initiative

The Crayon Initiative is a California-based nonprofit with a $5M annual operating budget, dedicated to bringing art, comfort, and creativity to children in hospitals across the country. With programs rooted in art, healthcare, and child wellbeing, their mission is to give kids a moment of joy in some of the hardest moments of their lives.

The challenge: Increasing visibility and funding without adding headcount

Like many nonprofits, The Crayon Initiative was stretched thin. Their team was juggling program work, fundraising, communications, and day-to-day operations with limited time. Social media content took weeks to produce, grant research was slow, and grant writing often required external support that strained their budget. Agency fees were rising, timelines were tight, and the team often had to choose between serving families or keeping up with administrative work. They needed more output, more consistency, and more support but without hiring more staff.

The Solution: 

Once The Crayon Initiative brought Vee into their workflow, everything shifted. Maggie, Vee’s social media AI, began creating and publishing content that increased impressions by 20% and reach by 12% using only organic posts. She saved the team 252 agency hours, about $18,900 in production costs. On the grant side, Grant helped the team scale from 5 grants a year to 50, saving hours of research time, reducing writing time from 40 hours to 15 minutes, and supporting over 40 applications with $460K pending. After just four months, The Crayon Initiative reached positive ROI saving hours and dollars in workload and consultant costs.

How The Crayon Initiative uses Vee.

For The Crayon Initiative, Vee became more than a tool, it became a natural extension of their  team. “Maggie is my new best friend,” said Robin Andrew. “We trained her for a few weeks, and now she comes with ideas and content that would take me weeks to do. We aren’t worried about socials anymore.” Founder Bryan Ware shared the same feeling about their grant support: “Grant has been a huge timesaver for us. We’ve cut our freelancer costs, and now we spend an hour a week reviewing drafts, submitting, and that’s it.” With Vee, the team unlocked more time, saved more money, and gained the capacity they needed to focus on what matters most: helping kids heal through creativity.