How GrantTitan earns trust: a record you can read

1. How verification works

Verification is automatic. The only things you ever do yourself are click a link in an email and, if your organization has one, connect a Candid profile. There is no manual review queue, no phone calls, and no document chase. Checks run against named sources:

Checks re-run on their own — on a schedule, and right away whenever an email or EIN changes — so if an organization’s status changes later, its profile changes with it.

Anything the sources do not cover, you may type in yourself, but it is labeled “Not yet verified” on the profile. An unverified fact can never satisfy a funder’s rule that requires a verified one.

2. Security practices

The practices below are the platform’s baseline, stated in plain words:

• Multi-factor authentication (MFA) — a password plus a second proof that it is you. Available and encouraged when you sign up.
• Role-based access — each person sees only what their role needs: organization admin, staff, reviewer, teacher, school admin, funder admin.
• Least-privilege defaults — nobody starts with more access than their job needs.
• Encryption in transit and at rest — information is scrambled while it travels and while it is stored.
• A document vault with per-document sharing — you choose, for each application, exactly which funder sees which document.
• A full audit log — every view, message, decision, and export is written down, so there is always a record of who saw what, and when.
• Your data stays yours — your organization can export its data and close its account. Closing an account never costs a fee.
• Accessibility target: WCAG 2.1 AA — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, level AA, the standard this site is built toward.

3. Who can see your information

• Your profile and your needs are shown to funders on GrantTitan — that is how funders find organizations and classrooms to support. For each need, you choose: visible to funders on the platform, or visible only to funders you apply to.
• Your documents are different from your profile. A document is shared only with a specific application, to the one funder you chose to apply to — and every time someone views it, that view is written to the audit log.
• Your profile has two layers. The public page — your story, where you work, your topics, your website — is open to everyone on GrantTitan, and your contact information appears there only if you turn sharing on (it starts off). The second layer — your EIN, your budget size, your documents, your direct contact details — is never public: it is shown only to a funder who is reviewing an application you sent to their grant.
• Your messages live inside the application they belong to, and they exist only where the funder has turned messages on. They are kept in the audit log like everything else.
• Funders are verified the same way you are. Every grant shows its funder’s verification record, so you can check who you are dealing with before you apply.
• Your data is never sold — not sold, not rented, and not used for advertising.

4. Education privacy

These are hard rules of the platform — not settings someone can switch off:

• No student names anywhere on the platform — not in posts, applications, messages, or check-ins.
• No photos of identifiable students.
• No grades and no student records of any kind.
• The rule is repeated at the moment it matters — on the forms and upload prompts a teacher actually uses.
• A classroom award is paid to the school or district, or spent on the materials themselves — never as cash to a teacher personally.

5. How to tell it is really GrantTitan

Grant applications attract copycats and fee scams, so here is how the real GrantTitan behaves — always:

• We never charge a nonprofit, teacher, or school any fee — not to join, not to verify, not to post a need, not to apply.
• We never ask anyone to pay to release a grant.
• We never ask for gift cards, wire transfers, or cash.
• We never ask for your password by email, text, or message.
• Applications and messages happen inside the platform, in your account — never by email or a messaging app.

6. How messaging stays safe

Messages exist only inside an application, and only where the funder has turned them on. Every message is checked before it is sent — the checks run on GrantTitan’s servers, not just in your browser:

• Text only, by design — there is no way to attach a photo or a file to a message. The button simply does not exist.
• Language is checked — profanity and slurs are stopped before they are sent, and a stopped message is never stored.
• Money and contact stay on the platform — a message that tries to move payment or conversation somewhere else (a payment app, a wire transfer, an email address, a phone number, a link) is stopped, because off-platform is where scams happen and records get lost.
• Stopped messages are counted, not kept — the conversation shows how many messages the checks stopped; the stopped text itself is not saved anywhere.
• Everything sent is in the record — messages live in the application record and the audit log, and either side can report a conversation to GrantTitan’s safety team.
• Meetings stay inside too — a funder can also request a GrantTitan Virtual Meeting (voice or video) from inside an application, and the note on the request passes the same checks as a message. The meeting link is generated for that one meeting when the applicant picks a time; invites and reminders arrive as notices inside GrantTitan, and no one’s email address or phone number is ever exchanged.

7. Proof you can check

Nothing on this page asks you to take our word for it. The records GrantTitan checks are public, and the registries we work within are public too — here they are, so you can re-run any check yourself:

• IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search — look up any nonprofit by name or EIN (employer identification number) and see the same legal name, tax-exempt status, revocation record, and deductibility the platform checks.
• Candid nonprofit profiles (GuideStar) — the profile and transparency status we pull into a nonprofit’s record, maintained by the organization itself.
• NCES school search — the federal school directory record behind a verified school or district.
• SDPC Resource Registry — the Student Data Privacy Consortium’s registry of National Data Privacy Agreements (NDPA) between districts and providers — the agreement we are ready to sign with any district.

If a check on this page and a check on GrantTitan ever disagree, believe the source — and tell support, so the record gets fixed.

About the pilot

GrantTitan is in pilot. The rules on this page are the rules the product runs on: verification checks run against the named sources — the IRS tax-exempt organization database, Candid, and verified school-system records — and every grant, application, message, and payment follows the practices stated above. If a rule here ever fails in practice, tell support — the record is how we fix it.