Privacy policy

GrantFinder is an independent grant matching service for businesses in Ireland. We are not a government agency, we are not affiliated with or endorsed by any government agency, and we play no part in deciding who receives funding. We gather the schemes that public bodies run, keep them current, and help you work out which ones you might qualify for.

For the purposes of the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 and the Data Protection Act 2018, GrantFinder is the controller of the personal data described on this page. You can reach us at hello@grantfinder.ie.

• You do not need an account, and we do not ask for your name to show you your matches.
• Most of what you tell us is information about your business — its county, its sector, its size — rather than information about you personally.
• We do not sell personal data, and we do not pass your details to grant agencies unless you specifically ask us to.
• We do not run advertising or tracking cookies, and we do not let anyone follow you across other websites from here.
• You can email hello@grantfinder.ie at any time to ask what we hold about you, or to have it deleted.

Everything below is the detail behind those five points. It does not contradict them.

Information you give us

• Your answers to the matching questions. Where the business is based, what sector it trades in, roughly how many people it employs, its turnover band, how long it has been trading, how it is set up (sole trader, partnership, limited company), and what you are looking to fund. Every question is optional — skip anything you would rather not answer and you will still get matches, just less precise ones.
• Contact details, if you choose to give them. An email address if you want your shortlist sent to you, or want to hear when a new scheme fits. A name, business name and phone number if you ask our team to help with an application.
• Correspondence. Emails you send us and our replies.

Information collected automatically

Like any website, ours records standard technical information needed to serve and protect the pages: your IP address, the page you asked for, the time, the page that referred you, and your browser and device type. These are ordinary server logs. We use them to keep the site up, to diagnose faults and to stop abuse.

What we do not collect

• No password, because there is no account to protect.
• No PPS numbers, tax reference numbers, bank details or financial statements. We do not need them to match you, and you should not send them to us.
• No special category data — nothing about health, beliefs, politics, trade union membership or anything else in Article 9 of the GDPR.
• No location data from your device. Where you tell us your county, that is a question you answered, not a reading we took.

The GDPR requires us to have a specific reason for every use of personal data. Ours are set out below.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed running the service against your rights and kept what we collect to the least that makes matching work. You can object to any of it — see Your rights.

We do not use advertising cookies, and we do not embed third party trackers that follow you around other websites.

The site uses only what it needs to work: a small amount of storage in your own browser that keeps your place as you move through the matching questions and remembers notices you have dismissed. That information stays on your device. You can clear it at any time through your browser settings, and doing so will simply start you at the first question again.

If we later add anything that is not strictly necessary — analytics, for instance — we will ask for your consent before setting it, as the ePrivacy Regulations (S.I. No. 336 of 2011) require, and we will update this page first.

• We do not sell personal data and we do not share it for anyone else’s marketing.
• Service providers. Our website hosting and infrastructure provider, and our email provider, process data on our behalf. They act only on our instructions, are bound by written terms that meet Article 28 of the GDPR, and may not use your information for their own purposes.
• Grant agencies and funding bodies. We do not pass your details to them. When you decide to apply, you apply to the agency directly and their own privacy notice applies from that point. The only exception is where you expressly ask us to introduce you or to act on your behalf.
• Legal disclosures. We may disclose information where the law requires it, where a court orders it, or where it is needed to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.
• Business transfers. If the service is ever sold or merged, information may pass to the buyer. They would remain bound by this policy, or would give you notice of a replacement before changing it.

We keep personal data inside the European Economic Area wherever we can. Where a provider we rely on processes data outside the EEA, we do so under a European Commission adequacy decision for that country, or under Standard Contractual Clauses together with whatever additional safeguards that particular transfer needs. Email hello@grantfinder.ie if you want to know which providers are involved and what safeguards apply to them.

• Matching answers given without contact details exist to produce your results while you are using the site. We do not keep them afterwards as a record about you. We may keep aggregate counts that cannot identify anyone, so we can see which schemes are in demand.
• An email address given for a shortlist or for alerts is kept until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete it, and in any event no longer than two years after you last engaged with us.
• Correspondence is kept for up to two years after the matter it relates to is closed.
• Records of application help we have given you are kept for up to six years after the work ends, which matches the period in which claims can normally be brought under the Statute of Limitations 1957.
• Server logs are kept for a short period, normally no more than 30 days, unless a specific log is held longer for a security investigation.

When a retention period ends, we delete the data or anonymise it so that it can no longer be linked back to you.

The site is served over HTTPS. Access to anything we do store is limited to the people who need it to do their work. No system is perfectly secure and we will not pretend otherwise — but the most effective protection we can offer you is to hold very little in the first place, which is how the service is deliberately built.

Please do not email us bank details, tax reference numbers or financial statements. We do not need them, and email is not a secure way to send them.

Under the GDPR you have the right to ask us to do each of the following.

• Access — give you a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Rectification — correct anything inaccurate or incomplete.
• Erasure — delete it, where we have no overriding reason to keep it.
• Restriction — pause our use of it while a dispute about it is resolved.
• Objection — object to processing we base on legitimate interests. If you object to direct marketing we must stop, with no balancing test.
• Portability — receive data you gave us in a common, machine-readable format, where we process it by automated means on the basis of consent or of an agreement with you.
• Withdrawal of consent — at any time, where consent is what we relied on. That does not affect anything done before you withdrew it.

To exercise any of these, email hello@grantfinder.ie. We will respond within one month. For complex requests that can be extended by a further two months, and we will tell you inside the first month if it needs to be. There is no charge. Because we do not ask you to create an account, we may need enough information to be confident a request relates to data we actually hold about you — we will not ask for more than that.

Automated decision-making

Ranking grants by relevance is automated, but it produces suggestions rather than decisions. It has no legal or similarly significant effect on you: it does not determine whether you receive funding, because every application is decided by the agency running the scheme. You can always ask someone on our team to go through your results with you.

Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, please tell us first at hello@grantfinder.ie so we have a chance to put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Irish supervisory authority, the Data Protection Commission, at 21 Fitzwilliam Square South, Dublin 2, D02 RD28 — by phone on +353 1 765 0100, or through dataprotection.ie.

Every grant page links out to the agency that runs the scheme, so you can read the official terms and apply. Those sites are not ours and this policy does not cover them — read their privacy notices before giving them anything. We re-check our links each week, but we have no control over what those sites do with information you give them.

GrantFinder is aimed at people running or starting a business and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us personal data, email hello@grantfinder.ie and we will delete it.

We update this page whenever the service changes in a way that affects it. The date at the top always reflects the current version. If a change materially affects how we use personal data we already hold, we will say so prominently on the site; where we hold your email address we will tell you directly, and where the change needs your consent we will ask for it before acting on it.

Questions about this policy, or about anything on this page: hello@grantfinder.ie. We have not appointed a Data Protection Officer; that address reaches the people responsible for data protection at GrantFinder.

GrantFinder is an independent service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any government agency.