How matching works
The Checkup uses the funding purpose first, then recipient type, state or national availability, education or business stage, funding preferences, and optional categories. It excludes expired, archived, unverified, inactive, and stale records. The internal relevance score is not displayed.
Strong Match, Possible Match, and Worth Exploring describe general alignment with the record’s tags. They are not eligibility decisions or funding predictions. Broad results may appear when optional answers are skipped.
Source standards
We prioritize official federal, state, local, college, foundation, nonprofit, and sponsor pages. A directory is labeled as a directory and is not represented as a specific award. Source labels identify who hosts the information; they do not imply endorsement.
Freshness and deadlines
Each record stores its source URL, last verified date, next review date, status, and source notes. Records past their review date are suppressed from matches. Dates and award amounts remain “verify with official source” unless verified for the relevant current cycle. We do not reuse a prior cycle’s deadline as if it were current.
Planning tools and privacy
The calculator adds confirmed funding entered by the visitor and caps coverage at 100%. It does not include unapproved loans or unconfirmed awards. Checkup and calculator interactions run in the visitor’s browser; answers are not sent to a server.