How We Verify Grant Information

Why this page exists

Most published grant information is wrong in a specific way: it describes a program as it existed when the page was written, not as it exists today. Deadlines pass, intakes close between windows, funding rates change, and the page keeps promising the old facts. A business that plans around a closed program loses months. So the standard we hold ourselves to is not "was this true when we wrote it" but "is this true right now, and can we show when we last checked."

The verification protocol

• Primary sources only. Program status, deadlines, rates, and eligibility come from the administering organization's own pages and documents — not from aggregator sites, search summaries, or memory. Where we cite a figure, we record the source it came from.
• Evidence, not impressions. When we re-verify a program, we record a verbatim quote from the official page supporting the status we publish, along with the date checked and the URL read.
• Scope is not status. A program funded "to 2028" is not the same as a program you can apply to today. We distinguish an open intake from an announced envelope, a framework, or a program between intakes — because conflating them is the single most common way funding lists mislead.
• "We could not verify" is an allowed answer. When an official source is unreachable or genuinely ambiguous, we say so and park the claim rather than guess. Roughly a dozen programs in our research corpus are currently marked exactly that way, with the reason recorded.

Automated freshness checks

Human diligence decays, so the checks are automated. Our publishing system runs two guards on every change to this site:

• A dated-claims gate that scans every page for dates written in upcoming tense — "closes 4 August" — and blocks publication once that date has passed. Recording history is fine; presenting a passed deadline as upcoming is not, and the system makes the second physically hard to ship.
• A staleness report over our internal registry of 175+ programs that ranks every entry by how old its verification evidence is relative to how fast that program changes — deadline-driven programs are re-checked most often, continuous programs quarterly, closed programs annually.

What the dates on our pages mean

Where a page shows a "last verified" date, it means a person or an audited check read the administering organization's own material on that date and confirmed what we publish. Where no date is shown, the information reflects our most recent research pass but has not had an individual re-check — treat it as a starting point and confirm with the program before planning around it. We would rather show you an honest gap than a decorative timestamp.

Questions about a specific figure

If anything we publish looks out of date, tell us: funding@impactapplications.ca. We treat a reader-reported error with the same priority as a failed automated check, and corrections are made on the record — see our editorial policy.