Who we are
Nomar Grants is a one-person grant writing practice. It is a sole proprietorship registered in Ontario, Canada, operated by Nicholas Dona, who lives and works in Japan. Clients are US 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations.
Postal address: 900 Chieftain St, Unit 806, Woodstock, ON N4T 0B7, Canada. Email: nicholas@nomargrants.com.
There is one person in this business. When this page says "we", it means one named individual, and he is the only person who reads your files.
This website collects nothing
This site has no analytics, no cookies, no tracking pixels, no advertising tags and no contact form. It loads its own fonts from its own server. Nothing on these pages sends information about you anywhere, and no consent banner is needed because there is nothing to consent to.
Two links leave the site and are worth naming. The scheduling link goes to Calendly, a US company. If you book a call there, Calendly collects your name, email and the time you chose, under Calendly's own privacy policy, and passes the booking to us. The email links open your own mail program. Nothing is collected until you choose to use one of them.
What we collect if you contact us
If you email us, we have your email address, your name if you sign it, and whatever you wrote. That sits in a Google Workspace mailbox. We also keep a short record in our own prospect and client tracking sheet: your name, organization, role, email, where we found the public contact information, and the dates and outcomes of our conversation. We keep that record so we do not contact you twice, and so we honour a request to stop.
What we collect if you become a client
Grant proposals are built from an organization's own records, so a paid engagement involves real documents. Through the intake questionnaire, the kickoff call and the documents you send, we typically receive:
- Organizational facts. Legal name, EIN, address, mission, history, staff counts, board list with roles and affiliations.
- Financial records. Operating budget, program budgets, IRS Form 990, audited financial statements or an annual report, revenue mix, and whether your last audit opinion was clean.
- Program information. What the program does, who it serves, how many people it reached, and any measured outcomes with the document each number came from.
- Grant history. Which funders you have approached, what was awarded or declined, and any past reporting or compliance problem with a funder.
- Contact details for the people we work with. Name, title, work email, work phone, and a short bio of the Executive Director.
We ask you not to send donor lists, individual beneficiary records, case files, or any document identifying a private individual. Proposals need aggregate numbers, not people. If a document you send contains personal records anyway, we delete it on receipt, tell you in writing that we did, and ask for an aggregate version instead.
Some of what you tell us is sensitive without being personal information. A past compliance problem with a funder, or a budget deficit, is exactly the kind of thing the questionnaire asks about and exactly the kind of thing you would not want repeated. We treat it the same way we treat everything else here. It is used to write your proposals and it is not shared.
Why we collect it
To write and research grant applications for you, to check every figure we put in front of a funder against a source document, and to invoice you. That is the whole list. We do not sell information, we do not share it with other clients, and we do not send you marketing about anything other than the work we are doing for you.
Where it is actually stored
Being specific matters more here than being reassuring.
- Google Workspace holds our email, and Google Drive holds client folders and working documents. Access is by password and two-step verification on a single account.
- Google Sheets holds the prospect and client tracker described above.
- A private virtual server, rented from a European hosting provider and administered only by us, runs the software that drafts, fact-checks and sends. Client working files are mirrored onto that server while an engagement is active, because that is where the drafting and verification tools run.
- Stripe processes payments. Card details go to Stripe directly and we never see or store them. We see the fact of a payment, the amount and the date.
- Calendly holds call bookings, as described above.
Because the operator lives in Japan, the business is registered in Canada and the service providers are mostly American, your information crosses borders. If your organization needs a specific data location or a signed data protection addendum, ask before you send anything. We would rather agree terms first than apologise later.
Who can see it
One person. There are no employees. There is no subcontractor, no virtual assistant and no editor with access to client files at the time of writing. If that changes, this page changes first, and anyone with access will be under a written confidentiality agreement before they see a client document.
The service providers listed above can technically access data held on their systems in the course of running their services. Where a paid tier gives better data handling than a free one, we pay for it. Google Workspace is a paid business subscription and the server is rented, not shared. The one exception is stated in full in the AI section below, because it is the exception a careful reader would want named rather than buried.
AI, in full
We use AI tools on your material, and here is exactly how
This is the part most vendors bury, so it gets its own heading and the loudest box on the page.
We use Anthropic's Claude to help research funders, assemble facts, and produce first drafts. The material we put into it includes your organizational facts, your program information, your figures and your documents. It does not include donor lists or individual beneficiary records, because we ask you not to send those and delete them if they arrive.
Three commitments about that:
- A named human writer reads, checks and owns every sentence before it reaches you or a funder. You never receive unreviewed machine output.
- Every factual claim in a draft is verified against a source document from your own records before the draft leaves us. That check is a mandatory step, not a habit.
- Training on your material is switched off. The account is a paid Claude Max subscription, which sits under Anthropic's consumer terms rather than their commercial ones. On those plans, using your conversations to improve their models is off unless the account holder turns it on, and it is turned off here. Anthropic also states that conversations flagged for safety review may be examined by them regardless of that setting. We are relying on their published terms and describing the account we actually hold, rather than presenting either as something we have audited ourselves. If your organization needs the stronger contractual position of a commercial account, ask, and we will move your work onto one before it starts.
If your board or your funder requires that no AI tool touches your material at all, we are not the right vendor, and we would rather tell you that on the first call than discover it later.
How long we keep things
- Client working files. Kept for 12 months after an engagement ends, then deleted, unless you ask for them to go sooner or ask us to keep them longer. You keep your own copy of everything we produce, permanently, so deleting our copy costs you nothing.
- Personal information inside client documents. Deleted on request at any time, and at the end of the engagement.
- Invoices and payment records. Kept as long as tax law requires them to be kept.
- Prospect and contact records. Kept while a conversation is live. If you ask us to stop contacting you, we keep the minimum needed to make sure we never contact you again, which is your email address on a suppression list. Deleting that record entirely would let us email you by accident, which is the opposite of what you asked for.
Deletions are recorded with a date in an internal log, so we can tell you what was deleted and when.
Your requests
Email nicholas@nomargrants.com and ask for a copy of what we hold about you, a correction, or a deletion. You will get a reply within five business days and the action itself within thirty days. No form, no account, no fee.
Cold email, and how to stop it
We send a small number of one-to-one emails to nonprofit leaders whose work contact details are published on their own websites or public filings, about a funding change that is on the public record for their organization. Every one is written for that organization. We do not buy lists and we do not send bulk campaigns.
Every email we send carries our real name, our real postal address and a reply-based opt out. Reply with anything that says stop, remove me, or unsubscribe, and you are removed. Our system reads replies every three hours, so in practice it takes hours rather than the ten business days the law allows. You do not have to be polite about it and you do not have to give a reason.
We are a Canadian sender writing to US recipients, so we comply with both CASL and CAN-SPAM, and we comply with the stricter of the two where they differ.
If something goes wrong
If we learn that client information has been accessed by someone who should not have it, we will tell the affected client promptly, in writing, with what we know and what we are doing about it. We would rather make an awkward phone call than manage a quiet one.
Changes to this page
If this page changes, the effective date at the top changes with it. If a change affects how we handle material for an active client, that client hears about it by email rather than being left to notice.