Industry eligibility
The sector a program will fund. The difficulty is vocabulary: two portals can describe the same slice of the economy with names that never meet, so a plain keyword search misses programs that fit.
Part of the GrantTrove grant funding glossary — one entry for every field the catalogue stores.
Also called Sector · Field of work · Focus area · NAICS restriction
In detail
Federal notices lean on industry classification codes, state portals use their own category lists, and foundations use mission language. "Agriculture", "specialty crop", "food systems" and "rural development" can all point at the same programme space and share no words.
We map source vocabularies onto one internal set of categories so a search on a sector reaches every record that belongs to it. The mapping is recorded rather than applied invisibly, because a mapping that cannot be inspected is a claim you cannot check.
Where a source category has no honest home in our vocabulary, it stays unmapped rather than being forced into the nearest one. A wrong mapping is worse than a missing one: it puts a record in front of someone it does not fit.
Against use of funds
Industry is the sector you work in; use of funds is what the money buys. A program can fund your sector and refuse to pay for the equipment your project needs. Filtering on sector alone produces a shortlist that survives the first screen and dies at the budget.
How GrantTrove stores it
- Source category names are mapped to one internal vocabulary so that two names for one sector stop splitting the results between them.
- Unmappable categories are left unmapped and visible rather than forced into an approximate bucket.
Common questions
Why does one sector have several names?
Because each portal built its own list independently. The names are artefacts of the publisher, not of the funding, which is why they are mapped rather than searched literally.
Do you filter by industry classification code?
Where a notice states one, it is part of what we read. Most non-federal programs state no code at all, so a code-only filter would discard most of the catalogue.
What happens to a category you cannot map?
It stays unmapped. Forcing it into the nearest bucket would surface the record for searches it does not answer.