Where the Numbers Come From
First-party data only: what our own users tell us and how they behave on our own platform, nothing licensed or scraped.
Every figure in this series comes from FundingPoint's own systems: signals inferred from how people engage with our emails and site, and information people give us directly when they sign up or respond. We do not buy third-party datasets, license syndicated research, or repeat statistics we found somewhere else and call them ours.
That is a narrower dataset than a national survey firm works with, and we say so in every piece. It is also a more honest one. We can trace every number back to a query we can rerun.
The Floor We Won't Go Below
We do not publish any figure built on fewer than 50 people, full stop.
Before any statistic makes it into a published piece, the underlying group has to include at least 50 distinct people. If a pattern is real but the group behind it is smaller than that, we leave it out rather than round a small number up into something that sounds more solid than it is.
This is why some pieces in this series are narrower than others. We would rather publish three well-supported findings a month than ten thin ones.
What We Never Do
No individual-level data, no cherry-picked framing, no claims dressed up as national statistics.
We report in aggregate only. No individual's information, situation, or identity is ever described in a way that could single them out. Ages, exact locations, and other identifying details are generalized or left out entirely.
We also do not claim our findings represent the country as a whole. Everyone in this dataset found FundingPoint through some combination of our own outreach and their own search, which is a specific population, not a random sample of the United States. When a piece pairs our numbers with outside context, like a government dataset, we say so and cite the source directly.
What Happens Before Publication
Every piece is checked for a real, current signal before it's written, and killed if there isn't one.
Before we write anything, we check whether the underlying data has actually changed since the last time we covered a similar topic. Republishing the same numbers under a new headline would not be honest reporting, so we do not do it. If a query comes back with nothing new that clears our 50-person floor, the piece does not run that cycle. That has happened, and it will happen again. We would rather skip an edition than stretch one.
Every published piece also names a real author from our editorial team and a real reviewer, both listed at the top of the article, so there is a person accountable for what is on the page.
