NORA
NORA is the AI assistant built into Granter, the Italian funding-search platform for the non-profit sector. It summarises grant calls, checks an organisation's eligibility, suggests project ideas and drafts application content.
What is NORA?
NORA is the artificial-intelligence assistant embedded in Granter, an Italian platform that collects funding opportunities for the non-profit sector. Granter is published by Open Terzo Settore S.r.l. of Milan, the company behind the Italia non profit community, which the site says has more than 40,000 members. The platform aggregates fifteen types of opportunity — grants, contributions, scholarships, contests, subsidies, sponsorships, loans, donations of goods, services and corporate volunteering — alongside a database of corporate and institutional donors and an editorial section called the Philanthropy Hub.
NORA sits on top of that material. You open the record of a funding call that interests you and start asking questions about it. Because the assistant already knows your organisation's profile — vision, mission, social causes, entity type, beneficiaries, all entered when you set up your account — it can answer without you restating your context each time. The publisher describes four capabilities: summarising a call's requirements, verifying your eligibility, generating project ideas, and writing content such as outlines, abstracts, presentations and emails. It draws its answers from the official documentation of the opportunities held in Granter's database, which the company says is checked and updated daily by a team of analysts.
The stated aim is to attack four familiar problems: not enough time, pressing deadlines, creative block, and information scattered across too many sources. Around NORA the platform adds weekly email alerts, an affinity engine that recommends calls and donors according to organisation type, field of work and territory, a lightweight CRM for tracking applications, and multi-user team accounts.
Two limits are worth stating plainly. The publisher is explicit that NORA augments the work of a grant writer rather than replacing it, and the terms of service describe the system as producing general, automatic output from statistical language models — not personalised advice. The underlying model provider is never named. Everything is in Italian, and the answers are openly tuned to the Italian third sector.
What it does
- Summarise the requirements of a funding opportunity in detail
- Check in a few clicks whether your organisation meets a call's eligibility conditions
- Answer free-form questions about a call, drawing on its official documentation
- Draft project outlines, abstracts, presentations and emails
- Generate project ideas tailored to your field of activity
- Improve and rework application text you have already written
- Offer strategic suggestions on fundraising and grant writing
When to use NORA / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if NORA is the right fit.
When to use NORA
- Italian non-profit organisations that apply regularly to public and private funding calls
- Grant writers and project designers working to tight submission deadlines
- Small associations and social cooperatives with no dedicated funding-research staff
- Fundraising teams that need to test eligibility before committing time to a full application
- Freelance fundraising consultants advising several third-sector clients
When not to use NORA
- Organisations operating outside Italy: the answers are explicitly tuned to the Italian third sector
- Anyone who needs an interface or output in a language other than Italian
- Teams looking to automate through an API or embed the assistant in their own systems
- Users who want a mobile app: the product is web-only
- People expecting personalised professional advice, which the terms of service explicitly exclude
- Anyone unwilling to commit to an annual subscription once the 14-day trial ends
How to use NORA
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Open a free 14-day trial on Granter, or sign in to an existing account — no payment card is requested for the trial
- Complete your organisation's profile: vision, mission, social causes, entity type, beneficiaries, territory and areas of interest
- Browse or search the database of funding opportunities, using the thematic filters or the affinity recommendations
- Open the record of a call you want to pursue
- Start NORA from that record and ask your questions about the opportunity
- Ask for a summary of the requirements, or run an eligibility check against your organisation's profile
- Request project ideas or suggestions for strengthening your angle
- Have NORA draft an outline, abstract, presentation or email, or rework text you already have
- Track the application in the built-in CRM and set deadline alerts
- Subscribe to a plan from Basic upwards to keep access once the trial expires
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Genuinely vertical: answers are grounded in a curated database of Italian funding calls, not in a generic web search
- Knows your organisation's profile already, which removes most of the prompting effort
- Available from the entry-level plan rather than reserved for the top tier
- 14-day trial with no payment card required
- The product page states plainly that data sent to the model is not retained to train it
- Servers declared within the European Economic Area, with six processors named in the privacy policy
- Publisher fully identifiable: company name, registered office, VAT and REA numbers in the footer
Cons
- No price appears in the HTML of the pricing page: the whole table is injected by JavaScript
- No permanent free plan — after 14 days an annual subscription is required
- Annual commitment renewing automatically, cancellable only by email at least 30 days before expiry, with no refund on mid-term deactivation
- The 14-day consumer right of withdrawal is expressly excluded
- Interface and content in Italian only, centred on Italy
- No API, no mobile app and no documented third-party integrations
- Coverage figures contradict each other across the site's own pages, and the language model behind NORA is never named
Pricing & Plans
There is no permanent free plan. A 14-day free trial is available without a payment card and without commitment, and it includes access to NORA. Beyond the trial, the lowest paid entry point is the Basic plan at 399 EUR per year, excluding VAT, which is also the first tier at which NORA becomes available. Subscriptions run annually and renew automatically. Prospective buyers should note that these amounts are not rendered in the pricing page's HTML: they are supplied by the site's own JavaScript bundle, so the figure should be confirmed in a browser before purchase.
- Basic — 399 EUR per year excluding VAT — grants and opportunities database
- with AI-assisted search and drafting
- the entry tier at which NORA becomes available
- Plus — 1
- 100 EUR per year excluding VAT — access to a list of foundations and companies aligned with the organisation's mission
- Pro — 2
- 700 EUR per year excluding VAT — the full database of key information on institutional donors
- Expert — 4
- 500 EUR per year excluding VAT — Philanthropy Hub access and advanced fundraising management features
- Enterprise — price on request
- via the contact form
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how NORA handles your data.
GDPR overview
Implementation is concrete and above average for a tool of this size. The privacy policy, last updated 10 June 2025, is written under Article 13 of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 and lists each purpose with its legal basis and retention period. Access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection rights are set out by article number, along with the right to complain to the Italian Garante under Article 27. The controller states its servers sit within the European Economic Area, and commits to adequacy decisions or Commission standard contractual clauses where a cloud provider lies outside it. Six processors are named, and the terms provide for a specific Data Processing Agreement where Open processes data on a customer's behalf. No DPO is designated and no minimum age is stated.
Who owns the data?
The data controller is Open Terzo Settore S.r.l., Via Brera 7, Milan, reachable at info@granter.it. The company owns the software and all related intellectual property outright, and its opportunity database is separately protected by the EU sui generis database right, so extracting or reusing any part of it is forbidden. Content you upload stays yours and remains your responsibility; if it contains third-party personal data you act as an independent controller. Note one clause worth reading: the terms allow Open to reuse content supplied by users in its own reports, articles and newsletters. No Data Protection Officer is named anywhere.
Reuse rights
Users may print or download platform content for strictly personal purposes, and may pass content to third parties for personal use provided the site is cited as the source. Beyond that, reuse requires written permission: commercial exploitation and any redistribution are prohibited, and the database is additionally shielded by the sui generis right, which bars extraction or re-utilisation of even part of it. Reverse engineering, sublicensing and building derivative products on the software are all excluded. In short, the answers NORA produces can be used in your own applications, but the underlying grant and donor data cannot be republished or resold.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The privacy policy states that the controller's servers are located within the European Economic Area, placing the processing under EU jurisdiction. No specific country is named and no hosting provider is identified. Where a cloud provider established outside the EEA is used, the controller undertakes that transfers rest on appropriate safeguards — adequacy decisions, standard contractual clauses approved by the European Commission, or other guarantees provided for by the GDPR. Six processors are named in the policy: PayPal, HubSpot, WooCommerce and Stripe for payments, Mailchimp and Mailgun for the newsletter; several of these are established outside the EEA. One detail should not be misread: the site is served through Cloudflare, and the resolved IP address geolocates to the United States. That describes a content-delivery node, not the place where user data is stored.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting NORA.
- No amount is rendered in the HTML of the pricing page — the figures come from the site's JavaScript bundle, so confirm the price in your own browser before committing
- The subscription is annual and renews automatically; cancellation must be emailed at least 30 days before expiry, the consumer right of withdrawal is excluded, and deactivating mid-term brings no refund
- A referral discount code produces a second, lower set of prices; do not mistake it for the list price
- The terms of service and the cookie policy are linked from no page on the site and can only be found through the sitemap, yet they carry most of the binding commitments
- The terms allow the publisher to reuse content supplied by users in its own reports, articles and newsletters
- The liability waiver is broad: a rejected funding application traceable to generated content remains entirely the user's problem, and the publisher gives no guarantee of result
- Relying on the assistant to judge eligibility or to write the substance of a proposal risks eroding the reading and drafting skills that grant work depends on — the output is statistical, it should be verified against the call document, and the cookie policy has not been revised since 2021 while the privacy policy was updated in 2025
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Very low. There is nothing to install, configure or connect: Granter is a web application reached through a browser, and the trial opens without a payment card. The only real preparation is filling in the organisation's profile — areas of interest, challenges, territory, beneficiaries — since that is what NORA reads to tailor its answers. Once that is done the assistant opens directly from any funding-call record, with no settings to adjust, no API key to obtain and no integration to wire up.
Deployment
Supported languages
Behind NORA
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly is NORA?
Who is it aimed at?
What can it actually do?
Does it replace a grant writer?
Is NORA free?
What data does it draw on?
Is my data used to train the model?
Is there an API?
Where is the data hosted?
Who do I contact for help?
Should you pick NORA?
NORA is a narrow tool, and that is precisely where its value lies. It is not a general-purpose assistant with a fundraising skin: it answers from a curated database of Italian funding calls that a team of analysts maintains daily, and it already knows the profile of the organisation asking. For an Italian association or social cooperative that applies to calls several times a year, that combination removes a real and repetitive burden — reading a long call document, working out whether you even qualify, and producing a first draft.
Outside that perimeter the case weakens quickly. Everything is in Italian, the content is openly tuned to the Italian third sector, there is no API and no mobile app, and no third-party integrations are documented. Anyone working in another country will find little here.
The commercial framing deserves attention. NORA is not sold separately: it comes with a Granter subscription, so the real decision is whether the platform as a whole is worth 399 EUR per year excluding VAT at the entry tier. The commitment is annual and renews automatically, mid-term cancellation carries no refund, and the consumer right of withdrawal is expressly excluded.
Transparency is uneven. On data the publisher is unusually clear — servers in the European Economic Area, named processors, an explicit statement that inputs are not retained for model training. On pricing it is not: no amount appears in the pricing page's HTML. Coverage figures also disagree from one page to the next, and the underlying language model is never named. The 14-day trial, which asks for no payment card, is the sensible way to settle the question.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
- Opens in a new window.