Beacon by Lighthouse

Privacy notice

Last updated October 5, 2026. Questions: support@lighthousent.org.

Beacon is run by Lighthouse Nonprofit Technologies, a 501(c)(3), for verified nonprofits. This notice says plainly what Beacon keeps about your organization and your team, who can see it, which services touch it, and how long it stays.

What Beacon keeps

  • Your organization. Its legal name and EIN, the IRS record we checked it against, and the profile your team writes: mission, programs, service area, budget, partners, past grants, the kinds of grants you want.
  • Your documents. What your team uploads to the Vault (past applications, 990s, annual reports, budgets). Beacon extracts their text so your agent can read and cite them. Scanned pages are transcribed for the same purpose.
  • Your conversations and work. Messages with your agent, the leads it found and the reasons, the opportunities in your pipeline, project ideas, drafts, notes it keeps about your plans, and short facts your team told it (which you can see, edit and delete under What Beacon knows).
  • Your team. Each member's email address, role, when they joined, invitations and requests to join, and each person's own settings such as the weekly email.
  • Usage and operations. How many agent runs your organization used and their cost to us, errors, and the records operators need to keep the service healthy.

Beacon is for organizational records. Do not upload client or beneficiary records; your agent is instructed not to keep personal information about the people you serve, and to say so if someone shares it.

Who can see it

  • Your team. Everyone who is a member of your organization in Beacon sees the same workspace: leads, pipeline, conversations, documents.
  • Your agent, and only yours. Each organization's agent runs in its own isolated space with its own memory and files. It cannot see another organization, and no organization can see yours. The agent reads public web pages and public records; it never sends your information to a web address or a search engine beyond the plain topic words needed to find funders.
  • Lighthouse operators. A small number of Lighthouse staff can see organizational data when verifying an organization, keeping the service running, or answering a request from you. They do not read your conversations as a matter of course.
  • Nobody else. Beacon does not sell or share your data with funders, data brokers or advertisers.

Services that process data for Beacon

Each one handles only what its job needs, under its own terms with Lighthouse:

  • Anthropic provides the AI models your agent runs on. Your prompts (profile, document text, conversations, public records) are sent to run the model and are not used to train it under Lighthouse's commercial terms.
  • TypeSafe provides a classifier that reads each lead's public facts and a short summary of your profile (mission, role, program names, focus terms, budget size, service area), never your documents, conversations or people.
  • Supabase hosts the database and file storage, in the United States, with access controls that keep each organization's rows and files to its own members.
  • Amazon Web Services hosts the server that runs your agent.
  • Vercel hosts the web application.
  • Postmark delivers Beacon's emails (sign-in links, invitations, briefings, the weekly summary).

Public records your agent reads come from public sources: the funder's own website, IRS filings via ProPublica and GivingTuesday's 990 data, Grants.gov, USAspending and state grant portals.

How long it stays

  • Your profile, documents, pipeline, drafts and the current version of each project idea stay as long as your organization has an account.
  • Earlier versions of a project idea are kept 14 days after a newer one replaces them.
  • Your agent's working session files are kept 30 days and its activity logs 14 days.
  • Invitations expire after 7 days. A sign-in session lasts up to 30 days and ends after 7 days without a visit.
  • When you ask us to close your organization's account, we delete its data and its agent's files; write to the address above.

Your choices

  • See, edit or delete the short facts your agent remembers under Settings, What Beacon knows.
  • Turn the weekly email on or off under Personal settings.
  • Download a copy of your organization's data any time under Personal settings; ask for a correction or deletion by writing to the address above.

Changes

Beacon is in a pilot and this notice will change as the service does. Material changes are announced to the owners of each organization by email before they take effect.