Privacy Policy

Who we are

Gem Group, LLC advises research institutions, life sciences companies and their investors on federal funding, government relations and capital. Our principal office is Watergate South, 700 New Hampshire Ave NW, Washington, DC 20037. You can reach us at ggiolito@gemgroupllc.com or (480) 347-6550.

We are the controller of the information described here.

What we collect

Almost everything we hold about you comes from one place: the consultation request form. If you never submit it, we never learn who you are.

When you submit the form, you give us:

• Your name, email address and phone number
• Your organization, if you tell us
• The practice area you are interested in
• Whatever you write in the message field

Alongside that, the form records automatically:

• The page you submitted from, and the site that referred you
• Any campaign tags in the link you arrived through
• Your browser's user agent string
• A scrambled, one-way fingerprint of your IP address

That last one deserves a plain explanation. We do not store your IP address. We store a salted one-way hash of it, which lets us notice that fifty submissions came from one source without letting us — or anyone reading the database — recover the address itself.

Browsing the funding opportunity tracker collects nothing beyond the analytics described below. You do not need an account to use it, and we do not record which notices you look at against your identity.

Why we use it

To respond to your inquiry and to scope whether we are the right firm for it. That is the whole purpose.

The automatic fields tell us which pages bring in genuine inquiries, so we know what is worth writing. The IP fingerprint exists only to catch spam.

We do not sell your information, rent it, or trade it. Submitting the form does not add you to a mailing list — our email system is explicitly told not to subscribe you, on every message we send.

Inquiries are treated as confidential. An organization asking whether it should pursue a particular federal opportunity is telling us something commercially sensitive, and we handle it that way.

Who else sees it

We run this site on services that necessarily handle some of your data. We use these and no others:

• Vercel — hosting. Sees server logs, including IP addresses.
• Neon — our database. Holds your inquiry and any notes we add to it.
• Plunk — sends us the email notifying us of your inquiry, which contains what you submitted.
• Clerk — sign-in for our own staff only. It never sees anything about you.
• Google Analytics — page views and clicks. See the next section.
• Umami — page views and clicks, counted without cookies.
• Vercel Analytics — page speed and view counts, without cookies or any cross-site identifier.

We will also disclose information if the law requires it. Nothing here is shared with data brokers or advertisers.

Cookies and analytics

This site sets very few cookies, and we would rather explain each than post a banner.

• Google Analytics sets cookies to tell repeat visits apart and to measure which pages lead to inquiries. It records page views, and clicks on email addresses, phone numbers and links away from the site — including links out to the official notice on a funding opportunity.
• Sign-in cookies exist only for our own staff using the admin area, and are never set for visitors.

Umami, our second analytics tool, sets no cookies at all. It counts the same page views and clicks without storing anything on your device.

Your theme preference is kept in your browser's local storage and never sent to us.

If you would rather not be measured, Google publishes a browser add-on that opts you out of Google Analytics everywhere, and most browsers can block these cookies outright. Nothing on this site stops working if you do.

How long we keep it

We will be straight about this rather than quote a tidy number. Inquiries are kept indefinitely. We do not currently run anything that deletes them automatically, so we are not going to claim a retention period we do not enforce.

If you want your inquiry removed, ask us and we will delete it — the record and any notes attached to it go together, permanently.

Your choices

Whatever jurisdiction you are in, you can ask us to:

• Tell you what we hold about you
• Correct it if it is wrong
• Delete it
• Stop contacting you

Email ggiolito@gemgroupllc.com and we will action it.

We do not sell personal information, so there is nothing to opt out of.

Children

This site is aimed at professionals at research institutions, companies and investment firms. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.

Changes

If we change how we handle your information, we will change this page and move the date at the top. Material changes deserve more than a silent edit, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Contact

Questions about any of this go to ggiolito@gemgroupllc.com, or call (480) 347-6550. Post reaches us at Watergate South, 700 New Hampshire Ave NW, Washington, DC 20037.