Pre-Submission Support: What Made the Difference?
Looking back at your most recent grant proposal, what institutional support made the biggest difference before submission, and what additional support would have significantly strengthened your application?
I have some questions.
Looking back at my most recent grant proposal, mentorship from senior researchers and administrative support from my institution were the most valuable forms of assistance before submission. Constructive feedback on the proposal's methodology and alignment with the funding call helped improve its quality. Institutional support in reviewing compliance requirements and coordinating submission documents also reduced administrative challenges. However, additional support through dedicated grant-writing workshops and expert pre-submission peer review would have strengthened the competitiveness of the application. Access to professional editing and more time for internal review would also have enhanced the overall quality and impact of the proposal.
While institutional support was available, it was often fragmented and provided too close to the submission deadline to have maximum impact. There was limited access to experienced grant reviewers who could provide critical, funder-specific feedback before submission. More proactive institutional coordination, dedicated proposal development support, and protected time for grant writing would substantially improve the quality and competitiveness of future applications.
Reading Fortunate's two reflections above adds an
important dimension to what I shared earlier. The point about support being
"fragmented and provided too close to the submission deadline"
describes almost exactly what we experienced with our first FID submission
before we learned to rescope, timing, not just content, was our real gap.
That's pushed me to think more concretely about
what "pre-submission support" should actually look like in practice,
beyond good intentions. A few examples from how we've since restructured our
own process at Purpose Rwanda:
We now build in a mandatory two-week
internal review buffer before any external deadline. This came
directly from learning the hard way that "internal review" done three
days before submission isn't real review, it's a final read-through under
pressure. Fortunate's point about protected time for grant writing resonates
strongly here; without ring-fenced time, reviewers end up rubber-stamping
rather than genuinely challenging the proposal.
We started keeping a simple internal
library of our own past submissions, funded and unfunded, with notes on
reviewer feedback where we received it. This partly answers Michael's
original question above about wanting access to examples, we couldn't get
external successful proposals to study, so we began treating our own submission
history as our first teaching resource. Even unsuccessful applications became
useful once annotated with what we'd change.
On mentorship specifically: I'd
add one nuance to what's been shared already. The most useful mentorship we've
received wasn't about proposal writing mechanics, it was a funder-side reviewer
once explaining, in fifteen minutes, how reviewers actually triage applications
under time pressure. That single conversation reshaped how we now structure our
executive summaries. It confirmed something I increasingly believe: technical
writing skill and funder psychology are two different competencies, and most
early-career support focuses heavily on the former while neglecting the latter.
This raises a question I'd genuinely value the
community's thinking on: for those of you who've had access to funder-side
reviewers as mentors, even briefly, what's one thing you learned about how
proposals get evaluated that you wish someone had told you earlier?