Making life easy for selection committee reviewers who want to skim rather than read is part of writing a winning proposal. With all the blood and sweat your team pours into creating and honing and polishing your proposal, wouldn’t you like the reviewers on the contract selection committee to read the whole thing and then, … Read more
What is ghosting? Ghosting is proposal writing jargon for showing the deficiencies in your competitors’ solutions without calling your competitors by name. Suppose, for example, that you’re competing for a NIH contract where solutions X, Y and Z are likely to be proposed as ways to fulfill the service needs described in NIH’s RFP. Your … Read more
Even minor instructions about money can be a big deal When NIH grant application instructions concern matters that are not strictly related to research, you may be tempted to give them short shrift. Watch out, because doing this can mean the difference between winning and losing your grant. This applies especially to grant application instructions … Read more
The story goes that some years back one of the federal agencies — I think it might have been NIH — was surprised by the overwhelming number of companies that responded to the RFP for a particular contract. There were way more competitors than they wanted to handle. So, they thinned the herd. They eliminated … Read more
Want to win more NIH SBIR grant money faster? Submit more than one grant application at a time and — if you do it right — it’s possible to double your grant awards in half the time. This is what I call the Double Up strategy, where instead of submitting one SBIR grant application per … Read more
I have been told some scientists find the pressure of writing R01 grants so intense they literally throw up. While I’m sure that’s rare, I have no trouble believing it’s happened. Just as it’s happened to people in business faced with losing their jobs if they don’t sell. Here’s a suggestion that certainly won’t make … Read more