Research development offices
Nobody on your faculty gets left behind
Your problem is not finding grants. It is that some of your faculty stopped trying, you know roughly who, you cannot scale yourself to sit with each of them, and you have very little visibility into what is actually happening across the college.
The uncomfortable part of the job
New faculty who never cracked the system, and mid-career faculty who tried twice and stopped, do not announce that they have given up. They just stop appearing in the pipeline. You know it is happening. You cannot fix it one office hour at a time, and the ones who need you most are the least likely to ask.
That is a capacity problem you have been told to solve with encouragement, and encouragement does not scale either.
The expertise gap runs in both directions
You know grants and you do not know their subject. They know their subject and they do not know grants. Neither of you can write the other's half, which is why the help you can give is real but always partial.
This is the single best fit for our writer that exists in any market we serve, because it drafts from the researcher's own documents. You do not need to understand quantum optics to help a quantum-optics professor put an application together. Their papers and protocols supply the substance; the assembly is what gets taken off both of you.
We have not seen a competitor make this argument, which we think is because most of them are selling discovery and discovery was never your problem.
What you can finally see
The admin view is a scoreboard across everyone in your program.
- Who is applying, and who is not
- Applied, won, lost and pending, per person. The zeros in the applied column are the answer to the question you have been guessing at. Nothing pushes an alert at you, so this is a report you read rather than a system that nags, and reading it monthly is enough.
- Readiness across the whole group
- An average readiness score with the distribution behind it, so you can tell a strong group with a long tail from an evenly weak one. Those need completely different interventions and the difference is invisible from submission counts.
- What was requested and what was won
- Rolled up across everyone, which is the number your dean asks for. It is populated by people recording outcomes, so it is as complete as your logging discipline, and worth knowing that before you quote it upward.
- Onboarding, per invitation
- How many faculty you invited against how many actually started. The quiet failure in every program like this is the people who never logged in, and this is where they show up.
You cannot read their work, deliberately
Clicking a faculty member does not open their proposals or documents, and there is no code path that would let it. You see the scoreboard, never the work product.
That is the answer to the question a suspicious PI will ask you in the first week, and it is worth being able to answer it flatly. Their drafts stay theirs. If they want your eyes on something they share that file with you, and they can revoke it. The enforcement is documented.
What we are not
We are not a research administration system and will not pretend to be one. No Cayuse, no Kuali, no InfoEd. Proposal routing, internal approvals, effort reporting and subawards all sit outside this, as does compliance in the regulatory sense of the word.
Submission is not ours either. Grants.gov, ASSIST and Research.gov all want a person with institutional credentials, and nothing here talks to your ERP.
What it does cover is discovery, eligibility, deadlines, drafting from a researcher's own material, and outcome tracking across a group. If what you need is the system of record, this is not it, and it sits alongside one perfectly well.
Has anyone actually done this?
University research offices are among the hundreds of customers we have served. The story below is the throughput question in its purest form: 26 separate proposals from one organization, which is exactly the shape of the problem an office supporting many faculty is solving every week.
Rather than applying for grants directly, this customer wrote their services into other organizations' proposals, and won work from 26 of them.
Talk to us about your faculty.
Or try it on a single proposal first. Both are reasonable places to start.