Report an accessibility problem

Creating and running effective proposal reviews

Tobin Spratte
March 25, 2023

Organizing and hosting proposal reviews requires time and energy few principal investigators can spare. With blue teams, pink teams, green teams, and red teams, proposal reviews sound more like Dr. Seuss and less like steps recommended by proposal management professionals. The process becomes all the more discouraging when collaborators or reviewers cannot or will not attend, even more so if feedback given during the review meetings is not useful, leaving proposers asking: “Why bother?”

Done properly, review meetings, called color-team reviews in industry, prove invaluable. Just like a great novel requires input from multiple subject-matter experts and editors, a great proposal—that is, one that will get you funded—requires input from people both attached and detached from the project.

Schedule for success

The success of these reviews hinges on their timeliness and organization. Set reasonable, achievable expectations for the condition of drafts prior to reviews. Create and enforce deadlines for your outline, storyboard, and drafts. Hold yourself to the same standards you expect from your team.

Work with people you trust

The composition of your team is as important as adhering to a process or a schedule. Involve co-investigators and reviewers who are not just good at what they do, but who you can trust to show up to meetings and deliver content, language, edits, and feedback on time.

Know what kind of review you need and when you need it

Schedule reviews far enough in advance that you have time to make adjustments. Make sure you have delivered required, completed materials to collaborators or reviewers prior to the meeting. If drafts are incomplete or budget estimates nowhere near ready to discuss, reschedule the reviews or adapt the meeting to your circumstances.

Develop review meeting agendas in advance

Even the finest of minds can get distracted. But reviews should not evolve into isolated scientific debates. Develop an agenda in advance to keep reviewers and researchers on topic, on task, on time. Make sure everyone has a chance to voice their opinions. Do not be afraid to silence sycophants and gadflies monopolizing the conversation.

Develop a set of review criteria

Reviews without guidelines often devolve into a bizarre combination of Socratic dialogues and group therapy. Use a list of evaluation criteria based on the sponsor solicitation to separate constructive criticism from encomium and grousing.

A plethora of positive comments indicates your reviewers are cursed by knowledge, meaning they are so familiar with your idea, your body of work, or your field that they cannot imagine how outsiders would read your proposal. If you have the time, get a second opinion.

An abundance of negative reviews likely means something is seriously wrong with your proposal—usually that your draft was not mature enough to be reviewed by other researchers, proposal experts, and editors.

Want help organizing or facilitating your next proposal review? Email us at ResearchDevelopment@asu.edu.

*This post was originally published by Tobin Spratte, Proposal Manager, in 2017.