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Research development’s accredited, highly trained proposal managers adapt best practices to meet the particular needs of every faculty team with whom we work. We offer an array of services and will work with you to determine your needs.

Email ResearchDevelopment@asu.edu to discuss the solicitation. One of our proposal managers will be assigned to your project and meet with you for an initial consultation to discuss your proposal management needs.

We are happy to offer advice for any proposal and answer questions about any opportunity. Because of our office's limited capacity, however, we are only able to support proposals of strategic importance or ones that meet the annual budget threshold of more than $1 million. To help you properly plan, prepare and produce your proposal, our office needs to be contacted at least four weeks before the sponsor’s deadline.

Proposal manager services include:

Kickoff meeting: motivate, inform and organize your team.

RD proposal managers can plan and execute a kickoff meeting that initiates the team, answers questions about the funding opportunity, assigns proposal tasks and sets a professional tone for proposal development. 

Strategy sessions: plan your approach, identify differentiators and build a strong team. 

RD proposal managers can facilitate strategy sessions that fit your team’s needs: half-day or whole-day “war room” planning sessions, single-topic discussions, and more, to help your team design a cohesive, consistent, winning project.

Content planning: create compliant, responsive and engaging content for your proposal.

RD proposal managers can provide a shell document or annotated outline for the writing team and help you plan content that is compliant to the requirements, responsive to the evaluation criteria and engaging for reviewers.

Executive summaries: write your executive summary or abstract at the beginning, middle and end of proposal development.

RD proposal managers can outline, draft and edit executive summaries to guide proposal development and demonstrate how your unique solution can benefit the sponsor’s vision.

Developing and selling benefits: demonstrate the benefit of your solutions to the funder.

RD proposal managers can edit your content to help you identify, quantify and communicate the benefits of your unique solution, giving sponsors a clear picture of how they will benefit from funding your research.

Internal and external reviews: Get actionable feedback from your team and expert reviewers.

RD proposal managers can facilitate draft reviews with internal or external reviewers and get written and verbal feedback that mimics a sponsor’s review and helps you improve your proposal content.

Proposal timeline: Use internal deadlines to keep your tasks on time.

RD proposal managers can create a flexible proposal schedule that works for you and your team’s timeframe, and then track internal deadlines and progress.

Document layout: Plan the little things for big impact.

RD proposal managers can help you plan the proposal document from the length of each section to the size of graphics, organizing headers, and final formatting for production — always keeping the sponsor’s expectations and the reviewers in mind.

Graphics: Communicate your research through powerful graphics.

We work with our in-house graphics team to translate your words and ideas into graphics for impact.

Additional Proposal Resources

Additional University Resources