Any good grant management software will have reports that make it easy for you to track proposal success rates. These reports use counts of active and terminated grants and rejected proposals to compute ratios of proposal submission success rates, which you can then analyze.
When you’re analyzing proposal submission success rates, consider the following:
Include only new applications in the analysis
Exclude continuations, supplements, and no-cost extensions from the analysis. In some cases, include competitive renewals, but be careful, because the probability of being funded is usually higher when compared with new applications. Make special consideration when deciding whether to include subcontracts in the analysis.
The date range will affect the results
The success rate should increase for researchers as they gain experience in proposal development over time. The success rate for submissions to certain federal funding agencies may also change over time as they are subject to economic factors and congressional budget appropriations.
Be careful not to double-count
When comparing different organization units, either use the same grant management system when creating reports for each unit, or take care to ensure the same procedures are being used in preparing the reports for analysis. Be careful to prevent double counting of grants with key personnel who are faculty with joint appointments in multiple departments.
Evaluate the total number of proposals in each group
This is particularly important for groups with a small number of proposals. In these cases, one awarded proposal can cause a large change in the success rate. A larger date range will usually increase the numbers and thus improve the power of the statistics.
Analyzing proposal success rates to evaluate researchers and research units
If you want to track proposal submission success rates for individual researchers, you’ll need a report that includes the faculty member’s role (principal investigator, co-investigator, etc.) as well as the number of co-investigators on the project to help monitor the influence of other faculty on the success rate. This is especially important when reviewing the submission efforts of junior faculty with proposals involving the collaborative efforts of senior faculty. Be sure to track the award type (R01, K Series, PPG, etc.) and the total funding requested for each proposal as these two factors influence success rates.
It’s slightly harder to analyze submission success rates by unit, but you can do it. Proposals are usually assigned to the PI’s department or the department where the bulk of the research will happen. The latter is more common at cancer centers and universities where the researcher primarily works in another department. For an apples-to-apples comparison, compare proposal submission success rates between departments or centers at the same university.
In some cases, you can try comparing the proposal submission success rates of similar departments at different universities, but then it’s difficult to guarantee consistency of calculation methods. The use of federal award amounts may be a better basis for comparison.
Analyzing proposal success rates to identify sponsors and research areas
It’s helpful to figure out how successful your proposal submissions are for each funding agency, both for future planning and setting expectations. There may be big differences between the success rates of federal, state, and industry grants. When you’re analyzing them, it’s usually best to separate grants from industry-funded clinical trials.
Analyzing proposal submission success rates for different areas of research is similar to analyzing success by sponsor. Make sure you define a primary research type for the proposal. If multiple areas are assigned to individual proposals, the analysis might double-count grants. Work carefully when comparing proposals with translational research, that is, medical research grants that include both a basic science and clinical research component. In any case, the success that an institution as a whole has with a particular sponsor or area of research can be helpful to junior faculty or those new to the submission process.
Conclusion
Analyzing proposal submission success rates will help you flag areas that need improvement at your research organization and can help indicate avenues of increased grant funding. Because the analysis is fairly technical, you might want to use a grants management system to make preparing reports much faster.
We at Cayuse offer grant management solutions with reports to help you analyze success rates, and whenever you have questions, our implementation and support teams can help with insight and guidance. Contact us today to learn more!
