Reading an RFP (request for proposals) can sometimes seem daunting – especially if you’re new to grant writing or it’s for a funding agency that you’re not as familiar with. RFP’s contain key details about eligibility, scope, and fit, but it is also critical to review the review criteria. Understanding how your proposal will be evaluated will help you frame your writing for a particular opportunity and make it easier for reviewers to score your proposal in the best light. How do you do this? It’s actually simpler than you think...

What Are Merit Review Criteria?

Each funding agency (and program within an agency) may have different styles of how reviewers are recruited and utilized; however, funding agencies all share merit review criteria designed to impartially evaluate proposals for fit, design, impact, and innovation. Review criteria are like a rubric to gauge the suitability and scope of a project, so figuring out what your next grant will be measured up against is an important step to take.

What Key Criteria Do I Need to Address?

In “How Do I Review Thee? Let Me Count the Ways: A Comparison of Research Grant Proposal Review Criteria Across US Federal Funding Agencies”, @Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski and @Stacy Tobin compared review criteria from 10 federal agencies. Amazingly, they found that despite the agencies' varied interests (and terminology), the review criteria boiled down to eight basic questions:

1. Why does it matter?
2. How is it new?
3. How will it be done?
4. In what context will it be done?
5. What is special about the people involved?
6. What is the return on investment?
7. How effectively will the financial resources be managed?
8. How will success be determined?

This simplifies things because when you’re preparing your next proposal, you can focus on answering these eight basic questions. Certainly, customize your writing to an agency's terminology and formatting, but what a relief that the basic criteria you need to cover are very similar regardless of your field.

Bottom Line

When writing a grant proposal, it helps to think like the people who will be reviewing it. Not only do you need to think about the style of writing (covered in our previous Grant Writing Tip!), but you also need to view it from their perspective as an evaluator. What criteria do they use to assess your proposed project? What questions do you need to answer? And, importantly, focus on how you can be very clear in addressing each of the criteria. Doing so will make it easier for your reviewers and provide you with a better chance of success!

Falk-Krzesinski, H. J., & Tobin, S. C. (2015). How Do I Review Thee? Let Me Count the Ways: A Comparison of Research Grant Proposal Review Criteria Across US Federal Funding Agencies. The journal of research administration, 46(2), 79–94.