Seed grants and pilot funding programs can be essential tools for supporting early-career faculty and aspiring researchers. But running these and other internal funding programs efficiently—especially at scale—can be a heavy lift.
From juggling application forms and reviewer assignments to coordinating award notifications and outcome tracking, the admin burden adds up fast. Fortunately, software solutions like InfoReady are available to help ease the burden by digitizing the work and process.
Here are five ways institutions eliminate the chaos and free up hours each week, based on real practices from InfoReady clients.
Manually building new forms for each cycle wastes time and invites errors. Instead, create flexible, reusable templates for different types of seed and pilot funding programs.
With drag-and-drop form builders and conditional logic, administrators collect exactly the information they need—no more, no less.
“It’s helpful to have standardized forms for everything. That’s an institutional priority for us—building a baseline for consistency across awards.” - Charlotte Forstall, PhD, Program Manager, Here & Next Seed Grants, Research Development Office, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, Washington University in St. Louis
Pro tip: Add conditional logic to tailor the form dynamically. For example, show additional budget fields only if the applicant indicates they are including a co-investigator.
Scattered email submissions and shared drives are a recipe for confusion. Use a central portal to post, share and collect all funding competition applications. A single, consistent web page helps everyone on campus know where to look for the current funding opportunities.
Applicants appreciate having one place to submit and track their applications—and they can save drafts, upload supporting documents, and request letters of support directly in the system.
"[We're] trying to sync up things so that researchers know where to go to look for funding opportunities because before it was just on various different pages. They never knew where to look. So now with InfoReady, everything is centralized." - Katie Smolnycki, Director of Institutional Partnerships, Fred Hutch Cancer Center.
Pro tips: Brand the portal to reinforce your program's goals and build a sense of community. Use a unique URL for each opportunity to share targeted opportunities with students and faculty who would be most interested.
Review coordination is often the most time-consuming part of running a program. Simplify the process it with automated routing, scoring and deadline reminders. Give reviewers their own portal to complete and track their assigned work. Use scoring rubrics and instructions to keep reviews consistent and equitable.
“Our big need that we identified for InfoReady would be to collect a high volume of abstracts... and have them reviewed quickly in a centralized location.” – Audrey DeLeon, Program Director of Research Collaboration, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center Office of Research and Innovation
Pro tip: Choose a solution that automatically packages each application into a clean PDF with a table of contents, like InfoReady.
4. Decide & Select Quickly with Built-In Notifications
When scores and reviews are complete, you’re ready to act. Use a dashboard to study results or export to other software for future analysis.
Once selections are made, automated notifications alert applicants of outcomes—no more mail merges or blind-copy chaos.
“Reviewers now get exactly what they need, when they need it—without me building individual review packets by hand.”- Charlotte Forstall, PhD, Program Manager, Here & Next Seed Grants, Research Development Office, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, Washington University in St. Louis
Pro tip: With InfoReady, administrators have real-time visibility into reviews, making it easy to rank submissions and identify awardees.
Collecting follow-up reports months later is easy to forget—and hard to manage in email. Make sure your solution provides access to real-time and historical data for accurate ROI reporting.
Need a report for leadership or a long-term impact study? All your data is in one place, ready to go.
“We’ve implemented 6-month milestone reports and annual reports through InfoReady. They’re already part of our master template.” – Rebecca Latimer, PhD, Director for CCSG Administration, University of Virginia Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Pro tip: With InfoReady, clients schedule future progress report requests at the time of award.
Seed funding programs matter. They lay the foundation for future grants, publications, and partnerships. By eliminating administrative friction, you’re free to focus on the high-value work: mentoring faculty, building corporate partnerships, and growing your institution’s research profile.
Want to see how your internal funding program could look with InfoReady?
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