“We long wanted to ramp up our internal seed grant programs for research,” reports Dr. Karen Markin, Director of Research Development at the University of Rhode Island, “but it wasn’t until our new Vice President of Research arrived that we were given a mandate to do so – as well as to increase our external funding and streamline procedures.”
That mandate demanded a solution beyond business-as-usual. Fortunately, the VP also provided an influx of funds to both incentivize faculty and support the adoption of InfoReady. “And that,” says Karen, “turned out to be a huge difference maker in multiple ways.”
The value of.. the InfoReady platform in general was underscored by Peter J. Snyder, Ph.D., URI’s Vice President for Research and Economic Development – and the individual largely responsible for ratcheting up URI’s research efforts. “We have made rapid and extensive use of the InfoReady system at the University of Rhode Island to manage our internal seed grants programs as well as for a host of other purposes. I was quickly sold on the fantastic tools available to track our return-on-investments from our internal grant funding through the use of the multi-year Progress Report function. InfoReady has allowed us to streamline our processes for managing internal competitions, and it is now used by several of our colleges, graduate school, and by the Provost’s office for many varied purposes.”
Administrators well know that InfoReady is a huge time saver for everyone involved, but Karen’s candor is refreshing. “It’s almost embarrassing to admit,” she continues, “but when we were administering grants before InfoReady, we used PDFs that were being emailed around and requiring digital signatures. These are a real pain in the neck. Having to scan everything to create a PDF package to submit is time-consuming, error prone, and just a huge hassle. With InfoReady, we now have a process which avoids emailing, PDFs, and scanning. We can easily view responses from the dean’s office and department chairs, see the reviewers’ ratings, even document the final OK from the Vice President. It’s just a much more efficient process, everyone’s happy with it and, best of all, I haven’t gotten complaints about the introduction of a new software procedure.”
To learn more, read the full case study and watch the webinar.
