This blog is about the work Matt Staton has been doing at A Bigger Splash Ltd on European Research Council projects since late 2007 and on H2020 (Framework) projects for a lot longer than that. During that time I have read and reviewed and commented on over 400 ERC projects of all types: this is a unique body of knowledge and experience.

I believe that this work deserves space of its own because it throws up a lot of very interesting and sometimes very peculiar issues about how to write effectively to win funding both in the ERC proposals and in the wider world of Horizon 2020 and national programmes. In brief, there is lots to be learnt about proposal writing and, as we all know, proposal writing is an ever more important skill for researchers in all institutions in all fields as budgets get tighter and competition tougher.

There is a stack of things to write on this topic as over the past eight years some very clear best practices have emerged for winners – as well as equally clear and perhaps more fascinating ‘worst practice’ for the unsuccessful. But even now, after looking at so many proposals new things are emerging which create new interest in the topic – mostly, it must be said, new and more elaborate forms of error as the structure of a winning bid tends to remain the same and to be fairly easy to spot as they are rigorously logical and coherent.

So, my hope is that what might appear on the face of it to be a rather dry theme to take up can lead to some interesting conclusions about the logic and rhetoric of writing about complex ideas in the very demanding format of a proposal template and responding well to the odd questions that are asked there. At the very least it will give me a reason and a place to wonder out loud why, for example, it is so hard for researchers to grasp the very particular rules of the game we are playing here and why so many seem so reticent about saying exactly what difference their research will make once all the interesting activities are completed.

More importantly and urgently, I’ll also try to unpick and hold up to the light to better understand the machinery behind some proposals which are so lucid and persuasive that the ideas drop as if inevitably from one logical layer to the next and that hardly need be read at all: these rare fauna are, it hardly needs to be said, the most competitive of all.

The job I do on ERC texts is to offer advice through detailed written comments on how to push them over the line into the group that will be read very seriously and which are in competition for funding – the final decision on funding is always to some extent in the lap of the gods but I think it is possible to get reliably into the group of serious contenders.

This very rigorous review and coaching is done with individual researchers from universities, research centres and business schools across the EU as well as with larger groups of researchers from the same institution in which case the intensive individual dialogue is often kicked off by a training event to set the writers heading off in the right direction.

So, through this blog I hope to share a little of the accumulated wisdom that might help researchers stack the odds a little in their favour in an ever more oversubscribed set of programmes.