Our high-level objective when working with researchers is to transform proposals from a cluster of great ideas and processes that are not quite doing themselves justice as a ‘pitch’ into a persuasive, surprising and even pleasurable proposition that is ready to be funded. We have done this many hundreds of times and hope to continue to be asked to do so – these are great intellectual challenges on the leading edge of knowledge and an exciting place to be working.

We effect this change through a close working partnership for the duration of the assignment which is based around a core of very detail review of the emerging draft texts and as many online meetings as necessary to get the job done quickly.

Above all we work in a client-centric way throughout to ensure that the work is completed to the rhythm and in the style of the individuals or teams concerned – we know precisely where we need to end up but understand there are a range of different ways of getting to the right ends.

So, we find the best fit to make this dialogic approach work quickly and effectively is with researchers who are expecting to work on our detailed recommendations and to consider some often fairly thoroughgoing rethinking and rebalancing. We don’t deal in general recommendations or simply ensure the page limits are observed or take the easiest way through as we will say very openly and clearly if there are serious barriers to success – we’ll also say how to fix them, of course, but don’t work simply to flatter the researchers and encourage them along a pathway to failure just in order to be able to invoice.

In fact, in the end, the only way we know how to do this effectively is to apply the same standards as we use when writing in other areas of our work – we don’t like losing, can’t afford to, therefore, rarely lose and have very, very high standards and in particular a good judges of what the call is for and what to pitch into it.

Clients have often told us of both tangible and intangible benefits – clearly, the tangible ones being much stronger proposals at the end, achieved efficiently and which go on to do much better than even the researchers themselves believe. Intangible a various and are particularly gratifying to us as are not things we can really aim at directly e.g., we are told that we build confidence, demystify the calls, make winning seem perfectly possible, simplify radically and most importantly of all that we for the very first time give researchers skills that can be used for any other proposal writing and which have very significant ripple effects on future success in bidding for research