From Breeze to Burden: Simplifying Limited Submissions

Limited submissions, I think, are a really unique use case in the InfoReady system for a few reasons. The primary one is the number of competitions that we are working with when we're doing limited submissions. I'm often posting multiple competitions a week to InfoReady, sometimes multiple in a single day, depending on what funding opportunities are coming out. Sometimes those competitions are really time sensitive due to the quick turnaround time between when we learn of the funding opportunity and the sponsor's earliest deadline. We need to move really quickly on limited submissions sometimes. The ability to post competitions quickly is really important, but in addition to quickly posting, it's also important for them to be efficiently posted because of the volume that we're working with.

The other complicating factor for limited submissions is that sometimes we set up competitions that we do not know if there's interest on our campus in applying to them. We don't know if they're going to be competitive or not. Again, for efficiency question, we don't want to spend too much time setting up a competition if it's not going to be of interest to our faculty anyway. Both speed and efficiency are really valuable for limited submissions in particular, versus in my prior role, I was also doing some seed funding, and maybe we had two or three a year, and I could really spend a lot of time trying to build out each one and customize it really specifically. Limited submissions, because of the volume we're working with, I do a little bit less customization, so I want a process that's going to work for all of the competitions we're working with.

Every institution is going to have different numbers that they're working with based on what opportunities are a good fit for your campus. At Berkeley, for our example here, I posted 158 limited submission competitions to InfoReady last year.

So, you can see why it's really important not to need to start from scratch every time I have to post a new competition. That would just be an incredible amount of work to do. Of those 158 competitions, 103 of them received a number of applications. That means about a third of the competitions that I'm posting to InfoReady get zero applications. There's no one on our campus who's interested in applying to them. It's still good that we post them, and I try not to look at that as wasted effort, because with limited submissions, we would try to err on the side of caution there. We want to do our due diligence, and generally, we'd rather post a competition that we end up getting no interest in than not post a competition at all. But I do want my time and my effort in posting them to be relatively minimal. Of the 103 competitions that received applications, only 35 of those competitions received more applications than we are allowed to submit to the sponsor. So only 35 needed a full review and selection process. That doesn't sound like a lot, but there were 276 applications within those 35 competitions. It's a really high volume of applications in addition to the high volume of competitions that we working with.

A huge benefit for InfoReady is helping us keep track of that really high number and not have to manually track them, which was probably the most time-consuming element of them pre-InfoReady.

InfoReady allows for the flexibility and customization that significantly relieves that administrative burden of having to organize limited submissions.