Alyssa: I just graphed yesterday the limited submission activity that we've done. And it has been increasing steadily every year since I started in 2022. And fiscal year '25, which we're just a little over halfway through, we are already at almost double the number of limited submissions. 

Gabriella: We've seen growth both in the number of limited submissions opportunities that we've been posting and also in activity within our institution. We have more and more faculty who are interested, who are applying. That's been nice to see that we are finding opportunities that they're interested in, that align well with their research.

Kendra: As far as growth, I've been in this position about two years, and I would say it's steady growth, but we've had a really good base anyway of people that are aware and interested in limited submissions, as well as the things that we are posting and putting out.  Our faculty and research administrators are relatively in touch with InfoReady as well as those opportunities. So we have that good base there. 

Jalon: There actually has been a decent amount of growth, like Gabriella was saying, not only in what we post as a university, but also how active our faculty is going after it. I know our VPR implemented an incentive program where he would extend funding dollars for people who just even went after certain opportunities. If they were awarded, they would get their award, but they would also receive something from the university as well. I think that was a good incentive of ramping it up, especially for our mid-level faculty. I feel like the early career faculty are very ambitious, going for a lot of opportunities, and then once they get to the mid-career might slow down a little bit, but that was a way of picking that up. We have seen a good increase amongst all opportunities, federal, state, corporate, and especially foundations.

How has InfoReady been helping you scale that up?

I think InfoReady it has made the process a lot easier, especially being able to streamline it. Now, InfoReady has been able to give us the opportunity to make one system, a straight pathway to get these opportunities in, get them through quicker, have our competitions, and push them out. It's been very helpful bringing everybody together.

Kendra: I check Pivot regularly. I used to check it every Monday. That was my thing. I've started checking it maybe every other week right now because we have a pretty good list of existing opportunities, as well as directing our faculty and research administration staff to use it themselves. Because there was a time when I was posting a lot of opportunities from Pivot and not getting any applications for them. So we've definitely narrowed our search down to be a little more precise and what our faculty are interested in. 

Then with the integration between Pivot and InfoReady, when you are told, 'this is something I'm interested it in', you're doing the automatic push into InfoReady?

Kendra: We're able to push it, which is wonderful. My favorite feature.

It's a time saver. Do you have a template in InfoReady that you push the Pivot opportunities into?

Kendra: I do. We created an updated template when Form Designer template was updated, and that's what we use, and we've tailored that to meet our requirements.

Alyssa: We also use Pivot, and I really rely on the related lists that are pushed to my inbox. I don't actively go into Pivot as often as I let them send me the things that they think I'm interested in based on the parameters I've set. Then there are those opportunities that we just know are cyclical on an annual basis, and our faculty are interested in them. So we keep our eyes on them, and we push them out in our newsletter every year when they come up.  We are signed up for all the different newsletters  and we cull through those weekly as a team.

We try to focus on the things that are either going to generate the most interest amongst the broadest group of people. If you're just relying on our newsletter, you're not going to see everything related to your work. We really do want more of our faculty to use Pivot themselves so they can tailor their own searches and really get the most relevant stuff for their specific research. It is definitely a multi-pronged approach to really see everything.

I also really like the push to InfoReady feature from Pivot. That's very helpful.

Jalon: I'm a little bit different. I'm pretty much in Pivot almost every day or at least every other day during the week. A big part of that is, I think it has to do with the institutional push for the uptick in research, just making sure that we're getting more opportunities out, more things to our faculty. A big part of my job is also doing research for faculty members. A lot of times people will come to me, and it helps give me a better idea of the research landscape at Rice. There are a lot of things that I think that I probably would miss had I not met with certain faculty members to understand what they're working on. So Pivot is something that I'm using a lot, but I also use Grants.gov, and the different funder websites, NSF, NIH. I am looking at those things as well. Like everybody mentioned already, definitely using the push to InfoReady right out of Pivot. That's a time saver. I feel like it can't be overstated enough.

Gabriella: I use Pivot, too. I have a saved search with our particular parameters, and I have just an automatic email. So I'm looking at Pivot and what it's finding for me weekly. Also, subscribe to all the listservs from sponsors, NIH, NSF, NASA. Then in addition to that, I have fantastic colleagues on my team who don't manage limited submissions, but in their own role, when they're looking at opportunities, if they find something as a limited submit, they will send it my way.  That's really nice that we all work together. Also, sometimes faculty as well, they find limited submissions and they'll send it our way to. 

We're promoting those in a variety of ways. We have a weekly newsletter that we send out. In addition, we have a website, and so we post everything weekly on there and then on InfoReady. We direct our faculty consistently to InfoReady to let them know that these are all of our open competitions that are running right now.

Kendra:  As far as reviewers, we have an ad hoc group of faculty, all interdisciplinary from different colleges and different subject matters. They volunteer, also maybe some are "voluntold", by RAs and RDs to help with that process. We try to have a pretty hefty list from our engineering college because a lot of our reviews are STEM based fields. We have an existing list that I pull from for our reviews. A lot of times I send out those emails in bulk, and I do want some subject matter, focus with these people, but we do interdisciplinary as well.

We also have a limited submission chairperson, which is an appointed faculty member who helps review those applications and keeps our reviewers in conversation. When we all meet together, they guide that conversation and have input because I'm not qualified to read a lot of these applications. We do try to have at least three reviewers on our panel at a time. 

How many routing steps are you using in the competition? 

Kendra:  It's been so long since I've really messed with my routing steps since I have them set up. So we assign our reviewers. They're sent an email with instructions and the rubric essentially, especially for reviewers, and then they put in strengths, weaknesses, fit with sponsor, any additional comments, and a score. Then I take that information and input it into my own Excel sheet that we then do the rankings, and that's what we review during our panel meeting. What is that? Maybe four steps?

Alyssa: There's not a one-size-fits-all approach for how to do any of this from institution to institution. At Colorado School of Mines, with maybe as many as 10 competitions requiring review panels every year, so again, a smaller number, we don't have a standing committee of people we pull from, mostly because it does seem like each one requires different subject matter experts. We sometimes won't know what subject matter expertise will be most important until we see what gets submitted. So not only the focus of that particular competition, but who actually ends up submitting. We're small so sometimes finding reviewers that don't have a conflict of interest is a challenge as well. If it's a nuclear engineering opportunity, all of our nuclear engineers have probably applied, so we don't have another one who can serve as a neutral reviewer.  I have a list that I keep in the back of my mind as people who have been good reviewers in the past and might have a broader base of knowledge, more of a generalist who I can call on.

But I would love to explore the idea of standing committee members and incentivizing that service by making it count toward their required services, faculty members. When you're asking folks to just volunteer their time, that is always a challenge. 

Due to a higher probability for conflicts of interest in some research areas, do you ever look for external reviewers, external subject matter experts?

Alyssa: We are open to that possibility if it ever really feels like the best solution. In the time I've been here, we haven't gone to an external reviewer. We have engaged some consultants who work with us on federal relations type things. They might know the Department of Energy really well. They're not staff, but we're paying them for their support. There have been a few instances where we've asked those types of people to serve on our review committees.

NOTE: InfoReady does accommodate external reviewers. If you have someone outside your institution who you want to assign a review to, you can do that in InfoReady. Just put in your email address and the account is automatically created for them. They're pinged with information about an account being created for them and with the review assignment.

Jalon: It sounds like we're a little bit different at Rice. We actually do utilize a standing committee of about 10 to 12 members from various disciplines across campus. For their time, I think they are compensated with some type of resource or incentive, but something to just help them because obviously they are very busy. I think the idea behind using the standing committee is obviously for some type of consistency, but also having the non-expert members reviewing as well. If we're looking at a harder science, a competition for something in the hard sciences, having someone who's from the humanities also look at it and be able to provide their feedback back their insight just to produce well-rounded proposals overall. We do utilize a standing committee.