Solicitation Guides - What Are They and How Can They Help You

We often decide to submit a proposal in response to a solicitation, and then pause: where to even start? What are the core requirements? What does a successful proposal actually look like? What questions come up most often for this call? Which documents must accompany the submission? And, more concretely, what are the next steps (or really, all the steps) to take in order to move from an initial idea to a complete proposal submitted on time?

To address this gap, we introduced Solicitation Guides: a set of hand-curated resources available to paid Initium users that provide tailored support for specific solicitations. These materials are created by experts and informed by input from researchers who have previously applied to these RFPs, reflecting what they found most helpful.

What does a Solicitation Guide include?

A Solicitation Guide includes several tailored resources for a given grant opportunity. Specifically, we provide:

• Proposal outlines aligned with solicitation requirements
  Structured templates that map directly to the sections, page limits, and evaluation criteria of the solicitation, helping you focus on what the solicitation requires and what the reviewers expect.

• Sample successful submissions
  Examples of funded proposals from the same or closely related calls, illustrating effective structure, level of detail, and positioning.

• Tips and FAQs
  Practical guidance drawn from common applicant questions and recurring pitfalls, including clarifications that are often implicit rather than explicitly stated in the call.

• A checklist of action items to guide your process
  A step-by-step list of tasks, organized along a realistic timeline, to help you track progress from early planning to final submission.

• A list of required documents
  A consolidated view of all documents that must be submitted, with notes on format, required content, and any submission constraints.

These resources complement what Initium already offers: brainstorming with discipline-specific expertise, crafting outlines, literature search, red-team reviewing, and more.

How to access a Solicitation Guide?

On the Initium AI platform, when you create a new project, simply indicate the guide you want to use. The screenshot below shows how to select a Solicitation Guide as soon as you create your new project.

Once you create your project with a Solicitation Guide selected, this will automatically provide your project with:

• A help page that includes proposal samples, solicitation-specific tips, and FAQs
• A pre-structured template following the solicitation requirements
• A prepopulated list of required documents
• A suggested list of action items you can follow

For instance, assuming you have selected the NIH R21 as the solicitation guide, you will have the following resources linked right from your project dashboard page:

Each of the resources linked here will take you to a page with curated materials on the NIH R21 solicitation. In turn, each page will provide you with step-by-step information that will make the entire proposal submission process much easier.

For example, as you move to creating a proposal outline, you will have the option to choose a template from your project’s solicitation guide

Each template will contain all necessary section headers and concrete guidelines on what should be included in each section, along with built-in support from Initium to help you create bullet points aligned with your proposal idea and with the solicitation requirements.

Available Solicitation Guides: Current and Upcoming

We are actively working on a number of Solicitation Guides, prioritizing those of highest interest based on feedback from our users.

So far, we have available Solicitation Guides for

• NSF Future CoRe - NSF programs supporting foundational research in future computing and information science
• NIH R21 - Exploratory and developmental grants for early-stage, high-risk/high-reward research in healthcare
• NIH R15 (both AREA and REAP) - Mechanisms designed to strengthen research at institutions with limited NIH funding

Forthcoming Solicitation Guides will address other high-demand opportunities, including:

• NSF SaTC, Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace - NSF’s cybersecurity research portfolio.
• NSF ERI - Support for engineering research for new academic investigators who have yet to receive sufficient research funding from Federal Agencies
• NSF CAREER - NSF’s main early-career award.
• NIH R01 Research Project Grants - One of the larger and most prestigious NIH mechanisms for research in healthcare
• DoD / ONR Young Investigator Program (YIP) - A Department of Defense program to support early-career academic researchers.
• NSF DMR-TMRP - Targeted materials research programs
• ONR STEM Education - Office of Naval Research STEM education funding opportunities (e.g., STEM Education and Workforce programs).
• NSF WALTZ – Support for research on the Earth’s near-surface environment and how that environment responds to change
• NSF Marine - Support for research on all aspects of the geology and geophysics of the present ocean basins and margins, as well as those of the Great Lakes

If you haven’t already, we hope you will soon try out one of the solicitation guides. We believe you will be pleasantly impressed with how quickly you will be able to familiarize yourself with the solicitation of interest, and get support to move your proposal from an initial idea to a final draft.

As always, we’d love to hear from you what we do well and what we could do better – you can fill out our feedback form here. Thank you for being part of the Initium community!