EFFORT

Estimating Funding Friction: Outcomes, Resource cost and Time

Summary

While competitive funding drives innovation, it carries well-documented costs alongside its benefits (Schweiger et al., 2024), leaving potential to uncover efficiencies across evaluation processes.

The EFFORT project delivers a systematic analysis of the resources required to distribute research grants, mapping the true system-wide cost across applicants, reviewers, and funders.

By examining consistency and variations across diverse funding modes (such as responsive mode versus targeted calls), we move beyond basic cost estimation to evaluate practical measures designed to manage demand and applicant burden.

Ultimately, the project investigates how real-world practices (including assessment criteria, scoring methods, blinded reviews, CV formats, and selection workflows) can reduce friction and mitigate potential bias, answering the core question of how funders can manage evaluation costs without sacrificing fairness and rigour.

Project team

Project lead, RoRI/University of Sheffield

Head of Programmes, RoRI

 Senior Research Fellow, RoRI/CFA

Researcher, RoRI/CFA

Research Fellow, RoRI/University of Sheffield

Visiting Senior Fellow, RoRI/NIHR, University of Southampton

Ed Noijons

Senior Researcher, CWTS

Partner organisations

The project in detail

This project will produce an overview and analysis of funder practices, which takes a system-level approach to the costs across all actors, allowing understanding of the relative costs of different funding allocation models. This will serve as a resource for funders to identify practices they might use, where they might most usefully use them (or refrain from using them), and their associated costs and effects. This will include insights into the universe of current demand management practices, and on the effectiveness of different practices. The analysis will include review of measures to ensure rigour and mitigate against bias in project selection e.g. anonymity/blinding, scoring systems etc. The project will use the Funder Data Platform to allow assessment of whether these practices have their intended effects.

This project will address knowledge gaps and generate evidence on the effort and effects of different funding models. The primary novel contributions of the project will be to:

Deploy a standard framework for estimating costs

Estimate costs across all actors in the system

Compare across funders and across different funding modes

Link differences across schemes and historical changes to consequences in terms of applicants for funding, funding awarded and funded project outcomes

The project will help funders understand their own position in the wider landscape of funding schemes. Project partners will gain access to a comparative analysis of how their funding schemes align with current practice across the research system. The target of our analysis is to understand where funder effort is expended in scheme management, identify outliers, and possible consequences of different assessment practices, whether they increase consistency in award quality or affect application numbers.

The mapping and cost estimate components will be complemented with case studies of historical changes in funder practice, which we will link to the outcomes, including in the grants themselves (e.g. composition and diversity of grant topics and recipients) and publication outputs (e.g. high citation publications, diversity of outputs). The quantitative analyses will provide much needed evidence that will aid funders in understanding the effects of changes to funding practices.

The project will also produce a scheme typology comparing the effort involved in different funding modes, and a standardised costing methodology. This will allow the project approach to be copied and adapted for other schemes, potentially contributing to project legacy and downstream evidence synergy.

The project consists of four work packages, outlined below.

WP1: Developing a common framework for estimating costs

This WP will establish what efforts, and by whom, are required for funding applications to be prepared, submitted, evaluated and awarded.

WP2: Estimation & Analysis

This WP will apply the typology developed in WP1 to map the different schemes deployed by the funder partners, and derive estimates for the costs, both in total and for different actors in the system

WP3: Analysis of outcomes: applications received, awards, and project outputs

Building on the implemented changes in funding practices identified in WP4, WP3 will examine how these changes are related to intermediate outcomes in terms of grant selection and, if sufficient time has elapsed, grant outputs. Analysis will take into account differences in the specific contexts of changes to funding practices that have been implemented and in intended outcomes. In doing so, this WP will link schemes to funder data on applications received, awards made and project outputs. A core aspect will be linking individuals and projects to bibliographic data, as with previous Funder Data Platform (FDP) projects.

WP4 Co-production and dissemination

This WP will ensure that funder partners have multiple clear, consistent and effective channels to feed into the project. It also covers dissemination of the project outputs to the immediate partners as well as more widely.

Funders interested in joining the project should contact t.stafford@researchonresearch.org or a.l.butters@sheffield.ac.uk for further information

Project timeline

The project runs from September 2026 to December 2027.

Outputs

Future outputs will be listed here.