"University research offices can sometimes help to match researchers’ profiles with available grants. In addition, university mentorship programmes often include workshops on grant proposals, during which “funding agencies are very honest and tell you what they’re looking for”, says Fabiana Visentin, an economics researcher at the United Nations University’s Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT), in the Netherlands.
Applying for schemes that include a pre-application stage can also save time and help researchers to understand if they’re a good match, Visentin adds. This stage usually requires a one or two-page proposal to be submitted before the full application, so “you can quickly understand if the funding agency likes your idea or not”, she says."