FundFit Competitions
Available October 2026
Limited submissions and internal competition software for the research development office
A sponsor lets your institution send three, and forty faculty want one. Somebody in research development has to find the opportunity, announce it, run the internal competition, and tell everyone how it went, sometimes with five weeks' notice. FundFit Competitions runs that cycle, and the seed and pilot programs you fund yourselves, so none of it lives in a shared inbox and a spreadsheet nobody else can open.
Find
The limited opportunity reaches you before a PI asks about it
Will it spot limited opportunities for us?
FundFit already reads the funding opportunities your faculty are matched to. The ones a sponsor limits per institution are flagged, and they reach the office that has to run the competition.
Flagged as limited
FundFit flags the opportunities whose sponsor limits how many an institution may submit, so they stand apart from the rest of the feed.
An Incoming list for the office
Limited opportunities wait in an Incoming list. Turn one into a draft competition or dismiss it. Or have Competitions check every hour, draft them for you, and email your admins.
Start from anything
A FundFit opportunity, a sponsor's URL, an uploaded solicitation, last year's competition, or a blank page.
Set up
Paste the solicitation, get the competition
How long does it take to stand one up?
The submission limit, the sponsor deadline, the eligibility rules, and the documents it wants are all in the solicitation already. Point FundFit at it and the competition comes back drafted, with the limit, the dates, and the eligibility summary showing the sentence they were read from. You correct what you disagree with instead of retyping a forty-page announcement.
Read from the source
Give it the sponsor's URL or the PDF. The limit, the deadline, the eligibility restrictions, and the required documents come back filled in.
The details cite their line
The limit, the dates, the award amounts, and the eligibility summary each carry the sentence in the solicitation they came from, so you are checking a citation, not a machine's summary.
Your internal dates
Set the internal deadline and the review window once. The timeline works back from the sponsor's date and flags a schedule that cannot be met.
Last year's, carried forward
These competitions repeat. Start from the last cycle and it brings the form, the rounds, and the reviewer panel with it. The new cycle gets its own dates.
Announce
A page faculty can find without emailing the office
How do faculty find out what is open?
Every open competition is listed with its internal deadline, its limit, and who is eligible. A researcher finds the one that applies to them and applies on the spot. The office answers fewer questions about what is open.
A page for each unit
The research office, a college, or a center each get a public page at their own address, with their own logo, colors, and welcome text. Nobody signs in to read it.
Filters faculty use
Visitors narrow the list by deadline, category, sponsor, cycle, and year.
Institution only, still on the flyer
A competition restricted to your own people shows the public its title and a sign-in prompt, and nothing else. The link on the flyer works without leaking the details.
Launch on a date
Build the competition this week and schedule it to open on the day the announcement goes out.
| Competition | Sponsor | Internal deadline | Slots | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NSF Major Research Instrumentation | National Science Foundation | 14 Oct 2026 | 2 of 4 nominations spoken for | Accepting applications |
| NIH S10 Shared Instrumentation | National Institutes of Health | 21 Oct 2026 | 0 of 1 nominations spoken for | Accepting applications |
| Searle Scholars Program | Kinship Foundation | 2 Nov 2026 | 0 of 1 nominations spoken for | Accepting applications |
| Beckman Young Investigator | Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation | 28 Oct 2026 | 2 of 2 nominations spoken for | Nominations are full |
| Sloan Research Fellowships | Alfred P. Sloan Foundation | 9 Nov 2026 | 3 of 3 nominations spoken for | Nominations are full |
Collect
A notice of intent first, the full application only if you need it
Can it run a notice of intent, then a pre-proposal, then the full application?
Most cycles do not need forty full proposals. Ask for two pages first, and ask the shortlist for the rest.
Rounds with their own forms
Run a notice of intent, then a pre-proposal, then the full application. Each round has its own form, its own dates, and its own reviewers, and an application that advances stays linked to the one before it.
A round that runs only if needed
If more people advance than the sponsor allows, the next round opens. If not, it is marked as not run and the earlier round names the nominees.
Tracks with their own limits
Split a competition into tracks, one per sponsor category for example, each with its own slot limit.
First come, or always reviewed
Approve applications automatically while slots remain, or send every one to review and let the internal deadline close the door.
Reference letters without the chasing
The applicant names the writer. The writer gets a link, uploads without an account, and is reminded until the letter arrives.
The form this sponsor asks for
The documents the sponsor names become upload slots with the page limits and formats written next to them. Fourteen field types, show-if and required-if rules, and a check of the required pieces before anything submits.
Review
Reviewers score in one place, on the sponsor's criteria
How do I keep a review moving without chasing reviewers?
Finding willing reviewers is the hard part. Once they say yes, the work in front of them should be short and plain.
A panel named before it opens
Name the reviewers for each track before the competition opens. A reviewer sees only the applications assigned to them.
One scoring sheet
The criteria come from the solicitation, so the internal review argues about the same things the sponsor will.
A workflow you lay out
Stages hold approve or deny steps and scored reviews. A committee step takes individual verdicts or one collective verdict. A stage advances by hand, when every review is in, or when a score or approval threshold is met.
Reminders you do not send
Set the due date and the reminder interval for a step. Reviewers hear when a review is assigned and when it is due, and an overdue review is flagged to you as well.
Decide
The sponsor allows three, and forty people want one
How do decisions and feedback go out?
Selected and not selected emails go out from the competition. Every email is a template your office can edit, for the institution or for one competition.
One selection screen
Every application's scores and committee verdicts sit on one screen, so nobody spends the morning after the deadline reconciling five spreadsheets.
Slots counted against the limit
The competition knows how many the sponsor allows and how many are spoken for, so the institution never submits a fourth by accident.
Decisions by track, in a batch
Pick the nominees for a track in one pass. A decision that would overrun the track's limit is refused.
Feedback in the reviewers' words
The reviewers' written comments are gathered into a draft for each applicant. Edit it, or leave a comment out, and it goes with the decision email.
Internal funding
Seed and pilot programs run the same way
Does it cover the programs we fund ourselves?
A limited submission picks who goes to the sponsor. A seed, pilot, or intramural program picks who gets your own money. The work is the same: a call, a form, a panel, a decision.
Listed on its own
Mark a competition as internal funding and your public page lists it apart from the limited submissions.
The same forms, rounds, and review
A seed grant gets everything a limited submission gets: tracks, rounds, a review workflow, a selection screen, and award amounts on the record.
Who it is for
One record, four kinds of reader
Research development
You run the cycle: find, announce, review, decide. Each step sits on one record, and last year's competition is where this year's starts.
Research administration
The slot limit is enforced, so the institution never sends a sponsor more than it allows, and the decisions and the feedback behind them stay on the record.
Reviewers
One queue, one scoring sheet, and a reminder before the due date. You see only the applications assigned to you.
Faculty
One page with the questions, the deadline, and what is still missing. There is no separate system to learn for one application a year.
Coming from InfoReady
What is different, and what is not
InfoReady is the tool most research offices know, and it is a mature one. Three differences matter to a research development office. Competitions drafts the competition from the solicitation, with citations, instead of from a setup page. It finds limited opportunities in the FundFit feed your faculty already use, where InfoReady's Pivot-RP link needs a subscription to both products. And it comes as one add-on with every feature in it, where InfoReady's plans tie admin seats and single sign-on type to the tier.
InfoReady is ahead on exports, a public API, and years of customers. A full side by side comparison is on the way.
InfoReady details are from its public plans and integrations pages, September 2026.
Questions
Before you bring it to your office
Do we have to use FundFit to run competitions?
Competitions is part of FundFit, so a competition can be built from the opportunity records you already have. An institution without FundFit can talk to us about both.
What does it cost, and are there tiers?
Competitions is one add-on to FundFit. Every feature on this page comes with it, and single sign-on is not held back for a higher plan. Ask us for a quote for your institution.
Can it run a notice of intent, a pre-proposal, and a full application?
Yes. Each is a round with its own form, dates, and reviewers, and an application that advances stays linked to its earlier round. Answers do not copy forward yet, so each round's form asks for what that round needs.
How are reviewer conflicts of interest handled?
Today a reviewer with a conflict tells the office, and an admin reassigns the review. There is no conflict declaration form yet.
Can people from outside the institution take part?
Not as guests yet. Reviewers and applicants need an account at your institution. Reference letter writers are the exception: they upload through a link, with no account.
Can we change a competition after it launches?
Yes. Settings stay editable after launch, and Competitions warns you when a change touches people who already applied. A published form is versioned, so changing it means publishing a new version.
What happens to applications that did not get a slot?
They stay in the record with their reviews and their decision, so the office can look up what the panel said about a researcher who was close the first time.
When can we have it?
October 2026. Demos are running now, and an office that wants to start with its spring cycle should talk to us this fall.