By the time a proposal is being written, the expensive choices have already been made: which call, which consortium, which role. Those choices are usually taken with a search box and a mailing list, by people who already have a full job.
SNM writes proposals and manages funded projects. This is the work that comes before both.
Start with the free tools
Two of the three things you need are already free, they stay free, and you should use them before you talk to us.
- Funding Radar: type in your institution and it builds a research profile from its public publication record, then ranks open calls against it. More than twenty public registers, no account, nothing held back.
- The Project Strategy Builder: eighteen questions that settle what a ranking cannot. What the project is for, who the users are, what competitors already sell, whether you should coordinate at all, how the work and the budget divide. Your answers stay in your browser until you choose to send them.
If those two answer your question, you are done, and for most institutions that is the honest outcome. The rest of this page is for the cases where they do not.
Open the Funding Radar (opens in a new tab)Work through the eighteen questions
Where the free tools stop
- They read what you publish, not what you can do. A publication record does not hold your facilities, your clinical throughput, whose senior time is free next spring, whether you can carry pre-financing, or whether your administration could survive coordinating. A strategy starts from that conversation.
- A match is not a chance of winning, and only the second matters. A topic can fit your themes exactly and still be written around an infrastructure you do not have, expect a consortium you cannot assemble, or sit two readiness levels above your work. Reading a call that way comes from having read how evaluators criticise proposals. Most of the eighty EU evaluation reports behind our assessment work were accumulated across the consulting work of SNM and its founder since 2006: the rest are public documents, released under EU access-to-documents rules or obtained through freedom-of-information requests. They are other people's reports on other people's proposals. We read them, we did not write them.
- Horizon Europe does not restrict by programme. Its conditions sit in each topic's own text, which is why no register flags them reliably and ours does not pretend to. Somebody has to read the topic. That is the part you are paying for.
- The Commission's records show who has already been funded, not who is forming a consortium now. No register can see the second, ours included. What the first is good for is reading how consortia under a topic were built and which of their members you have already worked with, and who to approach stays your decision.
- Type in your institution and the register already labels the calls it ranks for you: pursue, partner, monitor or skip, with its reasons, free. What it labels is the best few dozen, not the whole register, and its default answer is monitor: a call only leaves that label if a clause rules you out, if a consortium call is closing within thirty days so that joining is the only realistic role, or if the overlap with your own record is strong enough to pursue. Monitor is not a decision. Turning a monitor into a yes or a no is the work.
What you get
- Your institution's profile and its ranked calls, from the free register, with the organisation in the Commission's records confirmed by hand rather than matched on its name.
- Your European track record as the Commission holds it: how many projects, in which roles, and how many of those were funded places rather than unpaid partnerships. Those two counts differ more than people expect.
- The institutions you have already worked with, by shared project count.
- A written judgement: which two or three calls to pursue, which to decline, why, and what to prepare before each one opens.
- A sequence for the next eighteen months rather than a snapshot: join somebody else's consortium this round, lead the next one.
The first three are assembled from public data in about a minute, and every figure can be checked against its source. The last two take somebody who has written and run these projects, and they are what you are paying for.
Then two reviews a year, because the value is in being there when a call opens rather than in a document delivered once.
What it does not do
- It never promises funding. No honest version of this work could.
- It does not decide eligibility. It names which rule applies, where the funder publishes that rule, and what you still have to confirm with them.
- It will not name a partner to add. Recommending one implies knowing whether that body is committed elsewhere, whether it competes with you, and whether anyone there would take the call. None of that is in the data. What it does name is the theme in a call that nobody in your group covers.
- It reads published output. Companies, end-user organisations and patient groups barely appear in publication records, however essential they are to a consortium. It cannot find you a company. It can tell you that you are missing one.
Who it is for
Institutions with real research output and no dedicated pre-award office: mid-sized universities outside the Horizon Europe core, university hospitals and research foundations, research-performing companies, technology centres, and research councils in countries that are eligible for European funding and barely use it.
Not for a large university with an established EU office. They already do this, and they do it well.
Where the figures come from
Open calls come from Funding Radar, the free register SNM runs at fundingradar.eu (opens in a new tab). On six of its registers, which between them hold around three in five of the calls it lists, it reads the funder's own scope text and quotes the clauses that would rule an applicant out: its terms page publishes the exact count and keeps it current. On the rest it has not read the call and does not pretend to have. Where a funder publishes a country or programme rule, the register applies it and names the rule it applied. Where it holds no such rule it claims nothing rather than guessing. Research profiles come from OpenAlex, which is public and CC0. Track records and past consortia come from CORDIS, the Commission's own record of what it has funded.
The register stays free and ungated. Nothing is held back from it to make this service necessary, and every figure in the work can be checked against a public source. Its own About page says plainly that it is not complete: absence from the register is not absence of funding.