A leading academic research institution engaged BioTeam to help strengthen a major grant renewal by gathering current, evidence-based insights from the research community its data repository serves. With a tight submission deadline approaching, the institution needed a credible way to demonstrate the repository’s ongoing value, identify evolving community needs, and prioritize future investments.
BioTeam designed and facilitated a live community engagement webinar that brought together researchers from more than 30 institutions. Through structured polling and breakout discussions, we captured meaningful community feedback and synthesized the results into grant-ready recommendations, each directly supported by community input.
The result was a grant renewal narrative strengthened by current evidence gathered directly from the research community, delivered in time to support the proposal submission.
Challenge
As the institution prepared for its upcoming grant renewal, leadership recognized the value of incorporating meaningful feedback from the research community. Gathering community-driven evidence would help strengthen the grant proposal by demonstrating the platform’s impact, highlighting researcher priorities, and informing future investment decisions.
Approach
BioTeam designed and led a structured virtual engagement session specifically to generate proposal ready evidence.
- Recruited and convened researchers from more than 30 institutions for a live, interactive webinar.
- Used real-time polling and facilitated breakout discussions to identify pain points, unmet needs, and feature priorities across the research workflow.
- Captured feedback across key areas including data discoverability, metadata quality, interoperability, and readiness for AI and machine learning driven research.
- Synthesized polling results, breakout discussions, and participant feedback into a structured evidence base, clearly distinguishing community derived findings from BioTeam’s strategic recommendations.
Outcomes
- Delivered a comprehensive, grant-ready report that included survey results, key metrics, synthesized findings, and prioritized recommendations within the grant’s accelerated timeline.
- Provided evidence-based recommendations that were directly supported by documented community feedback.
- Identified immediate opportunities to improve data discoverability and metadata while informing longer-term investments in unified data infrastructure and AI-ready research capabilities.
- Equipped leadership with current, community-derived evidence to strengthen the grant renewal narrative and demonstrate the repository’s ongoing value to its research community.
- Created a repeatable engagement model that can be used to gather stakeholder feedback and strengthen future grant applications and strategic planning efforts.
