Abstract

Workshops are an effective means of consortium building, proposal preparation and project implementation. Skilled facilitators can create an atmosphere where participants feel comfortable sharing ideas, forming partnerships and contributing actively to the task at hand. RMAs can use facilitation techniques to help researchers plan and manage their proposal writing – or their projects – effectively, ensuring that milestones are met, and resources are allocated efficiently.

But what if you do not have any training in workshop facilitation? Or you are not sure how to use your facilitation skills in a proposal writing workshop?

As RMAs, we do not only have to navigate both the overall strategic framework as well as the details of calls for proposals and grant conditions. We are also asked to facilitate writing workshops or consortium meetings. When doing this, one of our tasks is to support our researchers in seeing how the dots are connected. However, only very few of us are facilitators. Others do not necessarily feel comfortable guiding professors and senior company owners to a solution. And using our drawing skills? What skills??

This session is for all of us who would like to support focused consortium meetings that lead to coherent proposals and consortium plans without having any formal facilitation skills.

During this session, the two speakers from the IT-University of Copenhagen use a conceptualization workshop for a Horizon Europe proposal as a concrete example to show, how we as RMAs can support the writing of a coherent proposal that ticks the HEU-boxes. We touch upon how to facilitate a workshop that creates an overview on what needs to be covered with regards to consortium composition, implementation, and impact, respectively, as well as how to distribute the work efficiently. The templates we share with you can be adapted to any other topic, including post award.

This session is designed in a fun and interactive way to enable you to take shortcuts in the planning of your next workshop.

After this session, you will have ten proven hacks to facilitate meetings that reach their goals and create specific outcomes, as well as a template showing the coherence of a Horizon Europe Proposal that can be used for any of your proposal writing support services.

The presenters are Melanie Büscher and Lisbeth Breinholt from the IT-University of Copenhagen. As certified facilitator and trainer, and team leader for the Research Support team, Melanie has extensive experience and expertise in workshop facilitation and a relevant background as RMA. Melanie has organized proposal writing trainings since 2007, as well as train-the-trainer seminars for National Contact Points and RMAs since 2017.

Lisbeth has recently started using graphic facilitation during kick-off meetings and consortium meetings. She is a very experienced pre-awarder, but new to facilitating interactive workshops. She will share the shortcuts and supporting tools that she uses to create overviews and show interdependencies, thus providing RMAs without facilitation training with very concrete inspiration.