Increase Your Research Funding

Color team reviews improve your proposal and increase your chances of getting funded.

Color teams are periodic formal reviews of a proposal at specific milestones as you develop it. This course will teach you how to improve a proposal using color teams.

See dramatic results immediately.

Purchase the course

Are you tired of paying high prices for external consultants?

Now you can know what they know. Color teams are the biggest return on investment for any proposal, large or small.

It's time for you to learn how to launch and lead color team reviews.

We get stuck in our process, which leads to:

Exhaustion. It is challenging to continue to pour your heart into something that fails to get traction.
Stalled progress. Research careers can't advance without winning awards.
Lack of motivation. Why do it if you'll end up in the same place as you always do?

Color teams motivate everyone involved in a proposal and lead to the best presentation of material possible. That leads to a higher chance for award.

Color Team Reviews Create the STRONGEST Proposal

Color teams are structured reviews at specific time points in the proposal development period.

Color teams allow proposal writers to quickly identify the right program, messaging, and persuasive text that grabs the reviewer's (and funder's) attention.

Color teams create more time to reflect and adjust text to make it the most persuasive and compelling proposal possible.

Learn How to Apply
Color Team Reviews to Your Context

At the end of this course, you will gain a repeatable internal color team review plan that can be implemented immediately for any proposal to any funder.

This means that every proposal will count.

Using a guided workbook and step-by-step instruction, you will learn how to use color team reviews to evaluate funding opportunities, draft compelling proposal text, and ensure institutional buy-in — transforming your proposal into an award.

The course provides video instruction followed by a downloaded workbook.

Leveraging 15 years of experience - applying industry proposal manager approaches - you will get the foundational knowledge and accessible tools to run color team reviews like a pro!

PURCHASE THE COURSE

Praise for Color Team Reviews

"A great fundamental Research Development skills class that has tremendous value for faculty and those on the Research Administration (RA) side."

– Jill Jividen, PhD, Associate Vice President of Research Development, University of Michigan

"I really liked the psychological aspect to the questions asked in the workbook for the Color Team lessons. They asked me to deeply consider the content and apply it to my own institution."

– Deputy Director of Research at a Texas Research 1 University

What is Your Research Leadership?

Faye Farmer founded Your Research Leadership specifically to empower research support staff and research active faculty to achieve their full professional potential. Leadership in research is both strategic and tactical. These on-demand, skill-building courses blend the “how” with the “why” of research development. She teaches you processes honed from over 15 years of supporting hundreds of teams with millions of dollars of proposals. All to help you see immediate results. If you’re ready to move from doing all the things to driving meaningful change, this is your next step.

Similar trainings cost over $500 and require you to translate the information into academia. We deliver a contextualized training that you can apply to your process tomorrow.

Who teaches this course?

Faye Farmer is an industry certified proposal manager who established the color team review process at her university. Using this approach, faculty researchers experienced dramatic improvement in the quality of proposal submissions. The course reviews several colors that have been adapted to an academic environment - translating industry speak into useful tips.

Over the course of a decade, she was the first to introduce and run all five of the color teams presented in this course (blue, pink, green, red, and gold).

This course is the only online course available that provides detailed steps and expectations specifically adapted to academic environments.

What’s Inside Color Team Reviews?

This course goes over all the steps of designing, holding, and prioritizing input from five different color teams.

Through engaging short videos and a step-by-step worksheet, you will learn just how powerful a color team review can be. The course includes:

Color Team Processes

We review the fundamentals that every color team possesses, taking time to understand how the process can be implemented and when.

Blue Team

We review how to evaluate a proposal opportunity before you start writing proposal text and strategically set the stage for success with others.

Pink Team

Once there is early proposal text, we consider the structure and function of that text in creating a compelling story for the reader.

Green Team

Incorporating review of budgets and ancillary documents ensures that the proposal can accomplish what it says.

Red Team

When you have an almost final draft of the proposal, you have to prioritize the changes that make the biggest difference in getting funded.

Gold Team

We learn how to use the final review to garner institutional or leadership approval and smooth the way for award.

This course provides a clear, repeatable review process, so that you gain confidence aligning your ideas with funder expectations, creating proposals with compelling impact.