We hope you got in a cosy spot under your blanket, with a mug of pumpkin spice latte (I plead guilty, remembering as Carolina and I went to Starbucks as soon as the season started). Believe me, this story will get pretty spooky.
Imagine this: you got past your first stage proposal evaluation with a positive result. And you peacefully moved on to preparing the second stage. The excellence of the concept and its potential impact were already in a very good place, and your partners are very pro-active and committed to making this proposal win, under your coordination. In reality, we even made sure that the submission would not be blocked, if we did not enter any values in the budget forms.
The submission deadline (around this time of the year) ended up being in an extraordinarily busy period for the entire team. And you know human nature: we can always manage to be late, do everything in a rush, last-minute, while other things and priorities creep in at the exact same time… They don’t call it horror for nothing. So, the usual quality control and cross-checking procedures were a bit lonely and not as well implemented as usual.
You think you have everything prepared, you invested so much time in writing and making sure everything was in place. Even had a detailed budget prepared for the entire consortium. So close to victory…
And after submission, you suddenly realize you simply forgot to enter the values in the online forms, because you ended up focusing a bit too much on the technical parts of the proposal. Now imagine you have been preparing this amazing pumpkin pie for a while now, and then you drop it on the floor – yes it can actually happen in real life.
Outcome? The proposal was considered “not admissible”, so did not even go through the technical evaluation. And that is not all folks: a slightly more horror part is facing the whole consortium and telling them that. How could you explain this outcome to them? That is indeed quite the spine-chilling task. In reality, partners were quite understanding, and after all the same call was open the following year.
The spookier the development, the better the ending. In fact, we did resubmit the proposal earlier this year and went through to the second stage again. So, we are not giving up just yet – this is also a reminder for us - the deadline to submit the full proposal is coming up soon, so we’ll make sure we submit the full proposal, WITH the budget this time, and hopefully the after-world spirits will be with us! Fingers crossed!
What about you? Any EU project horror story that would scare even the Sisters Grimm? Submit yours by October 29th https://bit.ly/EMHalloween. Don’t miss your chance and win a webinar recording to learn how to smoothly lead your proposal to submission. Keep the haunting of the Ghost Budget away!
