Preparing CSU Researchers, Scholars, and Artisans to Pursue Funding
RAO provides Faculty Development and Capacity Building services to empower individual researchers and scholars, research teams, and the OVPR. Essential to this preparation are our competitive intelligence and landscape analysis activities.
Competitive Intelligence and Landscaping
Competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing Intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization.
– CI Radar
In the context of CSU’s research enterprise, RAO gathers and analyzes competitive intelligence data to inform the decisions of CSU researchers, scholars, and artisans pursuing support for their work in an increasingly competitive funding landscape.
What types of research are sponsors investing in? What programs are given priority? What are the track records of investigatos who have recieved specific awards? Answers to these questions and many others can drive decisions for labs, teams, and the institution.
In partnership with the CSU Office of Research Analytics, RAO analyzed institutional, investigator, and sponsor data to help faculty leverage details of the funding landscape toward creating more successful proposals.
Federal Funding Landscape
Staying informed about federal actions and agency priorities is crucial to the researcher’s preperation to pursue federal funds. The links below represent just some of the federal agencies to which CSU faculty regularly submit proposal. As you explore opportunities across the federal funding landscape, seek out information on agency emerging priorities and new areas of interest.
CSU Websites on Federal Actions:
Federal Agency Policies and Priorities
- Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Priorities
- National Science Foundation (NSF) Priorities
- NSF’s Big 10 Ideas
- NSF Updated Review Process
- National Institutes of Health (NIH) Priorities
- Administration for a Healthy America (AHA) HHS new initiative
- ARPA-H Focus Areas
- USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Priorities
- National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Priorities
- National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Priorities
Online Resources
- Strategic Research Resilience: Resources for Researchers CSU website
- Creative Grant Seeking in a Challenging Landscape Hanover webinar (April 2025)
- Federal Funding Priorities in FY2026 Hanover webinar (June 2025)
- Major Changes to NIH Application Guidelines Hanover webinar (January 2025)