Introduction  

Outside of Researchfish, grants/awards are often funded by more than one funder. In the past, such situations required each funder to create a separate award entry in Researchfish; but with the introduction of co-funding support, a single Researchfish award can now be associated with multiple funders. This streamlines reporting for researchers, reducing the burden of reporting the same information to each funder separately and ensuring reporting consistency.

To help understand the respective roles of funders of an award, we will use the following terminology:

• Lead funder: the funder who administers the co-funded award in Researchfish, and includes it in their submission process.
• Other funders: the funders who are not the lead funder. They do not administer the award in Researchfish, but the data reported against the award is made available to them. Note there can more than one other funder of an award.  

You can use Researchfish's co-funding feature when other funders also use Researchfish. If other funders do not use Researchfish, the lead funder must share Researchfish data with them externally. 
You should only make use of co-funding if all funders have common reporting requirements, for example, as described in any funder-specific guidance text.

Note the initial release of co-funding has some functional limitations: where relevant, this is flagged in the documentation (see also “Future candidate work”).
 
 

How to use co-funding

If you plan to make use of co-funding, we recommend that you discuss this with your Customer Success manager  for guidance on adopting this new feature. This is especially important if you plan to use co-funding for existing awards in Researchfish, where there are additional considerations. 
 

Preparations

Before you do any co-funding setup in Researchfish, the funders of co-funded awards need to agree between them on who will be the lead funder. You will also need to agree on any funder-specific guidance text and category information to be added to co-funded awards, as this is part of award administration and can only be managed by the lead funder.

Only the lead funder can associate Additional Questions with co-funded awards. If other funders have Additional Questions that they want to associate with co-funded awards, contact your Customer Success manager who can help with this. 
 
 

Adding co-funding information into Researchfish

Information about other funders of an award can be added to awards when they are manually created or edited on the Researchfish platform. Note you can add information about more than one other funder.  

Bulk addition of other funder information

Currently the RHT upload mechanism does not support co-funding information. Your Customer Success manager can help you add co-funding information in bulk.
 
 

Administering co-funded awards

The lead funder can administer co-funded awards similarly to other awards, including using the RHT upload mechanism to update award data (note: this does not affect any co-funding information associated with the awards ), and managing category and node information. 

Other funders cannot edit    co-funded awards, or download them via the RHT download process, but can view them in awards search as "view only" awards.  

Researcher visibility of co-funding

Researchers can see if an award has multiple funders via the Award Details page: 

Preparing for submission

We recommend informing researchers and Research Organisations about your use of co-funding in your communications. This will help avoid confusion, especially if the award has been included in past submissions.

Your Customer Success manager will be able to support you in this activity.
 

Tracking the submission progress of co-funded awards

The lead funder will be able to see the status of co-funded awards in the Activity page, and in RHT downloads . Other funders will be able to see the status of co-funded awards via awards search .
 
 

Accessing data for co-funded awards

Where you are the lead funder for co-funded awards, there is no change in how you access data.

Where you are not the lead funder for co-funded awards, there are two ways in which awards data can be accessed:

• If your organisation has subscribed to the Snowflake®  reporting database,   the data team can help you understand how to query the data.
• Excel spreadsheet exports of awards: these include awards for which another funder is the lead funder. 
• Excel spreadsheet exports of outcomes: currently there is partial support for co-funded awards: 

• Live data exports of outcomes will include outcomes attributed to awards for which you are not the lead funder. This also applies to Additional Questions where you also have access to the same Additional Questions.
• Other data exports (such as “most recently submitted”, or data in a specific submission) remain future candidate work.  Our recommendation is that the lead funder sends a subset of their exported data to the other funders, for the awards that they are co-funding.  
   

Co-funding for existing awards

If you want to make use of co-funding for awards that have already been submitted in Researchfish, there are some additional considerations regarding past submissions. 

We strongly recommend that you contact your Customer Success manager, who can work with you to determine the right approach for you to take.

 

Future candidate work

Co-funding is a complex capability, which affects many areas of Researchfish functionality. The initial release is focussed on ensuring that we gain the benefits to researchers as quickly as possible. Beyond this release, the following are future candidate areas for further co-funding support:

• Update the RHT process to handle co-funding data 
• Improved exports support for co-funding 
• Improved support for retrospective application of co-funding to existing Researchfish awards
• Award export for co-funding (MSWord, Excel) 
• “Search (beta)” support for co-funding
• Reports to include co-funded awards
• Support for Additional Questions from other funders
• Category support for other funders
• Extending our harvesting support to cover other funders
• Interop  harvesting doesn’t currently cover other funders  
• Improving awards search (for example, improved support for PI search by other funders)

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