Resources
Practical guides for every stage of the grant lifecycle — from building a funding pipeline, to writing SBIR, NIH, and NSF proposals, to managing an award once you've won it.
Federal opportunities live on Grants.gov and SAM.gov, but state/local, foundation, and international funding (World Bank, UN agencies, and similar) is scattered across hundreds of separate portals with no unified search. Learn how to build a real funding pipeline instead of chasing one deadline at a time.
Solution available
AI Grant Finder™ syncs live opportunities from Grants.gov and SAM.gov automatically, and lets you add opportunities from any other source — state/local government, private foundations, international organizations — by pasting a link or the text, tagged and filterable right alongside the synced ones. Every opportunity gets a bid/no-go decision and a place in your pipeline.
Specific Aims pages, Broader Impacts statements, SBIR commercialization plans — every funder scores proposals against a different rubric. These guides break down what reviewers are actually looking for, section by section.
Solution available
AI Grant Scholar™ drafts every section calibrated to the FOA's requirements and agency-specific review criteria, then lets you edit, regenerate, and export.
Winning is the beginning, not the end — budgets need tracking, compliance items come due, and funders expect reports on their timeline, not yours. Learn what changes once a proposal becomes an active award.
Solution available
The Award & Post-Award workspace activates a funded proposal into a project baseline, then manages budget tracking, compliance, amendments, performance reporting, and closeout in one place — rolled up, alongside every other pursuit in flight, on the Portfolio Register.
A tour of the real sources — Grants.gov, SAM.gov, agency-specific portals, state pass-through programs, foundation databases, and international bodies like the World Bank and UN agencies — and how to tell which opportunities are worth your team's time before you start writing.
Read guide →Treat funding opportunities like a sales pipeline, not a folder of PDFs. How to set up watchlists, run a consistent bid/no-go review, and never miss a deadline again.
Read guide →A complete guide to the five key sections reviewers weight most — technical approach, innovation, commercialization potential, team qualifications, and broader impact.
Read guide →The Specific Aims page is often called the most important single page in any NIH application. Here's how to structure it for maximum reviewer impact.
Read guide →Broader Impacts is a co-equal review criterion at NSF — not an afterthought. This guide explains what strong BI statements look like and common mistakes to avoid.
Read guide →A clear breakdown of how SBIR budgets work — personnel fringe rates, F&A indirect costs, MTDC vs TDC bases, and the 7% small business fee.
Read guide →Moving from Phase I to Phase II isn't just scaling up — the deliverables, review criteria, and commercialization requirements shift substantially.
Read guide →Based on hundreds of reviewed proposals — what makes a reviewer say 'fund this' versus 'not competitive,' and how to write to that mental model.
Read guide →The first 30 days after an award notice — activating the project baseline, setting up budget categories, assigning compliance owners, and getting your team aligned before work starts.
Read guide →What funders actually check for — reporting cadence, financial documentation, programmatic milestones — and how to build a compliance calendar that doesn't rely on memory.
Read guide →Scope changes, budget reallocations, and timeline slips all require different paperwork. A practical guide to which situations need a formal amendment and which don't.
Read guide →One register follows a pursuit from opportunity through post-award, an Attention feed surfaces what's due next across every stage, and a probability-weighted pipeline separates likely dollars from wishful ones. How to read it, and where it plugs into your existing pipeline, pre-proposal, and award workflows.
Read guide →FAQ
Finding Funding
Does Clariva help before I even find a funding opportunity?
Yes. The Funding Intelligence Pipeline syncs live opportunities from Grants.gov and SAM.gov, lets you build watchlists, and tracks a bid/no-go decision for each one — so your team has a working pipeline, not just a proposal editor.
What sources does Clariva search for funding opportunities?
Clariva syncs directly with Grants.gov and SAM.gov for federal opportunities — no unified live API exists for state/local, foundation, or international funders, so those are added manually: paste a link or the opportunity's text, tag it as state/local government, private foundation, or international organization, and it's parsed into your pipeline the same as a synced one, filterable by source. AI Grant Finder then summarizes eligibility requirements, funding priorities, deadlines, and evaluation criteria for anything in your pipeline, regardless of where it came from.
How do I decide whether to pursue an opportunity once I've found it?
Each opportunity in your pipeline carries a bid/no-go decision plus AI-generated recommendations on fit, based on your organization's mission, capabilities, and prior performance — so the decision is documented, not just made in someone's head.
Writing Proposals
What is an SBIR?
Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) is a federal program that funds small businesses to conduct R&D with potential for commercialization. Eleven federal agencies participate, including NIH, NSF, DOD, DOE, NASA, and DARPA.
What's the difference between SBIR Phase I and Phase II?
Phase I (typically $150K–$300K) funds feasibility and proof-of-concept over 6–12 months. Phase II (typically $750K–$2M) funds full R&D and prototype development over 24 months, and requires a Phase I award.
How does Clariva know what to write?
Clariva uses your organization profile — company capabilities, PI credentials, prior performance — combined with the FOA requirements and agency-specific templates to generate proposals calibrated to real reviewer criteria.
Can I edit the generated proposals?
Yes. All generated content can be edited in the workspace. You can regenerate individual sections, refine wording, and then export the final version.
What does 'compliance checking' mean?
Compliance checking verifies that your proposal meets the FOA's required sections, page limits, font requirements, and other formatting rules before you submit.
Can Clariva draft things besides the proposal itself, like cover letters or MOUs?
Yes. The Supporting Documents generator drafts cover letters, letters of inquiry, concept papers, letters of support/commitment, MOUs, planning documents (logic models, M&E plans, risk plans, and more), and capability statements — all grounded in the same project and organization data as your proposal.
Managing Awards
What happens after I win an award?
Clariva doesn't stop at submission. Each award gets a dedicated workspace for budget tracking, compliance items, amendments, and closeout — plus a portfolio-level Awards page to see everything you're managing at once. Post-award reports go through a human-in-the-loop review and approval step before they can be exported or downloaded, so nothing goes out the door without a reviewer signing off.
What does Clariva track once an award is active?
The Award workspace tracks planned-vs-actual budget and milestones against the approved project baseline, compliance items and their due dates, performance records, and any open issues — with a portfolio dashboard rolling all of that up across every award you hold.
Can Clariva help with grant renewals?
Yes. When a new funding opportunity is a renewal of a prior award, Clariva flags the connection in your funding pipeline and links back to the originating award, so your team isn't rebuilding history from scratch each renewal cycle.
What happens if the scope, budget, or timeline of an award needs to change?
Amendments are tracked against the award's approved baseline and go through the same approval workflow as reports — so scope, budget, or timeline changes are documented and reviewed, not just noted in an email thread.
Is there one place to see everything I'm pursuing and managing at once?
Yes — the Portfolio Register follows every pursuit across opportunity, pre-proposal, proposal, and award stages as a single row, with an Attention feed unioning every due-date signal (opportunity deadlines, pre-proposal decisions, compliance obligations) and a probability-weighted pipeline value alongside the raw total. A Knowledge Center on the same page surfaces your own recorded win/loss outcomes and feeds those lessons back into the AI drafting of new proposals.
Platform & Security
Is my data secure?
All proposal content and organization data is encrypted in transit and at rest. We never use your proposal content to train AI models.
Can my team collaborate on a proposal together?
Yes. Organizations get role-based permissions, audit logging, and shared workspaces, plus a Document Library with versioning, internal/external sharing, and AI semantic search across everything your team has generated or uploaded.
Does Clariva connect to the tools we already use?
Yes. You can send notifications to Slack or Microsoft Teams, or wire up a generic outbound webhook, whenever key events happen in your account. More integrations are on the way.
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