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  5. Funding Opportunity Announcement Module (FOAM)

Funding Opportunity Announcement Module (FOAM)

Overview of FOAM

The Funding Opportunity Announcement Module (FOAM) is designed to provide end-to-end support for the ICs at NIH and our agency partners in development of notices of funding opportunities (NOFOs) and guide notices from initial draft through publication in the NIH Guide.

Originally, NOFO and Guide Notice writers began by using Word templates that they submitted in FOAM. FOAM is gradually transitioning to online templates that replace the use of Word templates. During this transition, Institutes/Centers (ICs) can choose to develop announcements within FOAM or develop and refine announcements offline before uploading to FOAM.

The FOA module is also being used by GrantSolutions.

Features

  • Create IC-specific configurable, reusable task workflows to track and monitor the announcement lifecycle
  • Review, revise, approve Word template NOFOs and notices
  • Create timeline comparisons
  • Develop reports
  • Define task details including due dates, milestones, expiration dates, privileges, assignments, dependencies, and phases
  • Customize and edit content and collaborate online to define content that conforms to built-in agency-level FOA templates
  • Visually display data

Benefits

  • Streamlines the process of creating a NOFO
  • Reduces number of systems used
  • Adds visual representations of data for NOFOs, such as a display of milestones to monitor
  • Improves tracking and reporting by marking critical business process events and deadline dates
  • Enables online collaboration with colleagues to develop and share data content
  • Enables parallel reviews, in system tracking of changes and in-line comments, along with the capability to upload and save documents
  • Enables reuse of NOFO data: auto generation of critique templates and capture of discrete due dates
  • Sends notifications to users based on events such as: NOFO review/approval required; NOFO reviewed/approved; milestone approaching; milestone missed
  • Reduces duplicate data entry by Guide Liaisons and improves data quality

Who can use FOAM?

  • Program Officials and others involved with the NOFO development process
  • FOA coordinators and NIH Guide Liaisons. Other contributors receive access when assigned NOFO tasks
  • NIH Office of Extramural Research (OER) policy reviewers
  • NIH Center for Scientific Review (CSR) staff, who review and approve receipt dates

Resources