Losing an EU proposal is expensive. Find the weaknesses before the real evaluators do.
A serious proposal takes hundreds of hours across your team, your technical experts, finance and your consortium partners. Submitting it without an independent challenge puts all of that at risk.
BidShark simulates how experienced EU evaluators are likely to assess your proposal — while you still have time to fix what they would flag. Built on a library of fifty evaluator profiles spanning different professional, sector and evaluation backgrounds.
Panel composition
Six independent readings
- 01ExcellenceObjectives, methodology, state of the art
- 02ImpactPathways, uptake, measurable change
- 03ImplementationWork plan, resources, governance, risk
- 04ConsortiumCapacity, complementarity, credibility
- 05Red teamUnsupported claims, gaps, weak links
- 06Sector specialistDomain depth for your call
Decision layer
One adjudicated score
0
independent specialist readings
0–5
the official scoring scale, in half points
0 min
typical upload to finished report
page cited
every material finding
You only get one chance to submit
Then you press submit, and nothing can be changed.
Weeks of meetings. Dozens of document versions. Partner inputs, budgets, work packages, KPIs, impact pathways, management approvals — often hundreds of hours of combined work.
A weakness that would have taken thirty minutes to correct can become one of the reasons an evaluator lowers your score. And you may not discover it until months later, in the Evaluation Summary Report, when the opportunity has already gone.
That is the problem this solves. We give your proposal the scrutiny you would rather receive before the deadline than after it.
What you actually want to know
What will an evaluator find that we have stopped seeing?
When you have worked on a proposal for weeks, you know what you meant. The evaluator only knows what you wrote.
Is the Excellence argument genuinely convincing?
Is the methodology specific enough to be assessed?
Are important claims supported, or merely asserted?
Does Impact show a credible pathway to change?
Are the KPIs measurable and meaningful?
Do the work packages deliver the stated objectives?
Is the consortium credible for the work proposed?
Are resources and responsibilities realistic?
Are requirements from the call missing entirely?
Where could a sceptical evaluator reduce the score?
You get the findings before submission — not after the opportunity has gone.
Transparent by design
Not one generic opinion. Six defined specialist roles.
Each evaluator scores independently, before it sees what the others found — the same rule a real panel works under, and for the same reason. Agreement between readings that never met is worth something; agreement between readings that influenced each other is worth nothing.
The evaluator behind seat 03
Senior security architect, national research and technology organisation
Security-first and very precise. Assumes optimistic claims are incomplete until proven otherwise, and treats a risk register with no entry for the obvious risk as evidence the register was written to be present rather than to be used.
Earns a five
- a real threat model
- governance and incident response
- realistic operational testing
Taken from the evaluator brief this seat is conditioned on, not written for this page.
Fifty evaluator profiles are held in the library. Which six read your proposal is decided by programme, sector and type of action — the same rule every time, so the same proposal always draws the same panel.
What you receive
Not one assessment. Two.
Knowing you would score 12/15 instead of 14/15 is not enough. You need the assessment in the form the real evaluators use — and, separately, a clear plan for what to fix first. One report, both halves, €499.
PART ONE
The evaluation, in the official shape
The assessment as it would read after the official evaluation, in the format you will recognise from an Evaluation Summary Report.
- Your likely score against the criteria for your type of action
- Excellence, Impact and Implementation assessed separately
- Strengths and weaknesses under each criterion
- Consortium and sector-specific assessment
- Threshold status and where you sit against it
What a panel’s verdict could look like — while you can still change it.
PART TWO
What is costing you points, and how to fix it
The part the official process never gives you: an actionable breakdown of what is holding the proposal back.
- Page-specific findings — where each problem is, not generic advice
- Claims that are asserted rather than demonstrated
- Where the evaluators disagreed, and how it resolved
- A red-team pass: where a sceptic would look to lower the score
- Prioritised fixes, for the time you actually have left
- How far you are from looking genuinely fundable, not merely passing
The first half tells you where you stand. This one tells you what to do about it.
What it costs against what it protects
Say five organisations spend a combined 250 hours developing a proposal — management, technical work, consortium meetings, partner inputs, budgeting, impact planning, work packages, revisions and approvals. At a conservative €75 an hour, that is over €18,000 of effort already spent.
The real question is not whether an evaluation costs €499. It is whether, after hundreds of hours, you can afford not to have the proposal independently challenged before you submit.
- Effort already invested
- ≈ €18,000
- This evaluation
- €499
- Share of what you have spent
- under 3%
Where the people are
The reading is automated. Deciding what counts as good is not.
Six specialist readings arrive in about ten minutes, which no panel of people can do. What people do instead is everything that decides whether those readings are worth having.
They encode the marking scheme
Sub-criteria, thresholds, weightings and score-band descriptors are transcribed by hand from the published evaluation form for your type of action, and stored against the version of the form they came from. Not inferred by a model from what it has read about EU funding — that is the single most common way an assessment of this kind goes quietly wrong.
They write the evaluator briefs
What each seat scrutinises, how strictly it reads, and what it treats as evidence rather than assertion. Fifty profiles, each versioned, each drawn from how experienced evaluators actually read. A brief can be corrected when it turns out to be reading something the wrong way; a model's unstated instincts cannot.
They review the output
Reports are checked for quality, and what that review finds goes back into the schemes and the briefs rather than into your individual score. This is how a mis-transcribed threshold or a brief that misreads a criterion gets caught — and why the fix reaches every client rather than the one who complained.
And one thing they deliberately do not do
Nobody adjusts your score after the fact. A number a person quietly moved is a number you cannot check, and the whole value here is that every finding traces back to a page in your own document. Where a review finds a problem, the scheme or the brief is corrected and the evaluation is re-run — visibly, under a new version.
The part that is not automated
Put your questions to a real EU evaluator.
The score and the six readings arrive in minutes. What they cannot do is answer the question you have once you have read them — whether a reviewer would really see it that way, and what to do about it. For that there is a person who evaluates proposals for EU programmes, and who reads your report before replying.
A person, not a faster model
Answers take two to three working days because somebody reads the report and writes one. Nothing here streams a reply while you wait — the waiting is what you are buying, and saying so beforehand is the difference between an expert and a disappointment.
About your report, not about EU funding in general
They see the scores, every finding and the evidence the panel cited for it. So the question can be the specific one — whether a reviewer would really read §1.2 that way, what would have moved Impact above threshold — rather than the one a search engine already answers.
Fifteen written questions
Asked whenever you like, across whichever criteria matter, as the draft changes. They attach to your account rather than to one report, so a question saved for after the rewrite is still there after the rewrite.
Evaluation + Expert Q&A
€699 — the full assessment, plus 15 written questions.
Real proof of the output
Inspect the report before you buy.
The value is not the number. It is seeing which sentence produced each finding, where the evaluators disagreed, and what to change first.
Open the complete sample reportFINDING 07 · IMPACT · P. 28, §4 · SIGNIFICANT WEAKNESS
“The pathway assumes stakeholder reach becomes adoption, but gives no conversion rate, minimum uptake threshold or evidence source.”
Adjudicated
11.0 / 15
Threshold status
Passes · not yet competitive
A score you can check
Every criterion carries the findings that produced it, each with the page and paragraph attached.
Disagreement you can see
Where evaluators differ materially, the report keeps both positions and shows how the decision was reached.
The limits, stated first
Anything the panel could not assess is on the first screen. A gap you are not told about is worse than a low score.
The evaluation pipeline
From upload to a defensible decision.
Independent reading first. Reconciliation second. One senior decision last. The order is the method — reverse any two steps and the result is a consensus that was never tested.
Your package is read
The proposal is parsed against the actual Part B template for your call — real headings, not arbitrary chunks — so each evaluator can be given whole sections rather than fragments a search returned.
The call is compiled
Published requirements become a numbered, traceable list, each with the excerpt it came from. Supply the portal link and we fetch the topic ourselves. This is what makes a compliance claim checkable rather than an impression.
Six evaluators read independently
Each receives its brief, the marking scheme for your type of action, and its assigned sections in full. None can see what the others found. Findings are recorded before any score is derived — a score written first and justified afterwards is the failure mode this order exists to prevent.
Disagreement is tested
Where two evaluators differ materially on the same criterion, they are put to each other with the evidence visible, capped at two rounds. Both positions and the resolution stay in the report.
A senior evaluator adjudicates
One final reading sets the criterion scores, threshold status and competitive position. Suggested changes are derived only after scoring is complete, because a proposal must be judged as submitted rather than on what it could become.
Confidential proposal data
Your proposal is not marketing material.
It contains budgets, unpublished methods, personal data and partner-sensitive information. How it is handled belongs before the upload button, not in a policy page nobody opens.
Processed for one purpose
Your documents produce the evaluation you asked for. They are not used to train models and are not shared with anyone outside that job.
Access only with your say-so
Our people can open a client proposal for technical support, and only after that client has agreed to it. Not as a standing permission granted by a terms page.
Isolated per organisation
Every stored record is scoped to the organisation that created it. Results are never shared between accounts, even for a byte-identical document — that alone would reveal somebody else had submitted it.
Marking schemes encoded
Each scheme is transcribed from the published evaluation form it came from and carries that form’s version, so a report stays traceable to the rules that produced it. If your call uses a scheme we have not encoded, the report says so on the first screen rather than scoring you against the nearest thing we had.
Why the number is worth anything
Judge the method, not the marketing.
This is a new service and it has no wall of logos to show you. What it has instead is a method you can check before you spend anything — and for a score you intend to act on, that is the thing worth checking.
Marking schemes
Transcribed by hand
From the published evaluation form for your type of action, stored against that form's version number. Not inferred by a model from what it has read about EU funding.
Every finding
Cited or dropped
A finding without a resolvable citation to your document is discarded before it can affect a score. That rule is enforced in the schema, not requested in a prompt.
Scoring order
Findings first
Each evaluator records what it found and classifies severity before any number is derived. A score written first and justified afterwards is rejected and re-run.
What we could not do
Said on screen one
Missing sections, an unverified scheme, a seat that failed — all stated at the top of the report rather than left for you to notice.
Every one of these is visible in the sample report before you pay for one of your own. Open it and check.
Questions before upload
The details a serious proposal team should ask.
No, and we would rather say so on the page than have you find out afterwards. The evaluation is simulated. The system holds a library of fifty evaluator profiles representing different professional backgrounds, sector expertise and ways of reading, and selects the relevant ones for your programme, call and subject matter. That produces a structured simulation of the questions a panel may bring — not fifty people reading your document. The Expert Q&A package separately adds written access to a real EU evaluator.
You have already invested in the proposal
Protect that investment before you submit.
one complete report
Six specialist readings, a tested reconciliation, one adjudicated score, page-cited findings and a prioritised revision plan. No subscription.
Evaluate my proposalOne proposal. One deadline. One opportunity to improve it before submission.