Planning for 2026: What Your Research Data Can Tell You

As research administration teams prepare for the year ahead, no doubt many of you are still recovering from 2025 and frustrations around juggling industry changes and new regulations with your day-to-day work.

Every year, we talk about New Year’s Resolutions and how this year is going to be different. The good news is that it can be, with help from the right set of tools. We know 2025 was unpredictable, and our hope going into this New Year is that the chaos begins to settle. However, we don’t really know if or when that will happen. 

While we can’t predict the future, we can analyze existing data to help establish annual goals, implement strategies for adapting to the unexpected, and shift perspectives and team mindsets from reactive to strategic. 

By preparing for anticipated requests and ensuring clean data, research administrators can come to the table this year with answers to the most common PI and leadership questions, as well as plans for stronger proposals and submissions in 2026.

To help get your new year started right, here are five suggestions on how you can leverage historical proposal data to help prepare for the upcoming year:

1. Use a centralized platform for proposal data

First, let’s address a common challenge research administrators face: siloed data and complex reporting processes that obscure trend visibility. In short, when data is dispersed across different formats and platforms, a comprehensive analysis can take too long and still contain errors from outdated or duplicate entries.

That’s why using a single, centralized location like the Cayuse Platform to consolidate award and proposal data can help accelerate the creation of intuitive dashboards and insightful reports. With instant access to performance trends that don’t require downloading Excel files and configuring rows of data every time, you and your team can easily share analytics to make data-driven decisions for the year ahead.

Analytics you’ll want to have ready to showcase include:

• Proposal submission counts and success rates over the past years, months, or even weeks. With dashboards pulling your data together from a single, centralized database, you can easily adjust the scope of your analysis and see the results in real-time.

• Comparisons of award conversion rates by department or PI. Cayuse Analytics’ live dashboard filters can be adjusted so you and your leadership teams can see what awards were accepted and where you can be more successful this year, even during active strategy sessions where more questions may arise.
  

Key Outcome: You’ll be able to spot patterns that matter for your 2026 strategy, rather than just summarizing what happened in 2025, and have ongoing discussions on how to prepare.

2. Have historical benchmarks ready to inform 2026 goals

Research offices are often asked to prove the rationale behind requests to meet goals, not just for internal reporting, but to advocate for staffing, tools, and process improvements. 

Cayuse Analytics allows you to benchmark current goals against historical trends, helping you answer questions like:

• How does workload distribution impact proposal throughput?

• Where are opportunities to reduce manual tasks or increase efficiency with new tools?

By anchoring your planning discussions in data rather than anecdotes, you’ll make a stronger case for resources and process investments with a clear picture of what the return or results will look like. 

Key Outcome: You’ll be prepared to set new annual goals with dashboards showing year-over-year performance and predictive trend lines to estimate 2026 submission volumes.

3. Assess capacity and resource allocation by award count and budget

Data doesn’t just tell you what has happened; it also shines a light on capacity constraints, especially for executives who need to see how their teams are allocating their time.  

For example, dashboards that monitor staffing workloads help administrators understand how many proposals and awards different teams are working on and where they are overextended.

This type of trend is key for planning hiring, redistributing responsibilities, or introducing automation to help teams with administrative tasks.

Key Outcome: You’ll gain objective visibility into workload challenges to better support resource requests and internal prioritization.

4. Empower stakeholders with role-based data access

As you think about 2026 and beyond, remember not everyone needs access to the same data. 

In fact, it’s helpful to have dedicated data and reporting dashboards by role so that each team can stay focused on achieving their main responsibilities and goals. After all, a PI, an executive, and a research administrator will all need access to different levels of data to help them do their jobs and make better-informed decisions. 

Here are a few examples to consider when thinking about how the data can help with 2026 planning across different roles:

• Leadership needs to see big-picture trends, year-over-year volume and submission rates, workload allocation, and costs associated with each award.

• PIs need to see their proposal statuses, what comes next, where they stand against their budgets, and any deliverables that could be at risk for meeting a timeline.

• Operational dashboards for research administration teams should showcase day-to-day performance and provide a view into their overall submission funnel. 

To give a quick example, the leadership dashboard widget pictured below showcases proposal submission metrics that can easily be understood at a glance:

Key Outcome: You’ll have user-based dashboards and reports to help keep different stakeholders and teams informed and engaged.

5. Build a data-driven culture for continuous improvement

Best practice research shows that investing in transparent analytic tools, fostering data literacy, and establishing standardized, easy-to-digest reporting methods all directly support strategic planning and operational effectiveness in research administration. That’s why using analytics shouldn’t be a once-a-year effort.

A data-driven research office looks for insights regularly, not just at the start of the year. That means:

• Regularly reviewing dashboards and performance with your team. Set up a monthly or even quarterly cadence and make it fun! Add brainstorming topics that also help showcase how to improve moving forward, then make sure to monitor the ongoing impact.

• Establishing data governance and stewardship best practices so data remains reliable and trusted. The more you can report on insights backed by data, the more your leadership and executive teams will trust you. Keep the data clean, simple, and reliable. This is an ongoing effort, but one that will pay off in the long term.

• Celebrating wins that came from insights. Don’t forget to take the time to commend better submission rates, reduced errors, and other positive metrics! Highlighting success builds team morale and emphasizes strategies for continued improvements.
  

Key Outcome: You’ll become the trusted resource for your proposal office. Whether you work in pre-award, post-award, or the full-proposal lifecycle, your data and analysis expertisxe, will make you and your department planning experts for years to come.

Staying prepped for reporting asks in 2026

As funding landscapes become more unpredictable and research needs evolve, your office will benefit from staying on top of monthly, quarterly, and annual data trends to help make strategic planning decisions. That’s why Cayuse’s real-time analytics tools empower teams to:

• Anticipate workload demands
• Advocate for the resources you need
• Improve submission quality and volume
• Streamline workflows to free teams for higher-impact work

With the right analytics foundation, research administrators can approach 2026 not simply with hindsight on 2025 performance, but with actionable foresight for growth, efficiency, and impact.