Donor training: 12 official free resources for applicants

Dozens of online courses on grant literacy exist right now, and most of them are good. Yet one category of learning material sits almost unused: the material donors publish themselves.

In fact the difference lies in the source. A course author retells the rules as they understood them, while the donor writes the rules. So when the European Commission publishes guidance on how proposals get assessed, that is the same document your evaluator reads.

We collected 12 such resources, from the official manual on the EU portal to the option of becoming an evaluator yourself and seeing the process from the other side. All of them are free, and several work in Ukrainian or come with Ukrainian advisers.

The Online Manual: an official textbook few people open

On the Funding and Tenders Portal the European Commission keeps an Online Manual. This is an operational handbook, and it walks through every step from registering an organisation to signing the agreement and reporting. Agency staff cite it when they answer applicant questions.

The portal itself is the single entry point for applicants, contractors and experts across all programmes the Commission manages. Because the How to participate section sets out the sequence of steps, and the Participant Register page covers organisation registration and the PIC code, most procedural questions end there.

One practical tip. When your consultant and a colleague from another university read a requirement differently, the answer almost always sits in this manual. It updates alongside the programme rules, so a blog post from two years ago may already contradict the current version.

How to tell an official source from a commercial one

Search for Horizon Europe training and private training companies will fill the top results. Their courses are often good and their trainers have genuinely worked with the programme, although the price starts at several hundred euros for two days, and the visual design makes them look like Commission events.

Three markers reveal an official source:

• The domain. Commission sites sit on ec.europa.eu, europa.eu, or on the domain of a specific agency or partnership.
• The price. NCP consultations, the Online Manual, info day recordings and the NCP network Academy are always free.
• The funding statement. Official projects carry a line at the foot of the page reading Funded by the European Union, often with a grant agreement number.

Paid training has its place. This check simply helps you avoid paying twice for content that already sits free on the portal.

The Ukrainian layer: the programme office and the contact point network

Ukrainian applicants have a separate advisory infrastructure, built with EU money. It costs nothing, works in Ukrainian, and fewer potential applicants know about it than you would expect.

The Horizon Europe Office in Ukraine

The Horizon Europe Office in Ukraine started work on 20 December 2023 and operates as a department of the National Research Foundation of Ukraine. The grant agreement runs between the European Commission and the NRFU under project number 101132682. So far this is the only framework programme office that the Commission funds in full.

What you can take from it: advisory support on participation, sections for news, events and calls, an events calendar, and the Knowledge Hub materials of the LUKE project with modules on foresight and on pitching a project. Since Ukrainian-language trainings and info sessions get announced there first, check the news section regularly.

National contact points

The NCP network was established by a Cabinet of Ministers resolution of 27 February 2024, and the list was approved by Ministry of Education and Science Order No. 838 of 13 June 2024. The logic is simple: each thematic cluster of the programme has a named person at a named institution who answers questions about calls in that area.

The list of NCPs sits in the open. This is the shortest route to an answer about your own topic from someone who reads the same documents as the evaluators, and the consultation costs nothing.

A separate contact point for Euratom

Meanwhile nuclear research, both fission and fusion, has its own NCP. It runs its own seminars and information days, including regional ones. In November 2025 the Vasyl Stefanyk Carpathian National University hosted a seminar on current Horizon Europe issues and widening participation, while in January 2026 the RIFF project information day took place in Kharkiv.

The NCP network Academy and info day recordings

Beyond the national level, the contact point network itself runs a pan-European training platform.

Horizon Europe NCP Portal Academy

The Academy on the NCP portal hosts training modules that the NCP network produced with EU money. These include training on Horizon Europe proposal writing, a separate module on how to read a thematic work programme and a call topic, and an analysis of ESRs, meaning the evaluation summary reports.

That last item deserves attention. The ESR analysis carried out under the Horizon Academy project shows how evaluator comments differ across action types. So you see the actual wording experts use to justify low scores instead of abstract advice.

Call Days and info day recordings

Partnerships and agencies run call days before every major intake and then publish the recordings. The IHI Call 13 Call Days ran from 24 to 30 June 2026, and the presentations sit on the partnership website. This is the most precise source on what a specific call expects, because the people who wrote it are the ones speaking.

The routine is simple. If you are targeting a call, first check whether it had an info day, then listen to the recording. That beats any course on speed and any retelling on accuracy.

The strongest training: sit on the other side of the table

Everything above shows how to apply. Then the next level shows how you get read.

Registering as a European Commission expert

The Commission continuously recruits independent experts to evaluate proposals and monitor projects. Registration stays open at any time through the Work as an expert section of the portal, and it requires an EU Login account.

The detail few people know. The Online Manual states plainly that registration is open to experts of any nationality, including those from outside the EU and Associated Countries. So Ukrainian citizenship and a post at a Ukrainian institution present no obstacle.

In practice an expert works as an independent individual and does not represent an organisation. The conditions: a profile must reach 100 per cent completion, only one profile per person is allowed, and duplicates get deleted. For each assignment an agency draws a pool based on skills and knowledge, plus balance across geography and gender.

The REA agency gives advice worth taking literally: update the CV in your profile regularly and use specific keywords, since profiles get found through those keywords for particular assignments. Generic wording lowers the chance of an invitation.

What this gives your own proposals: you read 5 to 10 other projects, see what strong methodology and a weak impact section look like, and absorb the assessment criteria from inside. No course delivers that experience.

LUKE reviewer: recruitment is running now

So here is an easier entry into the same role. The LUKE project invites independent reviewers for the transnational proposals of its own call. The terms are concrete: reviewing English-language proposals of roughly 20 to 30 pages, fully remotely, between July and September 2026.

Each review gets three weeks once you are matched to a proposal and give consent. The process runs through the PT-Outline platform, and the fee is EUR 50 per completed review. Registration goes through a form on the call page.

For context, that call drew 288 proposals, so the workload for reviewers is real. For a researcher planning to apply to EU programmes next year, this trades a few weeks of work for an understanding of how evaluation actually works.

A free consultation from the donor before you submit

Finally, the last category is the least known. Some donors will look at your draft before submission.

The Visegrad Fund. The official Fund FAQ recommends consulting project proposals with the Fund. The terms: a maximum of two consultations per project idea, always based on a draft sent in advance, and no later than 14 days before the deadline. The format is your choice of email, phone, online or an in-person meeting.

For the nearest deadline of 1 October 2026 that means getting in touch by 17 September. After that the Fund will not run a consultation.

Partnership Q&A sessions. Partnerships hold live question sessions before calls close. EIT Health ran one on 2 September at 11:00 Central European Time ahead of the 16 September deadline. Recordings normally stay on the call page.

National contact points. You can write to an NCP with a specific question about your topic, which is another form of pre-submission consultation, only without a cap on how often you ask.