In May 2025, an online brokerage event opened ahead of the Horizon Europe health calls. By the time its matchmaking closed in November, 1,978 participants had booked 1,906 bilateral meetings and viewed each other’s profiles 54,393 times. That is fewer than two meetings per participant, but about 28 profile views each. Most of the partner search happened on the profile page.
A brokerage event for an EU funding call helps organisations find partners before the submission deadline. Participants need to identify the expertise or role missing from their consortium, then decide whether a potential partner is a good fit. Meeting totals show activity; submitted proposals help you assess what that activity led to.
This guide is for teams at National Contact Points (NCPs), clusters, chambers and regional development agencies. It explains how to time a brokerage event, prepare useful profiles and track the proposals that follow.
What a brokerage event for EU funding is
Brokerage events exist in commercial matchmaking too. The mechanism of profiles, requests and mutual acceptance is the one we describe in business matchmaking and its three forms. A funding brokerage adds one specific job: helping organisations find partners for a proposal before the call closes.
That job has a legal starting point. Under the Horizon Europe Regulation, a collaborative project normally needs at least three independent legal entities: one established in an EU Member State and two more, each in a different Member State or associated country (Regulation (EU) 2021/695, Article 22). Many consortia are larger than that minimum, and the work programme can set different rules for a topic.
The evaluation adds a second test. Under the criterion “Quality and efficiency of the implementation”, evaluators score the capacity and role of each participant and “the extent to which the consortium as a whole brings together the necessary expertise” (Horizon Europe standard evaluation criteria, General Annexes to the Work Programme). So a coordinator does not look for contacts. She looks for a role: a pilot site in a second country, a company that will exploit the results, a partner who covers ethics or social science.
A useful profile therefore explains the role an organisation can fill.
Plan back from the call deadline
Because the gap is a role, the event has to take place while roles are still open. That means working back from the submission deadline, not forward from a free slot in the events calendar.
The Horizon Europe health community shows what that looks like in practice. The Health NCP network HNN3.0, together with Enterprise Europe Network (EEN) partners, ran an online brokerage week from 26 to 30 January 2026, ahead of the Cluster 1 Health info day. The first single-stage deadline for the 2026 health calls was 16 April 2026. That left about eleven weeks between the last meeting and the deadline. NCP4Missions followed the same logic for the EU Missions calls, with an online brokerage event on 28 and 29 January 2026, linked to the Missions info days a week earlier.
An eleven-week window gives partners time to discuss work packages and budgets. With only three weeks remaining, coordinators have much less room to assess potential partners and agree their contribution.
A brokerage event planned back from the call deadline
- 20 weeks Pick the call topics Choose the topics from the work programme and announce the date, so coordinators can plan around it.
- 16 weeks Open the profiles Registration opens with structured fields: call topic, role offered or sought, organisation type, country.
- 13 weeks Select the pitches Choose pitches that name a missing role in a specific topic, not a general capability.
- 12 weeks Run the brokerage days Pitches first, then bilateral meetings over one to five days, online or on site.
- 11 to 4 weeks Keep matching open Leave profiles and requests open and circulate the role gaps that are still unfilled.
- Deadline Count the submissions Ask participants which proposals they submitted with a partner they met through the event.
The week numbers are a working plan, not a rule. A two-stage call shifts everything towards the first-stage deadline, and a call with a short opening window compresses the early steps.
Make the cooperation profile do the work
Profiles deserve careful preparation because participants use them to decide whom to contact. The HNN3.0 organisers ask for “a high-quality cooperation profile” before anyone can pre-arrange meetings, and they are right to make it a condition.
The European Commission’s own partner search on the Funding & Tenders Portal shows the minimum structure. Announcements are linked to a specific open or forthcoming topic, they are either an expertise request (you are looking for partners) or an expertise offer (you want to join a consortium), and the description is limited to 500 characters. Your registration form can follow the same logic and add what the portal leaves out:
- Call topic: the topic identifier from the work programme, chosen from a list rather than typed. Matching on free text fails when one person writes “AI in diagnostics” and another “machine learning for imaging”.
- Request or offer: whether the organisation coordinates and needs partners, or wants to join. This one field splits your audience into the two sides that need to meet.
- Role: coordinator, work package lead, pilot or demonstration site, exploitation partner, specialist contribution. Roles are what evaluators score, so they are what participants should search for.
- Organisation type and country: university, research organisation, SME (small or medium-sized enterprise), start-up, industry, public authority. Combined with country, this lets a coordinator check the eligibility rule at a glance.
- Track record: previous EU projects, which participants can look up in CORDIS, the Commission’s database of funded research. It tells a coordinator whether a partner knows the reporting burden.
Compare two profiles. One says: “We are an innovative SME with strong expertise in digital health.” The other says: “We offer a hospital pilot site with 400 beds in Portugal for topic X, as a partner, not as coordinator.” The second makes it easier for a coordinator to judge whether the organisation fills a specific gap in the consortium.
Pitch the missing role
The profile gets a participant found, and the pitch gets them remembered. Pitch sessions sit alongside the meetings at many brokerage events for EU calls. At the January 2026 health brokerage week they ran on the mornings of the first two days.
A good pitch for consortium building is short and specific. It names the topic, the project idea in one sentence, the partners already on board and the one or two roles still missing. That last point is what makes the audience act, because a listener can recognise themselves in a role, not in an institutional presentation.
Ask applicants to name the roles they still need. That keeps pitches focused on potential collaboration and helps listeners judge whether to request a meeting.
Matching rules for consortium building
A good pitch creates demand, and the matching rules decide where that demand can go. Brokerage events for funding calls often keep requests open in every direction, because unexpected pairings are part of the point. A coordinator may meet another coordinator and merge two half-consortia into one.
The audience mix makes one rule more important than the others. At the HNN3.0 health brokerage event that opened in May 2025, the participant list looked like this:
Who registered for the HNN3.0 Cluster 1 Health brokerage event, May 2025
Selected organisation types. The breakdown totals 1,991 participants, including consultancies, clusters and NCPs; the headline statistic of the same event reports 1,978.
More than half of the participants came from universities and research institutions. Industry companies made up just over 3 per cent. If every university can request every company, those 67 companies will receive far more requests than they can accept, and they may not come back next year.
The answer is the same as at any matchmaking event with a scarce group: set a cap on incoming requests for the scarce side, let them see the role and topic before they accept, and recruit industry and public authorities deliberately, through clusters and chambers, before registration closes. The mechanics of request caps and acceptance are explained in our guide to buyer to seller ratios at matchmaking events.
Many of these events run online, as both January 2026 examples did, which changes slot lengths, time zones and no-show handling. We cover those details in our guide to virtual matchmaking events. Consortium building also differs from life science partnering, where the first meeting screens a licensing deal, as described in our article on life science partnering.
With Converve, you build the cooperation profile into the registration form and use its fields in a rule-based meeting matrix: which groups may request whom, how many requests each side can receive, and both sides accept before a meeting is scheduled. The B2B matchmaking module is where those rules are set.
After the event: matching until submission
The meeting days end, but the role gaps do not. At the 2025 health brokerage event, the organisers kept matchmaking open from 7 May to 30 November. Of the 54,393 profile views, 17,604 came after the event, almost a third.
Picture a coordinator three weeks after the brokerage days. She has four universities and a hospital, and no company to take the results to market. She did not find one in the meeting slots. If the platform is closed, she starts emailing contacts. If it is open, she filters for SMEs offering an exploitation role in her topic and sends three requests that afternoon.
Keeping matchmaking open costs little and catches exactly that case. Add two light touches: a reminder a few weeks after the event that lists the most frequent unfilled roles by topic, and a pointer to the NCPs in each country, who know which consortia are forming.
What to report to your funder
To find out how many proposals followed the event, track both meeting activity and the results participants report afterwards.
- Complete profiles: the share of registered participants with a topic, a role and a request or offer filled in. This shows whether your registration did its job.
- Meetings held: accepted and held meetings, by organisation type. It shows whether the scarce groups were reachable.
- Proposals submitted: after the deadline, ask participants whether they submitted a proposal that includes a partner they met through the event, and for which topic.
- Funded projects: months later, check which of those proposals were selected. CORDIS and the participants themselves are your sources.
Keep the third number as your main result. Between 2021 and 2025, nearly 149,000 eligible proposals were submitted to Horizon Europe and more than 21,000 projects were selected (European Commission, annual report on Horizon Europe monitoring, May 2026). That is roughly one in seven. Your event can help build a stronger consortium, but it does not control the evaluation.
Report what your event controls. Our framework of key performance indicators (KPIs) for B2B event matchmaking explains how to collect such figures with two or three clean fields instead of a long questionnaire.
Conclusion
A brokerage event for an EU funding call is measured by the consortia that submit, not by the meetings it books. That changes the design. You plan back from the deadline, make the cooperation profile carry the topic and the missing role, protect the scarce groups with clear matching rules and keep matching open until submission. Together, these records give you a clearer account of what the event contributed.
If you are planning a brokerage event for a funding programme and want to see how profiles and matching rules can be set up, get in touch with Converve.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a brokerage event in Horizon Europe?
A brokerage event is a matchmaking event where organisations look for partners for a specific funding call. Participants publish a cooperation profile, pitch project ideas and hold pre-arranged bilateral meetings, usually online. National Contact Point networks, often with the Enterprise Europe Network, organise them ahead of the info days for many clusters and missions.
How many partners does a Horizon Europe consortium need?
The standard minimum for collaborative actions is three independent legal entities: one in an EU Member State and two more, each in a different Member State or associated country (Regulation (EU) 2021/695, Article 22). Many topics are designed for larger consortia, and the work programme can set different conditions, so check the topic text.
How far before the deadline should a brokerage event take place?
Early enough for partners to agree work packages and budgets afterwards. The Cluster 1 Health brokerage week in January 2026 ended about eleven weeks before the first 2026 single-stage deadline on 16 April 2026. Practice varies: HNN3.0’s next edition on 24 and 25 November 2026 runs about 20 weeks before the 2027 deadline. Plan for at least ten to twelve weeks for single-stage calls.
What should a partner search profile contain?
The call topic, whether you offer expertise or request partners, the role you want to fill or play, your organisation type and country, and your previous EU projects. The Funding & Tenders Portal limits partner search announcements to 500 characters, so a specific role beats a general self-description.
Is a brokerage event the same as the Funding & Tenders Portal partner search?
No. The portal partner search lets organisations publish expertise requests or offers linked to a topic and contact each other. A brokerage event adds a fixed date, pitch sessions and scheduled meetings, which brings many partner seekers for the same topics together at the same time.
How do you measure the success of a brokerage event?
Count complete profiles, meetings held by organisation type, and above all the proposals submitted that include a partner met through the event. Funded projects follow months later and depend on the evaluation, so report them separately as a long-term result.
