Erasmus+ KA2 evaluation criteria: how KA220 and KA210 proposals are scored

Erasmus+ Key Action 2 is the part of the programme that funds cooperation between organisations rather than individual mobility, and it is where most civil society organisations, schools, universities and youth organisations in this region meet the Erasmus+ scoring system for the first time. The scoring is public, precise and unusually unforgiving of imbalance, which is good news for anyone willing to write against it.

KA220 and KA210, and which one you want

Cooperation Partnerships (KA220) are the larger, more demanding action, and Small-scale Partnerships (KA210) are the entry route designed for newcomers and smaller organisations. They share the same four criteria families but weight them differently, and the difference in weighting tells you what each action is really asking for.

That last row is the most useful thing to know before you start writing. The two actions share the same four award criteria, but they do not weight them the same way, and the difference tells you what each one is really asking for.

The four award criteria

Both actions score proposals out of 100 across four criteria: the relevance of the project, the quality of the project design and implementation, the quality of the partnership and the cooperation arrangements, and impact. The exact points behind each are published in the Programme Guide for the year you are applying in, and they differ between the two actions.

• Relevance. Whether the project matches the objectives and priorities of the action, and whether working across borders adds something that could not be achieved nationally.
• Quality of the project design and implementation. Whether objectives are clear and measurable, the methodology is sound, and work packages, budget and quality control hold together. Accessibility, digital tools, environmental sustainability and civic engagement all sit here.
• Quality of the partnership and the cooperation arrangements. Whether the mix of organisations suits the work, whether tasks are distributed sensibly, and whether coordination is real. Including organisations new to the programme is explicitly rewarded.
• Impact. What changes for participants and organisations, how it is measured, and what continues after the funding ends.

Where two proposals finish level, priority goes to the stronger score on relevance, and then on impact. That order is worth knowing before you decide which section gets your last available day.

The minimum in every criterion, not just the total

Reaching the overall threshold is not enough. Both actions also require a minimum score in every single criterion. A proposal can finish comfortably above the overall bar and still be rejected because one criterion fell below its own minimum.

The practical consequence is that a strong average is not a strategy. Before submitting, check that no criterion is being carried by the others, because the Programme Guide will not let the others carry it.

Eligibility, partnership size and lump sums

• Who can apply. Any public or private organisation established in an EU Member State or a third country associated to the Programme. For KA220, the applicant must have been legally established at least two years before the application deadline.
• Minimum partnership. KA220 requires three organisations from three different eligible countries. KA210 requires two organisations from two different eligible countries.
• Duration. KA220 runs 12 to 36 months. KA210 runs 6 to 24 months, extendable by up to six further months.
• Money. Both actions use predefined lump sums rather than line-item budgets, three of them for KA220 and two for KA210, with the current amounts set in the Programme Guide. You choose the lump sum, and the assessors judge whether the work plan justifies it.

That last point deserves emphasis. Under a lump sum you are not building a line-item budget for auditors, you are arguing that the volume of work matches the amount requested. A proposal asking for the largest lump sum with a work plan that would fit inside the smallest is not a budgeting error, it is a score reduction under design and implementation.

What this means for Western Balkans applicants

The programme divides the world into EU Member States, third countries associated to the Programme, and third countries not associated. That distinction decides whether your organisation can lead a partnership and whether it counts towards the minimum number of countries.

• North Macedonia and Serbia are third countries associated to the Programme. Organisations there apply on the same footing as EU organisations, can be the applicant, and count towards the minimum.
• Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Montenegro are third countries not associated to the Programme. Organisations there can participate in duly justified cases where they bring essential value, but they do not satisfy the minimum country requirement on their own.

In practice, a partnership built across the Western Balkans needs to check this early, because discovering it late means rebuilding the consortium rather than rewriting a paragraph. If your regional cooperation project does not fit the Erasmus+ country rules, it may fit the RYCO open call or the Western Balkans Fund instead, both of which are built for exactly this geography.

Where applicants lose points

1. Relevance written as background. Two pages about the problem in Europe, and one sentence connecting it to the specific priority the action names. Assessors score the connection, not the context.
2. Objectives that are activities. "Organise four training events" is an activity. The objective is what changes because those events happened, stated so it can be measured.
3. A partnership section that lists instead of argues. Each partner needs a reason to be there that the work plan confirms. A partner with no work package is a visible weakness.
4. Impact confused with dissemination. A communication plan tells the assessor how you will tell people. Impact is what those people do differently afterwards, and how you will know.
5. Nothing about what continues. Both actions ask what remains after the funding stops. Silence there costs points in the criterion with the heaviest weight in KA220.

Checking your draft against your own call

The Erasmus+ grid is fixed and published, which makes it perfectly suited to a structured check before submission. Build a table with the four criteria, their maximum points and their minimums, then write the page and section where each one is answered. Any criterion without a location is not a weak answer, it is an absent one, and under the per-criterion rule an absent answer is fatal rather than costly.

The Evalora Engine does this against the call document you actually received. It reads the official call and extracts the criteria and their weights, the eligibility rules, the partnership requirements, the required documents and the budget rules, then scores your draft criterion by criterion, flags requirements that are unmet, and ranks the fixes by the points they recover. Because the score is broken down per criterion rather than presented as one number, the section being carried by the others is visible before an assessor finds it.

This is also the specific job a general chat assistant handles badly. Ask ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to score the same draft twice and the numbers move, because nothing anchors the judgement to a fixed grid with minimums attached. The reasoning is set out in what general AI models miss on grant proposals.

Frequently asked questions

Source: the European Commission Erasmus+ Programme Guide, sections on Cooperation Partnerships and Small-scale Partnerships, and the eligible countries pages. Figures change between annual calls, so confirm them in the Programme Guide for the year you are applying in.