Category: Strategic Communication

Plagiarism in Grant Proposals

Last year, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article titled “Plagiarism in Grant Proposals” by Karen M. Markin. The topic of plagiarism in grant proposals is something I discuss in my grant development seminars and workshops, and this article made the topic more tangible for many of the participants (although there is still always a lot of discussion and disbelief around the concept of self-plagiarism).  If you haven’t read this article, and you are involved in grant development, I would highly recommend that you take some time to review the article and share it with your team. One very salient point made is that the PI will always be held responsible for content, and the line “my graduate student did it” is not a defense.

Often, however, seminar and workshop participants ask for an example, and recently a case of plagiarism in a grant proposal was addressed by the Office of Research Integrity. Continue reading “Plagiarism in Grant Proposals”

Tracking and Organizing Your Social Media with Bitly

Tracking and Organizing Your Social Media with Bitly

In this business you need to keep up with available and emerging technologies, but the trick to staying productive is to pick and choose the tools in which to invest your time. The tools I choose typically have some competitive advantage over other tools in the area of efficiency–there simply isn’t enough time in the day to explore inefficient tools in the hope that there is some hidden benefit as yet unexplored that will change the calculus of efficient time management. But this article makes me want to re-consider Bitly, a tool I have used solely to shorten links. It would seem I’m missing out on some potentially interesting Bitly tools. Analytics for links across multiple sites and media is just one benefit of Bitly, and this article explores other Bitly tools of which many are unaware.

Happy exploring!

Choosing the Right Study Section

Many researchers are unaware that they can choose a study section for their investigator-initiated application in some instances. This is not an option for every agency and foundation, but it is for the NIH, for example. In fact, any researcher applying to the NIH who does not spend some quality time researching the study section listings and other abundant materials available to applicants at the Web site for the NIH’s Center for Scientific Review (CSR) is missing a strategic opportunity.  Continue reading “Choosing the Right Study Section”

Shifting to Writing for the Emerging Patient-Centered Research Paradigm

For those of you who are interested in patient-centered research, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) has released a report that may be of interest to you: Partnering with Patients to Drive Shared Decisions, Better Value, and Care Improvement – Workshop Proceedings. This report has an accompanying four-page meeting summary, as well, and I would recommend this summary not just for its content, but for its utility as a writing model for those strategic communicators new to the area of patient-centered research. Continue reading “Shifting to Writing for the Emerging Patient-Centered Research Paradigm”

The Golden Rule

The field of strategic communication encompasses many elements, including military and business communications, internal and external communications, public relations, marketing, and advertising, just to name a few. My interest has been in identifying and defining the key elements of strategic communication and developing scalable writing techniques professionals can apply to their specific area of interest. There are many sources for learning more about strategic communication theory, since it is a field of academic study; however, my approach in this blog is to offer practical, accessible strategic communication techniques developed during my career as a professional, strategic writer.

Today, we will start with The Golden Rule. There are many elements to strategic communication in business, but perhaps the most important one is The Golden Rule. This isn’t the rule about doing unto others as you’d have them do unto you. That’s nice and all, but remember we’re talking business here. The Golden Rule to which I’m referring is the one that goes something like this: He who has the gold makes the rules. This idea will thread through my entries as we go along, because so many elements of strategic communication support the alignment of your content and how it is presented to meet the expectations, desires, and abilities of your audience (your readers). The Golden Rule asks you to identify not just the message you want to impart, but to define exactly what information your audience expects and how this information is best presented to the audience.

A good example of The Golden Rule in action can be found in grant writing, in part because there actually is gold involved (i.e., funding). If you are writing a grant proposal for a large Federal agency like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), for example, no matter how great a research idea you may have, it will only be funded if your research question and the proposed outcomes of your research align with the mission of the NIH. Identifying the underlying mechanism of a disease process that affects millions of people annually is something likely to be funded, because the NIH has an interest public health and basic research. Although research into the history of chytrid fungus in museum specimens would be a great research idea for a herpetologist interested in identifying the role of chytrid fungus over time in the decline of amphibian species, the research does not align with the mission of the NIH, and so would not be fundable by that agency. Applying The Golden Rule, you would ask yourself, then, with whose mission does my question about chytrid fungus align? Perhaps the National Science Foundation (NSF), a private foundation with a conservation mission or an interest in herpetology, or even a natural science museum with a large herp collection would be appropriate audiences for your message.

The Golden Rule, even when money is not directly at stake, simply reminds strategic communicators to identify and define the audience for a message before determining the content and the means of the communication. By identifying and defining your audience, you are more likely to understand the expectations and needs of your readers and provide them with the information they need in a medium that is most effective for communication of your message.

So, you may ask, that’s fine and good, but what is the end game? Most strategic communication, whether it is a business plan for a start up in need of venture capital or an advertisement for a product, has an effective call to action as a goal. What do you want your audience to do as a result of your strategically, effectively imparted message? Fund your business, support your research, or buy your product? Defining your call to action is as important as defining your message and identifying your audience.

For this blog entry, my call to action is this: Think of a message you would like to communicate and what you would like to result from your message (your call to action). Then identify the audience for your message and apply The Golden Rule, reshaping your communication to align with the motivation of its audience. By doing so, you have established the foundation for building an effective, strategic communication.