Hyperlinks provide a clean, efficient way to offer readers additional information or clarifications of key ideas in our prose, and they allow us to keep our missives targeted and brief. However, the NIH holds two things sacrosanct–page limits and reviewer anonymity–and both are potentially violated by the use of hyperlinks in grant applications.
Hyperlinks provide a clean, efficient way to offer readers additional information or clarifications of key ideas in our prose, and they allow us to keep our missives targeted and brief. However, the NIH holds two things sacrosanct–page limits and reviewer anonymity–and both are potentially violated by the use of hyperlinks in grant applications. Continue reading “Hyperlinks in a Grant–Yes or No?”
Funders proliferate mission and vision statements across their communications, which should, in theory, make it easy for grant seekers to strategically align their applications with funders’ expectations. Often, however, mission and vision statements can be too broad to help individual grant seekers determine the goodness of fit for individual projects, resulting in a waste of time and effort.
Web sites can be useful resources if they are kept current, but they, too, are often formal and fairly general, and research highlighted on web sites provides a glance in the rearview mirror—that research was funded years ago, which doesn’t help you necessarily understand what’s winning awards now.
Here at Strategic Grantsmanship, it’s all about efficiency and how to win more grant money in less time. Time unnecessarily spent on the grants treadmill indiscriminately pursuing every opportunity that comes your way and might be a fit for your project keeps you away from what you really want to be doing, whether that’s working in the field or lab, running your business, or running with your dog. So here are six easy online tools I use to efficiently achieve insight into the current wants, needs, and interests of potential funders and accurately gauge if a funding opportunity is worth pursuing. Continue reading “Six Easy Online Tools Every Grant Seeker Should Use”
It’s the first week of the New Year, and the government offices are back up and running. Funding announcements are beginning to trickle out again, and you can see mention of them popping up here and there. But where are the definitive lists of these opportunities posted when they are published? If you are trying to jump start your grant writing in the New Year but don’t know where to start, this quick start guide will point you in the right direction so you can review the opportunities as soon as they are published.
Today, we support your New Year’s resolution to buckle down on grant writing by offering you information about where to find sample applications and how to use them:
When training people to write grants, I use examples and am often asked by my clients for sample proposals. Obviously, my client proposals are confidential, so sharing them is absolutely out of the question. I don’t even talk about my projects with my family, I’m a vault. So the question still stands, where can you find good sample applications?
Some grant writing books have samples, but usually they are discrete sections of the application, and context can be lost. That doesn’t help the new grant writer get the sense of how the sections of the application all fit together. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) web site has a very well thought-out grant preparation section that you should definitely investigate, but it lacks samples as well. However, one of the NIH’s institutes, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has an application development section with sample applications and summary statements for R01, R03, R21, R21/R33, and F31 opportunities, and sample applications for the SBIR/STTR applications: R41, R42, R43, and R44.
These are samples of well-written applications, or, as NIAID puts it, “sound examples of good grantsmanship.” However, some of these sample applications were written in response to older opportunities, and so they may not reflect the current form sets or requirements. Their value, as the value of any sample of writing should be, is not in detailed “copying” of the approach, but in demonstrating how ideas are articulated in each section and how the sections hang together to form the complete application.
Where can using sample applications go wrong? Seeing these or any other writing examples as “templates” is a mistake. As the saying goes, you do you. Also, reading the sample applications without reading the sample summary statements leaves you with half the story. Take the time to read the feedback on the sample–it will give you great insight into what the reviewers like and dislike in applications.
Other Sample Materials
The page has other samples you will likely find useful, including a sample data sharing plan and sample model organism sharing plans. Links to the NIH’s biographical sketch samples will also be useful to most grant writers, if they haven’t found them already at the NIH site. I review NIH biosketch strategies in several places on this blog.
One Last Thought
Ask your mentor and members of your department who have had success in grant writing if they have any proposals you may review and use as a guide for your own proposals. Of course, keep in mind that under US law each proposal is automatically copyrighted and the academic rules regarding plagiarism apply (of course). And, while you are asking, it wouldn’t hurt to ask if those trusted colleagues would be willing to review your application and offer feedback. Your grant application should have ample internal review by multiple people in and outside of your discipline before submission. But that’s a topic for another blog entry.
You can update your NIH application post-submission. Read on to learn how (and for what circumstances).
A glacier cave located on the Perito Moreno Glacier in Argentina.(Photo credit: Martin St-Amant – Wikipedia – CC-BY-SA-3.0)
While the focus of my job is the time period before the application deadline, I do spend a considerable amount of time managing clients’ expectations and anxieties in that time between application submission and review. The timescale of grants can seem glacial to those who are new to the grant funding process, and so much can happen in the career of a researcher or to a research project between the time a grant application is submitted and the time it is reviewed. This applies equally to academic researchers and private sector researchers, because, although the SBIR/STTR timeline is shorter than the R01 timeline, for example, small businesses tend to have less of a financial cushion and a tighter timeline than academic research programs. When something good (promotion! publication!) or bad (loss of an animal colony due to natural disaster) happens, what can you do? Most people do presume that they can (and should!) contact the agency in the case of a natural disaster, but are at a loss over the ability to communicate less dramatic happenings, like publication. What many applicants don’t realize is that there is a mechanism by which they may update their applications post-submission. This is the topic of today’s blog, so take a deep cleansing breath, release that anxiety, and read on.
Strategic Grantsmanship 