Grantsmanship 101: 5 tips to get funded
By Leah Colvin
Whether you’re writing your first funding application or you’re a more experienced grantwriter, there are a few basic grantwriting techniques that can enhance your application and make your proposal more likely to receive a favorable review. Below are five grantsmanship tips to increase your fundability.
Tip 1: Learn the lingo
Your grant application must, first and foremost, meet the mission of the funding agency. Such missions are listed on the agency website in an “About Us” or “Mission” section, and many can be found easily via web search. When crafting your hypothesis and aims, keep the agency’s mission in mind. It can be important to make it obvious to your reviewers that your work helps them meet their mission by using a few of the same words in the mission or by directly stating how your work fulfills the mission.
Second, while grant contents can be largely similar between funding agencies, each funder uses unique terminology for applications. It is critical to become familiar with the terminology, required sections and foci before you begin designing your proposal using the grant instructions and/or guidelines provided by the agency.
Tip 2: Sell it
Salesmanship often gets a bad rap in the academy.; however, it is in reality a useful technique for communicating about your work. Salesmanship consists of two components:
- Identify a problem or need;
- Provide a solution.
Identifying a problem or need is an extension of positioning your science within the granting agency’s mission that we talked about in Tip 1. The difference here is that the problem that you will present to your reviewer is within the specific context of your field of study, where the mission is broader in scope.
Successful applications will identify a need that is high priority to the funding agency and create a sense of urgency – that is, why is now the right time to solve this problem? Looking up recently-funded grants in the program to which you are applying is a great source of information on priorities of the funding agency. Project RePORTER and Award Search list applications funded by the NIH and NSF, respectively, and many other agencies will also list funded projects on their websites.
After outlining the problem to your reviewers, provide the solution: your proposal. Design your central hypothesis and aims to directly address an important aspect of the problem. Tip 2.5: it can be helpful to design a testable central hypothesis and then craft an argument for the problem or need. However, when writing your grant, always present the problem first, followed immediately by the solution.
Tip 3: Guide your reviewer
In most grant review panels, one or two reviewers are assigned primary responsibility for vetting your proposal. These primary reviewers are also responsible for presenting it to the rest of the committee and either deciding or making recommendations on its score. Thus, it’s very important that your primary reviewers serve as your champions to the rest of the review committee.
While your reviewers are undoubtedly knowledgeable, their backgrounds are diverse and may be quite different from yours. Thus, it is important to write in an accessible way that minimizes jargon and is easily understandable for anyone with broad knowledge of your field.
Furthermore, your reviewers have many long applications to review and recommend within a short period of time, and are often exhausted from travel on top of their primary responsibilities at their home institutions. Help them out by leading them through your proposal with a few simple formatting tricks. Use underlining, bold and italics to emphasize important components, like your central hypothesis and impact.
Finally, strictly adhere to font and margin guidelines so that your text is easily readable, and be aware that your reviewers may have visual differences creating difficulty seeing certain colors (such as red-green colorblindness) or fine details in text and images.
Tip 4: Be the expert
As I mentioned above, your reviewers are very knowledgeable people, but are probably less knowledgeable than you on your specific research focus. Own and demonstrate your expertise by:
- Making sure your research question is highly relevant to your experience as demonstrated by your biosketch. If you are branching into a new area, bring in a collaborator (or two) with relevant experience.
- Including a testable central hypothesis, with hypothesis-driven aims and subaims. Each aim should be well-supported by preliminary data. Each hypothesis should give valuable, publishable data whether confirmed or disproven.
- Including carefully considered pitfalls and alternate approaches. Every project will have a pitfall, and it is important to demonstrate to your reviewers that you fully accept this possibility – and are expert enough to have a plan in place if and when it happens.
Tip 5: Get feedback
Asking for feedback will help you craft a more successful application. This feedback comes in two steps: critical review and copyediting.
First, critical review early in the process can help you proactively target your application and save time editing as your due date approaches. This type of feedback focuses on targeting the mission of the agency, crafting your problem and solution, and project feasibility, and is most appropriately conducted by faculty mentors and peers. It can be very helpful to seek feedback on your central hypothesis and aims before putting together the rest of the application.
Your final step is copyediting for readability, format and grammar. At least three weeks before your application is due (two weeks for your reviewers to help, and one week for you to incorporate changes), your faculty mentors and peers can check over the final version of your proposal. The Office of Postdoctoral Affairs is also able to perform this kind of review for up to four written pages of a grant or fellowship application.