The 10% rule
How to work your way up from tiny grants to big ones
Gooooooooood morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you might happen to be!
As you might know, I’m currently fortunate enough to be funded by a big, beautiful research fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation. It’s a fellowship that’s enabled me to live out my dream of leading a team research project, supervising my second PhD student, and digging into the long history of Chaucer’s dirty humour. And in today’s post, I want to share the strategy that helped me get here.
Million-dollar ideas
Not every country in the world is in a position to offer millions of dollars (or Swiss Francs) in research funding to people researching Chaucerian obscenity. But many countries are home to funding bodies that award thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, in research grants and fellowships. But how can a researcher get ahold of that kind of money?
Here’s the thing you need to know: much like banks and Hollywood producers, funding bodies prefer to give money to people who already have money. If a funding body knows that another funding body has awarded you funding in the past, they figure you’re a safer bet for their massive grant than someone who’s never been awarded funding at all.
But don’t throw up your hands in despair! Because you don’t have to have a million-dollar grant under your belt to win a million-dollar grant. But where do you start?
Start small
Some people may be able to win big pots of money right from the get-go, but most aren’t. So if you’ve never won a grant or research fellowship in your life, then you start small.
As soon as you’re eligible, start applying for small pots of money. This could take the form of a publication grant to enable you to publish an article or book open-access, or help you cover the cost of reproducing images in your publication. Or you could apply for funding to organise a conference or other academic event (which of course will also help you get valuable organisational experience). Or you could apply for a travel grant that enables you to attend a conference elsewhere, or to visit a particular archive.
Even relatively small grants of $100 or so are worth applying for in these early stages because they act as ‘seed funding’ for bigger applications down the line. In other words, they help you to establish a track record of acquiring money and putting it to good use.
Ok, you may say, but how exactly do I go from $100 to $1,000,000?
That’s where the 10% rule comes in.
The 10% Rule of Grantwritingâ„¢
What I’ve learned after nearly a quarter of a century in academia (scream) is that it’s perfectly possible to win a bigger grant than you’ve ever won before if you’ve already won a grant that’s at least 10% as big (or thereabouts) as the grant for which you’re applying.
Let me explain (and please bear with this medievalist as she attempts to do math).
If you’re applying for a grant of, say, $1000, that application will look much stronger if you’ve managed to nab a couple of grants worth $100 (or more) than if you’ve nabbed nothing at all.
Same thing goes for a grant of $10,000: if you’ve already been awarded a grant of $1000 or more, then $10,000 isn’t a wild leap.
Same thing goes for $100,000 (or thereabouts): if someone has already awarded you a grant of $10,000 or more, then in the eyes of the funding body handing out $100,000 you won’t look as risky a prospect as an applicant who’s never been awarded any funding whatsoever.
Writing grants is all about persuading funding bodies that you and your idea are a safe bet. There are a lot of ways to do that (e.g. important publications, professional experience, letters of recommendation). But showing that you have a track record of winning funding and using it effectively is a key part of the puzzle. When a funding body sees that someone else has trusted you with their money, they’re more likely to give you some of theirs. And what I’ve learned is that it’s not crazy to apply for a grant that’s ten times as much as the biggest grant you’ve won so far.
Now I’m not saying that winning a grant of one amount guarantees that you will win ten times as much the next time around. But if you’re trying to figure out how to work your way up to a million-dollar grant, the 10% Rule™ can help you figure out how to pace your grant applications, and what to aim for next.
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VB,
M