Two things every grant application must do to be successful
No exceptions!
Goooooooooooood morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you might happen to be!
As you may know, in addition to writing comedy and researching medieval obscenity, I also write and edit grant proposals (and teach the occasional online grantwriting workshop, which I really need to do again sometime soon!). Over the course of my career, I’ve been lucky enough to support myself by writing successful grant applications that, taken together, have been awarded millions of dollars. Granted, this is partly because I’m based in Switzerland, where research funding is particularly generous (if you can get it). But it’s also because years and years of reading other people’s proposals and rewriting my own over and over have taught me a lot about how grant proposals work.
(SIDE NOTE: If you’d like to see some of these successful proposals, including the application for a seven-figure grant that funded a six-year team project, you can check out the ‘Things That Worked’ series.)
Today I had the honour of being invited to Fribourg to consult on a senior colleague’s grant application, and it reminded me that there are two things every application for research funding must do if it is to be successful. I talk about these two things in more detail in my grantwriting workshops, but I thought I’d share them with you here, too!
Get your readers excited
Funding bodies want to know they’re funding exciting research, research that’s cutting-edge, high-risk, and/or likely to have a major impact either within academic or in the public sphere. That’s why it’s so crucial to identify exactly what’s so innovative about your proposed project, and to state it from the very beginning of your proposal. Questions you can ask yourself to figure out what’s exciting about your proposed project include:
What problem are you going to solve?
What discovery do you hope to make?
What mistake are you going to correct within your field?
What are you going to do that nobody has ever done before?
Are you looking at something important that nobody else has noticed yet (or that nobody has realised is important)?
Are you going to come up with a totally new theory/product/methodology?
Does your project resonate with major ongoing debates and conversations in the public sphere?
Asking yourself these kinds of questions can help you identify which elements of your proposed research project will immediately strike reviewers as new and urgent. Remember: funding bodies want to know that they’re advancing knowledge about important topics, so make it clear exactly how you plan to do that!
Reassure your readers
This is the less sexy side of grantwriting, but it is absolutely crucial. When funding bodies award funding, they’re essentially betting on the likelihood that a researcher will accomplish something important. Betting involves risk. So while reviewers need to be excited about the project, they also need to be reassured that it’s feasible, that it will produce something, that it’s been well thought out, and that you are the best person to do it.
There are a ton of different ways a funding proposal can reassure its readers, including the following:
It shows that the applicant really knows what they’re doing.
It shows that the applicant has anticipated potential risks to the project and already devised potential solutions for problems that might arise.
It includes a very clear plan for how the research will be carried out.
Its scope is ambitious, but not unrealistic.
Its timeline is ambitious, but not unrealistic.
If you’re dealing with a publicly supported funding body, remember that they need to be able to reassure the public that their money is being invested wisely. If you’re dealing with a private foundation, they need to know that their money is supporting causes that are important to them.
No grant proposal can succeed without doing these two things.
In fact, I’ll go one step further: every single sentence in your grant proposal should be doing ONE (if not both) of these two things.
If it isn’t doing one of those two things, it may not be worth including in your application!
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VB,
M
A post to pin, this one, and to follow with reading “Things That Worked” to see how to accomplish the two topics you address here. As in all writing, learning the genre is crucial.