Writing Grant Applications
billwadge.wordpress.com
billwadge.wordpress.com
But no matter what type of grant it is, the biggest point I tell people is this:
You need a story.
All other aspects flow from that. (E.g. how effectively you can communicate the flow of logic in the writing, and other technical aspects which include much more than just the text boxes and what this blog summarily describes.)
Find that story, then it will rise above the pack. Most people want grant money but have no idea what it takes to get it.
I thought OP's recommendation was for more of a personal story, e.g., "When my uncle was diagnosed with X, his doctors tried Y, Z, and T. Surprisingly, while these treatments are considered standard of care, their efficacy is low. Recent research points to V as a risk factor for X so..."
I am glad I was wrong :-)
Turns out if you want to be successful, as measured by paper acceptances or citations, which is the standard metric used by universities and companies, it's all about being able to tell a good story to convince reviewers.
A well-told and convincing story can hide all kind of faults in your experiments or results. It's pretty much all you need.
The person you’re replying to has a different goal of paper acceptances or citations.
Are you getting a higher-than average hit-rate of successful grants awarded? If so, what is that percentage (ie, what percentage of grant applications you write are awarded successfully?)
Or, by successful do you mean that you just do this full-time because you have many clients you work for?
I won't disclose my percentage rate but it's extremely high. Sometimes government grant programs close down 2 days after you submit a massive application to them, that happened to me last year. So is that a fail? Not sure. How much you are granted is another thing though, about 50% of my grants don't get awarded the full amount applied for, it's extremely common.
A 30% success rate could be extremely high when applying for grants, or maybe for all I know an 80% success rate is what you get if you just make it up as you go along and you need to score above 95% to qualify for "extremely high". No way to tell one or the other from where I'm sitting.
There are also some clients (or grantmakers) that simply turn me off. Not common, but it happens. E.g. a certain kind of religious foundation only granting to those who contribute to their world view (with all respect to religion in general though), or a corporate foundation whose name I just don't feel like applying to (sorry McDonald's, you just leave a bad taste in my mouth).
It feels weird being part of mining companies (and philanthropists) paying funds to do good when what their source of money did was not good, but you weigh up the whole world and realise it's better sometimes to just help community projects happen, you've got to have balance somewhere.
Usually every grant project makes me tear up at least once, out of empathy to those I'm helping. That's what it's all about.
I love my job.
Nevertheless, it's an obsession among many grantmakers, so we have to deal with it.
Instead of forcing my client to come up a completely new 'innovative' project or program, you can build on your existing one while making it feel 'new':
- Introduce a new element to the project packaged as 'expansion' or 'growth', or a concepts like 'new target group' to bring in as benefices, where in reality it might be only 20% genuinely 'new work' for the client if the grant goes ahead.
- Then you give the application a snazzy title and use wording magic to change the perception of what's being proposed.
Right now I'm doing this trick for a client. Proposal will suggest that the grant funds the first 12 months' salary for a newly installed part-time volunteer coordinator to usher in a new era of program growth, and I'll call it 'seed capacity funding'.
Suddenly what they're funding is 'new', but it's a decade-old program.
I just gave something of real dollar value but I'm happy to trade it for Hacker News upvotes just this once. ;)
Happy to share an upvote :)
This is nice advice, but not exactly unknown. Have you spent much time on the grant reviewer side of the equation? It seems like literally every grant I've been part of writing involves the compromise and recasting in novelty that you're describing. I would expect many grants are using this approach to deal with the novelty obsession of funding bodies.
That's right, it's just common sense based out of experience.
Why people still need me - even after I can give 'free advice' like the above - is the stuff I have flowing through my blood and brain that others just don't. Grantwriting is a constant creative process. The 'source' of all my tricks I've collated is what I can produce, on-the-fly, in any new situation in the future. You have to have the personality. And I among others like me do. I'm not unique, but it's a pretty uncommon set of attributes you need to have. Obsessiveness and attention to detail (in every aspect of the job), sense of vision, empathy, sense of justice, your grammar and writing prowess, the willingness to jump through hoops (that's grants 101, I have stories to tell about that psychological requirement), hyper goal-based brain - that's all me. A lot of people would rather eat cardboard than go through all that.
So it's my niche. I thrive in this environment.
> Have you spent much time on the grant reviewer side of the equation?
I've spent some - it's not as fun as the challenge of applying to grants though - and it's been enough to know that everything I learned through years of being a grantwriter was confirmed when being a grants assessor.
People see through your cracks immediately. You really must be real (with what you say and in giving them what they want) if you want to have high chance of being funded.
But then every grantmaker type (corporate, govt, private philanthropic, club) has other factors, e.g. granting for 'PR' reasons instead of merit based on the guidelines. Certain private philanthropic bodies will have extremely specific attitudes and goals compared to others. It's a wide world. (Thankfully.) And there's a lot of money.
People who talk about "the skill of grantwriting" perpetuate this cycle of wasted intellect. Faculty at the top 5 laugh at how many faculty elsewhere are tricked into pursuing this quixotic idea.
Worse, reviewers and grant-makers themselves are generally unqualified to make such grants, and as such, have no ability nor incentive to track the success of grants issued.
All in all, if you need money in academia, your best bet is to either be independently wealthy to fund your ideas, or find a few direct personal benefactors who believe in you and your general goals.
*Edit -- if you are here in HN, then your ability to do the latter suggestion (find a few personal benefactors) is actually much more within reach than getting funded through a grant -- it is certainly worth your time to explore that option, and in the long-run will provide you more security and freedom to really explore your field and interests.
The problem with grants is that each one of them has their own evaluation criteria, panels, and overall decision structure, so what works for one type of grant is useless with another. That makes writing them so time consuming.
Even though my first federal grant (NSF) was funded, the process was one of the most draining things I have ever done.
I loved the puzzle of breaking down a new, fun idea into its fundamental parts and I enjoy writing. But I do not enjoy the salesmanship, the 7% funding rate, the 8 months I waited to find out my second proposal was rejected, or the laborious amounts of supplemental documents.
Your project need not align exactly, but it must support the cause of the program, otherwise it is dead in the water, no matter how well-written.
Good Program Officers are happy to communicate with PIs, and will help them make great applications. You need them, and they need you. Build that team. Do it early and often.
For example, the NSF can do a degree of steering, etc. The CDC, depending on program, has either full control, or absolutely none at all.
This: https://seliger.com/2017/08/21/grant-writing-help-series-put... is about one example of effective non-fiction persuasive writing like scientific and technical grants: "Put the most important thing in the first sentence." By the way, the whole Dave Barry interview is worth reading: https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-dave..., although most of it doesn't seem to be immediately on topic.
Alan Alda did as well and that was what gave birth to the idea for his book, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look On My Face? (https://www.amazon.com/Understood-Would-Have-This-Look-ebook...)
It has a big focus on improv that can be distracting from the main message of the book, but I found it really insightful and had my assistant read it for discussion about how to improve communication skills and awareness.
I can see why bureaucrats and government officials prefer it this way (accountability!) but I don't understand why we scientists put up with it.
He generally had a grim view of academia and is senior enough to afford to speak his mind.
Even as a much younger researcher, I feel that at any point in time, I usually have a couple of worthwhile new ideas that are quite likely to pan out and will get funded someplace or another. But if I have to spend a multiple months of effort into getting them funded, I have a lot less time available to generate the next couple of good ideas. This doesn't mean that people just stop doing research, most researchers are competitive workaholics. Instead, we'll just rehash the same old stuff in a new bottle: we target newer applications and/or chase the latest fads (e.g. adversarial ML) with the goal of getting some of our old ideas reused in a new domain.
This creates a negative feedback loop because the quality of research gets worse and the people think this stuff is not worth funding and that in turn reduces funding rates even lower which causes research to get worse.
Unfortunately, scientists working on "useless" ideas wasting public money is a much too convenient bogeyman for politicians to give up.
He's a brilliant scientist, but more importantly he learned how to write effective grant applications early on.
He might have not gotten this far without this skill.