December 22, 2019
Our blog posts typically focus on grant strategies for nonprofit institutions. In this post, we’re going to focus on a different topic for a more targeted audience. The topic is research funding. The content will be most relevant to US-based academics. However, many of the principles will also apply to researchers based outside the US and to nonprofits.
Through our work in grant development, we’ve met many faculty members who haven’t received training in finding funding or writing grant proposals. Because of this knowledge gap, they don’t know what projects are good prospects for grant funding, where to look for funding, how to interpret funding guidelines, or how to work effectively with resource development staff at their home institution.
In this post, we share what we’ve learned about finding research funding based on our experience working with faculty at US-based universities. Not everything we cover may apply to your particular situation or institution.
Before we discuss the details of the grant process, we want to address an issue we’ve seen arise among faculty in the social sciences.
The issue is what constitutes a research project in the context of pursuing grant funding. The distinction between a project and a research study is not always clear. Further, because academics naturally see their ideas as research projects, signs indicating that they should — or could — seek funding for a project (with an evaluation component) often get missed.
As a disclaimer, we are not researchers or experts in monitoring and evaluation. Our experience relates to grant proposals. What we are sharing is how we’ve seen the research study vs. project evaluation question play out in grant proposals.
Isn’t Project Evaluation Research?
One reason for the confusion between project grants and research grants is that project evaluation relies on some of the same tools, methodologies, and approaches as a typical research study.
Project evaluation is a type of research.
In both research studies and project evaluations, data are collected and analyzed, and surveys may be the primary method of data collection. However, a distinguishing feature of a research study is that it produces, or emphasizes, the generation of generalizable knowledge.
In comparison, the primary purpose of a project evaluation is to report on the project’s outcome. The data collected through the evaluation may yield generalizable knowledge, but it’s not the primary motivation for the evaluation.
Data collected through a project evaluation are used to answer questions such as:
How many people or organizations were served/reached/educated?
How many service sites were opened?
How many people did X or learned to do Y by the end of the project?
As a grant applicant, you may not have a choice regarding the development of the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) plan in your proposal. Not only will the funder require one, but they may expect to have significant input on your M&E plan, to the point of telling you the indicators you should use; this level of engagement is not uncommon in government-funded grants.
FEATURES
Features of a Project Proposal vs. a Research Proposal
Project Proposal
A project proposal is usually structured around a single goal (often named by the funder) and objectives (also often named by the funder), with specific activities listed under each objective. The activities are usually the prerogative of the applicant, who has the greatest input into the project’s design.
A project proposal typically includes a background section, a management and personnel section, and a past performance section. As referenced above, a monitoring and evaluation plan in outline form (i.e., preliminary indicators) is also generally a requirement.
Research Proposals
Research proposals seek funding to investigate questions around phenomena (how does X mechanism work? Does X cause Y? Is Y related to X?) and to validate predictions about relationships between sets of data. Whether the study is hypothesis-driven or descriptive, the goal of a research-focused proposal is to advance knowledge. Maybe the knowledge gained through the research study will ultimately lead to practical applications, such as a replicable project, but furthering knowledge is the primary impetus. A typical research proposal includes sections on significance, innovation, justification and feasibility, research method, and resources and facilities.
Behavior Change Indicators and Proposal Type
An area where it's challenging to determine if you are talking about a research study or a project related to behavior change. Both projects and research studies can involve collecting and analyzing data to show how an intervention affects behavior. Because evaluating behavior change in a target population is more sophisticated than simply counting the number of people who showed up for a workshop, including behavior change indicators may suggest that you are conducting a research study. However, incorporating a behavior change indicator into your project does not necessarily mean you should seek research funding. You should look at what you are doing and why you are doing it.
To help you determine whether you are proposing a research study or a project with an evaluation piece, it may help to ask yourself questions like the ones below:
Will your proposed project apply scientific methods to generate generalizable knowledge (that is, will the knowledge gained apply to a wider population)?
Did you design the evaluation component because the funder required a monitoring and evaluation plan as part of the proposal, or is the evaluation and data analysis the heart of your project? That is, are you proposing a project to generate data, or are you collecting evaluation data to document the project’s results?
Is your motivation for conducting the project to learn more about how (or whether) something works, or to determine the project’s impact? If you are primarily interested in whether your planned intervention achieves the desired impact, this may indicate that you are proposing a project with an evaluation component rather than a research study.
IMPACT
What Is the Impact of Seeking Research vs. Project Funding?
We are starting with the research study vs. project question because different funders and funding mechanisms come into play depending on whether you are talking about a project or a research study. In some cases, you may be able to market a research study to a funder interested in implementing projects, and vice versa: You might convince a funder that traditionally focuses on research to fund your project. However, in general, where you look for funding for a project versus a research study will be different. Additionally, as noted above, the structure of the proposals differs, with sections that are similar but not identical. When developing your proposal strategy, you want to choose the type of proposal that will allow you to tell the most compelling story. If the standard research proposal sections don’t seem like a good fit for what you want to pitch, it may be an indication that seeking research funding may not be the best fit for what you have in mind.
FRAMING
Is It Possible to Turn Your Project Proposal into a Research Study, or Your Research Study into a Project Proposal?
The project vs. research study question is nuanced and can come down to emphasis. Another factor is how broadly applicable your research is. If your research question is focused on influencing student behavior or performance at your home institution, or if you are focused on implementing a project in your immediate geographic area, it may be seen as less likely to produce generalizable results.
To make your research question applicable to a broader population, you may need to adjust your research design to make it clear to the funder that the research has the potential for broader impact.
If you have a research study and you’re having difficulty finding funding, you may be able to redesign your research plan to be an intervention or service project with a traditional monitoring and evaluation plan.
DIFFICULTY
Is Winning a Grant for a Project Easier (or Less of an Accomplishment) than Receiving a Research Grant?
We’ve spoken to faculty members who’ve felt that a grant proposal for a project with an evaluation component is “less than” a proposal for a research study, and that, for career purposes, their work needed to be regarded first and foremost as research.
In terms of the potential impact on one’s career, the type of grant probably doesn’t matter. There may be no difference to your career whether you receive a grant for a project with an evaluation component or a research study. Either way, you can write journal articles on your work that can be published in peer-reviewed journals. Either way, you might receive media attention if your work produces interesting findings. And either way, you may be able to leverage your data to bring about policy changes. While you will want to confirm that this is true at your institution and in your discipline, the number of grants you receive, the dollar value of those grants, and the funder may all carry more weight than the specific type of research involved, exploratory or evaluative.
People interpret the relationship and distinction between evaluation activities and research differently. As stated earlier, we work on proposals; we are not researchers. We raise the topic of project vs. research proposals simply to encourage you to consider it, as it could help your funding strategy.
What’s a Better Fit, Government or Foundation Funding?
The question of what kind of funding or funding source is going to be best for you depends on what you want to do. As highlighted above, one question is whether you are dealing with a research study or a project. Other important questions (in no particular order) include:
Will your project involve a single site or multiple sites? The number of sites increases both the complexity and cost. The more complex it is, the more likely government funding will be needed.
Does your project involve secondary data analysis? (more on this question below)
Is your project related to a “hard” science, a social science, or related to the liberal arts? Depending on your discipline, certain types of funders may be better prospects — corporate donors, for example, are more likely to be options in fields such as engineering or business.
Are you hoping to win a grant large enough to cover part (or even all) of your salary? If you need a grant of $100K+, this will narrow the field of potential donors and may point toward government funding as a better prospect.
Are you early in your career or mid-career? (Many opportunities restrict eligibility by career phase)
The point of the questions above is to help you narrow the field of potential funders. Funders have different budgets, funding priorities, and missions.
The larger the grant amount, the more likely you’ll need to seek government funding: If you are seeking a grant of $100K or more (e.g., enough to buy you out of, or reduce, your teaching load or conduct a multi-site study), a government-sponsored grant will be your best bet because they are larger awards. A grant from a professional association can be as low as $5K. A grant from a foundation may average around $50K (in comparison, a grant from the US government [USG] is rarely under $50K/year). There are exceptions to these average grant amounts, with some of the larger private foundations awarding grants in the six-figure range. However, expect smaller awards from foundations than from USG agencies.
Small grant proposals are good entry points: If you are new to grant writing or your grant writing skills are rusty, we recommend targeting small grants with a one-year performance period sponsored by professional associations. These awards are competitive, so there’s no guarantee that you’ll get an award. However, the advantages are that the applications are usually easier to complete than standard foundation grant applications and are far less daunting than applications for USG agencies. The grant awards vary by association. Based on our experience, awards range from $3K to $20K, with an average of $5K. Professional associations are more common in some fields than others, so depending on your field, grants from professional associations may not be an option.
Preliminary data may be required: If you are seeking research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), you need preliminary data to be competitive. This is true even when the funding mechanism states that no preliminary data are required. If you lack preliminary data, you may want to hold off on applying for external funding and instead focus on securing internal (institutional) funding to support data collection. A small grant from a foundation or professional association may be another way to fund preliminary data collection.
For NIH and many research-funding foundations, to be a competitive applicant, you will need relevant publications. If you have not published in the area that will be the focus of your proposal, you may want to prioritize publishing articles in peer-reviewed journals before you seek grant support.
When funders review grant applications, they are not just evaluating the soundness of your ideas. They are also evaluating your skills and experience. If they don’t have faith that you can pull off the proposed work, you will not get funded. While you work on your publications, you can gain valuable proposal writing and project experience by joining a research study or project team led by a more senior investigator.
The Meaning of Unsolicited Proposals
“Unsolicited proposals” is a term that comes up frequently when searching for grant funding. Foundations and USG agencies apply the term differently.
In the foundation world, when a foundation says it does not accept unsolicited proposals, it means it will only review proposals submitted in response to a published solicitation or by invitation. Sometimes, foundations will say something like, “We don’t accept unsolicited proposals. However, you’re welcome to send us an email of up to 150 words describing your idea. If we find it intriguing, we’ll be in touch!” Your efforts are unlikely to result in anything, a fact some foundations will explicitly state in full transparency. That said, it’s a low bar to clear, so you could send an email to see if you spark any interest.
If you spot a foundation that supports projects in your field but has a “no unsolicited proposals” policy, even if there appears to be a fit, we advise you to cross it off your list and move on to better prospects. While you could make inroads with the foundation and receive an invitation to apply, it’s a long shot. You’re better off spending your time looking for funders that actively solicit applications.
If the foundation’s message is “we don’t accept unsolicited proposals, but we occasionally post solicitations,” it’s still a long shot. However, since it’s easy to do, we suggest you sign up for the foundation’s alerts in case the foundation posts a solicitation of interest.
On the USG side, when you see a reference to “unsolicited proposals,” it doesn’t mean “don’t send us a proposal.” Instead, it refers to a broad funding opportunity announcement that invites investigator-initiated proposals. At NIH, parent announcementsare the mechanism by which NIH agencies receive investigator-initiated proposals.
So, to summarize, for a foundation, “unsolicited” means they don’t want to receive your proposal unless they’ve invited you to submit one, which could be through an open call for proposals or an invitation. For the USG, an “unsolicited proposal” means the applicant has the freedom to define the proposal’s focus.
Below, we highlight a few tips and tools especially relevant to seeking research funding.
Elsewhere on our blog, you can find posts on how to find funding, with much of the information applicable to both nonprofits seeking project funding and those seeking research funding. Also see our post “The Best (Free) Places to Search for Grant Funding.”
Know the Funders in Your Field
If you don’t know the major funders in your field of research, this is a key item to add to your task list. You should be able to find out who is funding work in your field by:
Checking journal articles to see if funders are credited
Reading the investigator’s bio, which will often include a list of funded research;
Searching the website of the investigator’s home institution, which usually highlights grant awards and the names of funders; and
Looking up individual researchers and institutions on RePorter to see their history of funding, which can help you determine which institutes might fund your work (this step is most helpful if you seek NIH funding).
You may also come across information about funders interested in your area through conferences, professional associations, and industry-related events and publications.
If you’re concerned that you will face an overwhelming list of potential funders, have no worries on that score. Regardless of your area of expertise and whether you are employed by a nonprofit or educational institution, you will find that the list of viable funders is going to be manageable. For some subject areas, the list may be as small as 20.
How does the list become so small when there are 20+ federal agencies posting opportunities on grants.gov and more than 150,000 foundationsin the US?
It happens because your list of potential funders has to be winnowed down to the select group that funds the work you want to do, where you want to do it, and the length of time and dollar amount you need. Further, you and your institution must meet the funder’s eligibility requirements.
If you take the universe of funders, including corporations, government agencies, private foundations, and professional associations, and overlay the list with your subject area, your level of experience, your institutional affiliation, any restrictions imposed by your institution such as minimum overhead rates, and the specifics of your project, the number of funders remaining is going to be relatively short. You are going to see the same names repeatedly, which is going to be both discouraging (is this all there is?) and reassuring (it’s a finite list).
Because the pool of potential funders is going to be relatively small, this is why, depending on your field, the research study vs. project proposal question mentioned earlier could be an important consideration for your funding strategy. If you are unsuccessful with the pool of funders that fund research in your field, you could potentially access a new group of funders by pivoting and redesigning your research idea to pitch it as a project with an evaluation component.
FUNDER & FUNDING DATABASES
Funder Databases vs. Databases of Funding Opportunities
One of the primary ways to learn about funding opportunities is to conduct research using a funder database. There are two kinds of databases.
One type of database focuses on funders. When you do a keyword search, the database will churn out a list of foundations and government agencies that have an association with that keyword (e.g., the Gates Foundation would turn up if your keyword is “malaria”). The results will consist of descriptions of the funders, not current funding opportunities.
The second kind of database includes actual funding opportunities. A listing in this kind of database, when you type in “malaria,” would be a current or ongoing call for proposals for projects related to malaria. The Gates Foundation might appear in this search as well, but only if its global health program is actively seeking applications on this topic.
The distinction between the databases is important. If your goal is to identify open funding opportunities (rather than learning about funders in your research area), you need to make sure you are using the correct database.
On the general resources page of our website, we’ve listed several funder databases. If you are associated with a US-based nonprofit or educational institution, your organization may have a license to use one or more of these databases. In nonprofit organizations, database access is often limited to development staff because the organization can afford only a handful of licenses. At universities, both faculty and students may have access to one or more funder databases using their university credentials.
Funder Database Options
One of the largest and most well-known funder databases is the Foundation Center’s Foundation Directory Online (FDO). FDO is an example of a database that provides information about funders (primarily foundations, though it also includes some government agencies), but it does not list open funding opportunities. It is also not a database that caters to the research community, although the database includes foundations and government agencies that fund research.
If you have access to FDO, it’s worth familiarizing yourself with it. However, while it is one of the largest, if not the largest of the funder databases in terms of the number of foundation profiles it contains, we do not recommend it as a primary search tool for faculty. The database is not intuitive, making it a poor match for casual users.
For a funder database that is more manageable in format and size, we recommend GrantStation. Another funder database we recommend for its balance of ease of use and information is Instrumentl. To see if you like Instrumentl’s interface, you can sign up for a free trial. Unlike FDO and GrantStation, Instrumentl contains opportunity listings.
Several databases cater to academic institutions, including Pivot, SPIN, GrantForward, and GrantSelect. These databases list funding opportunities, not just funder profiles, and they include opportunities from a variety of funders, including foundations, corporations, and governments (US and foreign). If you have access to a database, it’s worth taking advantage of any training your institution provides on using the database and familiarizing yourself with valuable features, such as the ability to save search results. You can also access video tutorials for many of the funding databases on their websites or on YouTube.
If you do not know which funder databases you have access to at your institution, the webpage of your institution’s office of sponsored research may provide this information, along with the link to the database. At some institutions, instead of the office of sponsored research, you might be able to access funder databases through your institution’s library.
Lastly, another way to access lists of funding opportunities and funders is to explore the webpages at major public and private universities. Many university departments post funding opportunities on publicly accessible webpages. Some universities maintain public databases of opportunities. An example of this kind of database is a research funding database maintained by Duke University.
GOVERNMENT DATABASES
Grants.gov
To learn about grant opportunities posted by USG agencies, check grants.gov regularly. Grants.gov posts opportunities released by 26 federal agencies, 12 independent federal agencies, and executive branch offices and commissions. Grants.gov posts new opportunities throughout the day, so if you are waiting for a particular opportunity to come out, it’s a good idea to check grants.gov at the beginning and end of the day. Grants.gov posts forecasted (i.e., pending) opportunities and active opportunities. You can search for opportunities by sponsoring agency, keyword, solicitation number, or open and closing date.
USG Agency Websites
For grant opportunities (as opposed to contract opportunities, which you can find on SAM.gov), grants.gov is the preferred search tool if you want to go to one site to look at opportunities across the federal system. If you have one or two federal agencies that are of particular interest to you, you may want to complement your research on grants.gov by checking the agencies’ websites regularly as well. Many agency websites list their current funding opportunities, which, because they are a focused list, can be faster to search than using grants.gov.
Other Government Websites
If you are interested in learning about funding opportunities posted by other governments (e.g., the UK) or by multilateral agencies such as the World Bank, you may already have the tools you need. Funder databases that specifically target academic institutions, such as SPIN, usually include funding opportunities from other governments and intergovernmental agencies. If you don’t have access to a funder database, you can always do web-based research to find where the government or intergovernmental agency of interest posts its grant opportunities. It’s a slower method, but it does work. There are also subscription databases that focus on international funding, such as Devex and DevelopmentAid.
Grant money exists for all kinds of projects, but not all projects. Some projects and initiatives are less likely to receive grant funding.
Projects that are Difficult to Fund
A few examples of difficult-to-fund projects include:
Courses and curriculum development: If you are trying to secure support to introduce a new course at your institution, it’s going to be difficult to fund this work through grants, so much so that we advise you not to bother pursuing grant funding. From your perspective, you may feel like an external grant is needed because you cannot get institutional support to develop and host your course. From a foundation’s perspective, educational institutions are in the business of teaching courses and charging tuition to develop and deliver them. The fact that universities are in the business of teaching and have a means of collecting revenue makes it a hard sell.
If you want to develop a course, we recommend going through existing channels at your institution, including working with your institution’s advancement department, to explore the possibility of securing a gift to support its development. Depending on the course topic and its attractiveness to donors, a cash gift from an individual or corporate donor to your institution, designated to fund your innovative or global course, could be an option. An added advantage of a gift is that it would give you money for your course without some of the traditional burdens of proposal development and project management associated with grant funding.
A second suggestion is to think creatively about how you can offer the course. For example, if you want to offer a global course, as long as doing so does not violate institutional policies, you could explore launching the course on your own for free through an online course platform like Thinkific. Does your course or program idea need a website? Again, free options are available through services like Google’s Blogger and the Evernote-based web platform Postach.io (you can learn more about Postach.io on our blog). You can create a multi-functional website that is robust enough to support a course using the combination of a free website platform and Google’s suite of tools.
Projects that do not “move the needle”: Funders fund advancements in the field, not your development. If you feel like the next logical step for you in your area of interest is to explore X — but X is an area that has already been or is being explored successfully by others — it’s unlikely you will get funded. Especially for research funding, you have to establish that whatever you are proposing is an important question that hasn’t been answered yet and deserves to be. If you cannot write a compelling case for a knowledge gap that needs to be filled, then you haven’t established the need for the research. This is one reason it is essential to spend time on your lit review. In your proposal, your analysis of the existing literature should underscore the gap that your study will fill and help you establish that your proposed study will make an important contribution to the field.
Projects with a limited focus or reach: Proposals for projects that focus on activities at a single institution or a small geographic area, such as a single neighborhood, or that stand to benefit a limited number of people, are challenging to fund. Part of the reason lies in generalizability. Some funders may question whether what you propose for your institution (or in your city with a vulnerable population unique to your area) will yield findings that are more broadly applicable. The other related issue concerns funding eligibility and the pool of potential funders. Depending on the focus, your project may interest only a few regional or local funders. A small funder pool means that not only do you have a reduced chance of being funded, but also that if you are funded, the grant will probably be for a modest amount. That said, many large US-based foundations limit their giving to specific regions and cities around the country, so your target geographic area could fall within one or more funders’ priority areas. There’s no bright-line rule with this one, but as you look for funders, the geographic scope is one variable you’ll want to consider.
Secondary Data Analysis
Finding funding for secondary data analysis can be challenging. We have not come across many foundations that emphasize funding of secondary analysis. On the USG side, there are some options for funding secondary analysis, but they may not be appropriate for everyone. NIH has the R03 small grant mechanism, for example, which specifically lists secondary data analysis as a covered activity. Unfortunately, the R03 is not intended or necessarily ideal for early-career investigators.
Another challenge in funding secondary analysis is the grant size. When we have seen grants from foundations that can be used for secondary analysis, they are small grants, too small to enable the faculty member to reduce her teaching load through a course buy-out. Depending on your institution’s course buy-out policies, finding a grant that will be at the level that would enable a course buy-out may not be possible.
If you are early in your career and want to fund secondary analysis, we suggest looking for internal funding opportunities offered by your home institution, which are more likely to support secondary research and less competitive than external grants.
Another approach to overcoming the challenges of secondary analysis is to include it as one of your data sources, rather than your sole source. By designing a research study that will use secondary data and primary data, you may find that you have access to more funding options.
Lastly, if your research area relates to a specific disease, population, or industry (e.g., Alzheimer’s, veterans, or energy), you may want to look for funding opportunities from foundations and advocacy organizations associated with these areas. Issue-specific organizations sometimes fund secondary data analysis of their datasets or public data. One thing to be aware of is that the organizations may have specific questions to be answered through data analysis and may not be open to funding investigator-driven research questions.
Urgent Funding Needs
Another challenging funding situation concerns timing rather than the subject matter. If your funding plan hinges on having a check in the bank within the next few months, you’re likely to be disappointed. It’s unrealistic to expect to receive a grant award within a few weeks of submitting your proposal.
It can take a long time to go through the funding process. It can take weeks to months to write the proposal, and it can take months for a funder to get back to you about the status of your application. If you are fortunate enough to receive an award, it may take several more weeks to finalize it. For example, if you need a funded grant in hand for tenure purposes, you must look for funding regularly and apply for as many grants as you can, well before your tenure review. If you’re down to your last few months before you’re up for tenure, you may not have enough time to find an opportunity, prepare and submit an application, and wait for the funder’s evaluation of your proposal.
When you search for potential funders, it is helpful to have a sense of your project's cost. Without at least a ballpark figure, you won’t have the information you need to vet funding opportunities and potential funders. Do you need $5K, $25K, $50K…or $500K? Unless you have a sense of how much things cost and how much labor it will take to complete your project, you’ll have no way of answering this question. If you need $5K, that’s going to be a different set of funders than if your anticipated budget is $50K.
One characteristic that successful investigators and program directors share is their ability to build, interpret, and manage budgets. If you understand how to build a project budget — and you are familiar with concepts like overhead, indirects, and fringe benefits, and how they impact a project — it will make you a more competent grant seeker and ultimately project director if the proposal receives funding.
Budget Preparation and Review
Creating a proposal budget is not a secondary activity in the grant process, and it does not start after you finish the narrative proposal. The budget should be developed in parallel with the narrative proposal. There will be a gap between the time you begin the narrative proposal and the time you can begin working on the budget (because you can’t prepare the budget until you have a sense of your project design). Still, that gap should be measured in days, not months. If the proposal you are working on has a six-week turnaround, the first draft of the budget and the second draft of the narrative proposal should be ready for review at the same time (roughly 2–2.5 weeks into the process).
Both the narrative proposal and the budget should undergo multiple drafts and reviews before submission.
Someone (ideally you, if you are the principal investigator) must compare the narrative and cost proposals to ensure the activities described in the narrative are captured in the budget. What kinds of things should be part of your review? It means recognizing that if you are conducting field data collection, you may need to budget for transportation for field staff, including associated costs like fuel and insurance. It means thinking through, given your project design and data collection needs, how many software licenses you’ll need, and whether you need to purchase 3 laptops and 7 iPads…or 4 laptops, 3 iPads, and 3 mobile phones. If your proposal refers to two community coordinators, are they listed under personnel in your budget, and have they been budgeted for the correct amount of effort given their scope of work? To have an accurate budget, you must think through each stage of your project to identify a comprehensive list of the resources and equipment required for implementation.
Key Budgeting Concepts
Other things to be aware of related to the budget process include:
The grant ceiling is not your budget figure. The award ceiling and your budget figure are two different things. The answer to the question, “How much do you need for your project?” is not “The foundation says it awards grants up to $50K, so I guess $50K.” Maybe your budget is $50K, matching the award ceiling, but it may be significantly higher or lower.
Creating an accurate budget: When you create your budget, think through how much money you need to do what you want to achieve the results you want. Your budget should be based on realistic figures that correspond to your project activities. If you design and budget your project and then subsequently adjust the scale of your project down to fit within a funder’s funding parameters, that’s okay and reasonable to do. However, we caution against exceeding your budget by using the award ceiling as your starting point. Doing so risks inflating your budget in a way that will be transparent to the funder, which will not be in your favor.
Reviewing the budget line items: A second issue that can arise when you aim for a random budget figure is a total disconnect between your line items and their true costs. This can create issues later when you implement the project and have to report on expenditures. Finally, if your budget is essentially fiction, you may be tempted to skip reviewing it against the proposal narrative (since they are only loosely related anyway). By not conducting a careful review, you could miss under-budgeted line items.
Understand the implications of overhead rates. Overhead covers general operating expenses, such as rent, utilities, and administrative costs. Knowing your institution’s policies around overhead rates is essential. If your institution requires proposal budgets to include a minimum overhead rate of 20%, it should not allow you to submit a grant application to a funder that has a 10% cap on overhead costs.
Accepting the funder’s overhead rate: If you receive a grant award and your institution subsequently finds the funder’s overhead rate unacceptable, either your institution needs to turn down the award, or it needs to accept the funder’s overhead limits. The proposal guidelines will state the funder’s policy on overhead rates, so you will always know the overhead rate before you apply. If the rates are too low, or if the funder doesn’t allow any overhead costs, don’t apply and hope you can negotiate a better deal later. The rate is the rate. If you receive the award notice and tell the funder the rate is unacceptable, it could negatively affect your relationship with the funder and how the funder views your institution as a whole.
USG negotiated indirect cost rate: For USG grant applications, many institutions (including educational institutions and nonprofits) have a Negotiated Indirect Cost Rate Agreement (NICRA) with the US government. NICRA covers indirect costs (facilities and administrative costs) and fringe benefit expenses. There are some exceptions, but in general, an organization negotiates an indirect cost rate with one federal agency, and most other federal agencies honor that same rate. NICRA is an advantage of USG funding because everyone knows, going into the proposal process, that indirects will be covered at an established rate, presumably acceptable to both parties.
Understand the implications of match requirements: Both foundations and government agencies can require applicants to commit matching funds (also known as cost share). If you are unfamiliar with cost share, please see ˚Making Sense of Cost Share” for an orientation. Briefly, when cost-sharing is required, the funder is saying they are not willing to cover the entire cost of the proposed work. They want you, the applicant, to share the risk. Sometimes, they even meet them halfway: a 50% matching-funds requirement is not unheard of for some foundation-sponsored opportunities.
A few things to keep in mind about cost share include:
You must deliver what you promise: The main thing to remember about cost share is that whatever you commit to in the proposal, your organization or institution is obligated to provide if your proposal results in an award.
You cannot reuse the same matching funds: If you have a volunteer data collector, your institution cannot apply her volunteer hours as a match on multiple grants. If she works 10 hours a month, you have 120 hours of her time to use as cost-sharing across all grant applications. You cannot apply 120 hours per grant application.
USG grants cannot be used as cost share: Another important concept is that you cannot use a federal grant as cost share on another federal grant. You can, however, leverage the resources of one federal grant to help support other federally funded projects. For example, if your institution used federal grant funds to rent office space, that office space can be offered as leverage in a grant application for another USG grant. For example, you can share office space or equipment purchased with one USG grant to support another USG grant, reducing costs.
What happens if you cannot meet your cost share requirement? The repercussions vary, but you should be prepared for the grant amount to be reduced. Under the worst-case scenario, the grant could be terminated because you violated the terms of the grant agreement, and you (that is, your institution) will need to reimburse the funder for the grant funds received to date. Because of the risks involved in committing to cost share, you need to be careful about offering it when it is not required, or offering more than required in hopes of achieving a competitive advantage.
Preparing a high-quality, competitive grant proposal takes time, beginning with the preliminary work you need to complete before you start writing, through to the writing process itself.
Preliminary Tasks Before You Begin Writing
The writing phase of the proposal development process occurs roughly midway through the grant-seeking process. Long before you write, you need to do some homework.
Before you write your proposal, if it’s a research proposal, you should complete enough background research to know whether your project idea falls within the funding priorities of the funder you’ve identified. You should also feel confident that your proposed research idea will be considered novel and likely to advance knowledge in your field. To help answer these questions, it’s a good idea to run your ideas by one or more of your mentors. If you are seeking NIH funding, it’s important to contact the listed program officer to discuss your idea and confirm that the funding opportunity you plan to apply to is appropriate. By the time you write your proposal, you should already have identified your collaborators (partner institutions and co-investigators) and even collected letters of commitment. As discussed above, you should also have a sense of your project's scale, including its duration, cost, and required resources (human and equipment).
How Long Does It Take to Write a Grant Proposal
The time it takes to pull together a grant proposal can vary considerably. For NIH proposals, it can take 6 to 12 months to submit a new proposal. Funding opportunities sponsored by foundations tend to have a much shorter time horizon. A foundation may post a funding opportunity announcement with an application window of just a few weeks. That some foundations have short application periods is yet another reason to have your current project or research ideas fleshed out in detail.
Grant proposals are not written in a single sitting, so any proposal development plan must account for multiple drafts and opportunities to gather feedback. If you are considering responding to a funding opportunity announcement, pull out your calendar and work backward from the due date to determine when you need to start working on the proposal, factoring in milestones such as budget drafts and any internal reviews. As you look at your calendar, a few things you’ll want to do include:
Reserving at least a week to 10 days of concentrated time to prepare the first draft, which usually takes more time than subsequent drafts.
Lining up reviewers who can read your proposal drafts and provide feedback, with 24–48 hours reserved for each review.
Blocking off at least a day (probably more like 2+) to cover editing and formatting of the proposal, and the time you’ll need to review and accept the edits if you hire an editor.
Scheduling a minimum of 3 days to secure official institutional sign-off and package the proposal for submission.
Checking with others at your institution who will be supporting the proposal effort, including finance staff, proposal managers, supporting writers, and external collaborators, to make sure they can assist during the period in question
If you go through the list above, you may find that, given the deadline, you don’t have as much time as you thought to craft a quality proposal. You may also realize that, while preparing the proposal is theoretically possible, to get it done, you and possibly others will have to drop everything else to focus exclusively on the proposal, which may not be realistic.
Since many funding opportunities are cyclical and accept applications annually or several times a year, if you have any doubts about whether you can prepare a quality proposal by the deadline, we recommend holding off until the next funding cycle. While you wait for the next call for proposals, you can prepare for the opportunity by familiarizing yourself with the funder’s proposal guidelines.
Finding Grant Opportunities
No one cares more about your career than you do. Even if your institution or department has a dedicated grant development staff, it’s wise to block off time in your schedule to look for funding opportunities. The development staff is busy researching funding opportunities and supporting the development of proposals for several faculty members. You may not be at the top of their minds when they scan funder databases. More importantly, you are in a better position to identify relevant funding opportunities than development staff are. First, you know your work — the subject matter and direction — better than anyone else, so you’re in the best position to assess whether what you want to do fits within a funder’s programmatic priorities. Second, you know your field of study better than the grant development staff. You know (or should know) the most active investigators and institutions in your chosen field. If you do not keep up with the literature in your area of expertise, this should be a priority. Unless you know what’s happening in your field, it will be harder to predict whether funders will regard your project idea as novel, likely to make a significant contribution to the field, or too progressive to be considered feasible.
Writing Grant Proposals
If you do not enjoy writing, or if you don’t mind writing per se but don’t feel comfortable writing proposals, you may entertain the idea of hiring a grant writer. Hiring a grant writer can be the best way forward in some circumstances. For example, if you struggle to generate proposal content or if English is not your first language. However, it’s not a magic bullet. Adding a grant writer doesn’t necessarily make the proposal process easier or faster.
Contrary to what the name implies, a grant writer doesn’t write the whole grant application from beginning to end. A grant writer can provide writing support at some level for most sections of a proposal. In less technical sections of the proposal, the grant writer may assume a more significant role, possibly serving as the lead writer. Examples of areas where grant writers can serve as the lead include the management and personnel section, the facilities and resources section, and other sections that do not require specialized knowledge or expertise. For sections such as the research or project design, they’ll need you to supply the concepts and most of the language, which they can polish and have you review for accuracy.
Other factors to be aware of in working with a grant writer include:
A grant writer can be expensive: You may have access to a grant writer through your institution, which is ideal and offers several advantages. First, if the grant writer is in-house, she’ll know your institution’s policies and procedures related to grant development. The second advantage of having an in-house grant writer is financial: If you need to hire a grant writer, you may find it to be prohibitively expensive. Depending on the complexity of the proposal and the scope of work, a grant writer can cost thousands of dollars per proposal.
A grant writer may not save you time: A grant writer cannot write a proposal from beginning to end with minimal direction, solely by referring to background materials, copies of your latest publications, and boilerplate text (for more on myths about grant writers, please see our post “Three Faulty Assumptions about Grant Writers”). Grant writers have to work closely with the research or project team to draft the proposal, so you can never be that far removed from the process. Tied back to cost, one reason why it can be so costly to hire a grant writer is that they need to extract your vision of the project from you, which may require multiple conversations and several iterations of the proposal over several months.
Grant writers are not fluent in all types of grants: It is unusual to find a grant writer who is equally comfortable working on grant proposals for submission to private foundations and to government agencies.
Grant applications vary: With some exceptions, private foundations that provide research funding have adopted an NIH-style application, but the application process for a foundation grant differs from that for a USG grant. Based on our experience, grant writers not only typically specialize in proposals for foundations or the USG, but they also typically have concentrated experience preparing proposals for a single agency or institute.
USG agencies have similar, but not identical, grant applications: While grant opportunities released by any USG agency share common elements, different federal agencies often require different approaches and sometimes have very different application packages and submission procedures. If you hire a grant writer who has primarily worked on proposals for submission to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but you need help with a proposal for submission to the Department of Defense, it may not be an entirely smooth process. If you plan to hire a grant writer, we recommend finding someone who understands the application process for the type of funder in question and, if it is a federal agency, the specific agency.
If you want someone to help you understand the proposal requirements, collect supporting materials, and keep you on schedule, you may need a proposal managerinstead of a grant writer. Not only do proposal managers manage the proposal process, but they can also write non-technical sections.
Knowing how to interpret standard proposal guidelines and draft a proposal is a skill set you should cultivate if your livelihood depends on securing grant funding. If you know the process, you’ll be better positioned to manage input from others. Additionally, the proposal could come together more quickly if you take the lead in writing the core sections.
For many faculty, a recipe of 1) writing most of the proposal yourself; 2) working with a proposal manager on the process; 3) collecting constructive feedback from colleagues and external partners on every draft; and 4) using an editor to tighten the language and perform a copy edit on the penultimate and final drafts, will be the most efficient path to producing a quality proposal.
If you work at an institution, you may have access to resource development staff, that is, individuals who help with researching funders, developing a funding strategy, and writing or managing a proposal. To get the most from your relationship with the development staff, it’s useful to know how to work with them and what they need from you.
Below are some general tips for working with the development staff. Each organization is unique, and resource development staff have different work styles. The list below is a starting point, which you can tweak as you get to know the preferences and needs of the development staff at your institution.
Come prepared: If you want help to identify potential funding sources, plan to do some preliminary work before you schedule a time to talk with the resource development staff. Information that is helpful to the development staff includes:
The goal and scope of the project and the type of data involved (i.e., primary or secondary
Where the project will take place.
Who the target beneficiaries are.
Who your potential collaborators are, if you’ve identified any.
An estimate of the amount of money you will need for your project.
If you have submitted a proposal on this topic before, the names of the funders and when you applied.
A list of the potential funders you are interested in, if you have identified any.
Any timeline that is relevant (e.g., you want to find grant funding, but you can’t work on a grant for the next 6 months).
In addition, it’s helpful if you can provide a short project description (~1/2 page long), copies of previous proposals you’ve submitted for this project, and any other background materials that can help the development staff understand what you’ve done so far and where you want to go. For their work, although it may be interesting to them, they don’t need extensive details about your proposed project. They primarily need the broad strokes of who, what, when, where, why, and how much.
Understand the role of resource development staff: Resource development professionals are members of a profession and have specialized knowledge and skills. Most resource development staff have at least one graduate degree and sometimes even a terminal degree. Resource development staff, particularly proposal managers, do schedule meetings and type up and distribute meeting notes related to proposal development, but these tasks are not their primary responsibilities. While responsibilities will vary by organization, resource development staff can help with strategic thinking, funder research, partnership negotiations, drafting memoranda of understanding, and proposal writing and editing. To foster a positive working relationship, we recommend treating the development staff as colleagues and learning about their skill sets, benefiting both you and them.
Respect your institution’s process: Your institution, not you, will submit your USG grant application, which must be submitted by an authorized institutional representative. An institutional representative will also likely be required to submit most foundation grant applications. If your grant application results in an award, your institution, not you, will be the recipient of the grant funds and must agree to the award terms. For all these reasons, you need to learn the procedures at your institution for submitting grants. Your organization or institution likely has a process for internal review of grant applications before they are submitted. At a minimum, this will include checking your budget. If your institution requires that all grants be submitted to the office of sponsored research or department-level development staff at least a week before the due date, this is to allow enough time for these institutional reviews. If you are late in submitting your grant application to the Office of Sponsored Research, the staff may go out of their way to get the reviews completed so your application can be submitted by the deadline. However, rushed reviews increase the risk of overlooking something.
If you submit your application to the development staff late and something goes wrong, there may not be time to fix the issue and resubmit it by the deadline. If you are running behind schedule, reach out to the appropriate development and sponsored research staff to let them know what’s going on. Once they have your update, they can share with you what they can and cannot do for you if things fall too far behind schedule.
Keep Trying
If you want to advance your research career, you need to know where to look for grant opportunities and how to assess them for fit. You also need to know how to write a proposal. Mastering these skills will help you in your search for funding, although they won’t guarantee funding on your desired timeline. It can take a lot of time — sometimes years — and multiple attempts to secure a grant. This is particularly true of NIH grants. If you are unsuccessful with your first (or sixth or twentieth) grant proposal, try to find out from the funders why your proposals are not being funded and continue to develop your grant writing skills. If you persevere, you will get funded!
General Resources
Sample grant proposals: If you are seeking examples of successfully funded grant proposals, we recommend looking at the resources listed in our blog post “14 Resources for Sample Grant Proposals.”
Reference book for proposal development: If you want to buy one book that will take you through the basics of how to prepare a grant proposal, the book Grantsmanship: Program Planning & Proposal Writing, Second Edition, updated and expanded by Barbara Floersch, is the one we recommend. While the book is written with nonprofit organizations in mind and focuses primarily on foundation grants, if you’re new to grant funding, you’ll find it to be a valuable introduction to fundamental grant terminology and concepts.
USG Resources:
Agency Websites: As soon as you have a sense of which USG agencies are the most common sources of funding in your subject area, you should bookmark the agencies’ websites and visit them frequently, as well as sign up for their newsletters. The agency websites usually post funding opportunity announcements (sometimes redirecting to grants.gov) and often provide helpful information on how they evaluate proposals.
Grants.gov: Grants.gov is the site you should monitor for USG grant opportunities. Grants.gov is also the site you will need to use to apply to many of those opportunities. To help you learn how to use the site, grants.gov has posted a series of YouTube tutorials.
NIH-specific Resources:
Sample Proposals: The single best resource for sample NIH research proposals is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Podcast: NIH periodically releases short podcasts on proposal development. The podcast host interviews NIH staff members about common questions related to finding the right opportunity and responding to standard proposal sections, etc.
Reference book: If you want detailed guidance on how to prepare an NIH proposal, consider purchasing The Grant Application Writer’s Workbook, National Institutes of Healthby John D. Robertson, Stephen W. Russell, and David C. Morrison
RePorter: NIH RePORTERis an electronic tool that you can use to search a database of NIH-funded research projects and access publications and patents resulting from NIH funding.