Finding Funding for Research
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 of the US as well as to nonprofits.
Through our work in grant development, we’ve met many faculty members who have not received training on how to find funding or write grant proposals. As a result 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. However, we hope you’ll find a few tips that are useful. In addition, we hope you’ll share in the comment section any tips you have for finding research funding.
This post is lengthy. To make it easier to navigate the content, we've outlined the post below, hyperlinking each section heading to the relevant part of the article.
Outline
a. Isn't Project Evaluation Research?
b. Features of Project Proposal vs. a Research Proposal
c. What Is the Impact of Seeking Research vs. Project Funding?
II. Researching Funders and Identifying Funder Priorities
a. What’s a Better Fit, Government or Foundation Funding?
b. The Meaning of Unsolicited Proposals
III. Where and How Can You Research Funders?
a. Know the Funders in Your Field
b. Funder Databases vs. Databases of Funding Opportunities
IV. Challenging Funding Situations
a. Projects that Are Difficult to Fund
V. Understanding Proposal Budgets
a. Budget Preparation and Review
VI. Creating a Realistic Timeline for Preparing Your Grant Proposal
a. Preliminary Tasks Before You Begin Writing
b. How Long Does It Take to Write a Grant Proposal?
VII. Taking the Lead in Finding and Applying to Grants
a. Finding Grant Opportunities
VIII. Tips for Working with Resource Development Staff
I. WHAT ARE YOU PROPOSING: IS IT A RESEARCH PROJECT, OR COULD IT BE A PROJECT WITH AN EVALUATION COMPONENT?
Before we discuss details of the grant process, we first want to cover an issue that we’ve seen come up among faculty working in the social sciences.
The issue is what constitutes a research project in the context of pursuing grant funding. The distinction between what is a project versus a research study is not always clear. Further, because academics naturally learn towards seeing 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 the context of grant proposals. If we’ve mischaracterized or oversimplified the concepts, we hope those of you who are experts will step in and clarify in the comments below!
Isn't Project Evaluation Research?
One reason for the confusion between project grants and research grants is because project evaluation relies on some of the same tools, methodology, and approaches as a typical research study.
Project evaluation is a type of research.
In both a research study and in a project evaluation, data are collected and evaluated, and surveys may be the primary method of data collection. However, a distinguishing feature between a research study and a project evaluation is that a research study produces, or emphasizes the generation of, generalizable knowledge.
In comparison, the primary purpose of a project evaluation is to report on the outcome of the project. The data collected through the evaluation may lead to generalizable knowledge, but it’s not the leading motivation behind 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 of 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 and where they have the greatest input in the design of the project.
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 with 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 including significance, innovation, justification and feasibility, research methodology, and resources and facilities.
Behavior Change Indicators and Proposal Type
An area where it can be challenging to determine if you are talking about a research study or about a project relates to behavior change. Both projects and research studies can involve the collection and analysis of data to demonstrate how an intervention impacted behavior. Because evaluating behavior change in a target population is a more sophisticated activity than simply counting the number of people who showed up for a workshop, the inclusion of behavior change indicators may imply that you are dealing with a research study. However, incorporating a behavior change indicator into your project does not necessarily mean you should seek research funding. You need to 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 so you can generate data, or are you collecting evaluation data to document the results of the project?
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 seeing if your planned intervention leads to a desired impact, that could be a sign that you are proposing a project with an evaluation component, not a research study.
What Is the Impact of Seeking Research vs. Project Funding?
The reason why we are starting with the research study vs. project question is that 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 be able to 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 referred to above, the structure of the proposals are different, 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.
Is It Possible to Turn Your Project Proposal into a Research Study, or Your Research Study into 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 change your research design so it will be clear to the funder that the research has the potential for a broader impact.
On the other hand, 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. (To see how a project proposal vs. research proposal could potentially differ, please see our attempt to highlight the differences through the hypothetical example at the end of this post.)
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 the question because it could help with your funding strategy. We welcome other perspectives on this topic and encourage you to share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.
II. RESEARCHING FUNDERS AND IDENTIFYING FUNDER PRIORITIES
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 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 are you 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 tend to be 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 6-figure range. However, in general, you should 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 performance period of one year 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. From our experience, the awards can range anywhere from $3K to $20K, with the average being a one-time award 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), to be competitive, you need preliminary data. 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 applying for external funding and focus instead on securing internal (institutional) funding to collect preliminary data. A small grant from a foundation or professional association may be another way to fund preliminary data collection.
Additionally, for NIH as well as many foundations that fund research, 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. In some cases, foundations will say something like, “We don’t accept unsolicited proposals. However, you’re welcome to send us an email of no more than 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 for entry, so you could go ahead and send an email to see if you ignite any interest.
If you spot a foundation that supports projects in your field, but has a “no unsolicited proposals” policy, even though there appears to be a fit, we advise you to cross the foundation 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 should post 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 is inviting investigator-initiated proposals. In the case of NIH, parent announcements are the mechanism through 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.
III. WHERE AND HOW CAN YOU RESEARCH FUNDERS?
Below, we highlight a few tips and tools especially relevant to seeking research funding.
Elsewhere on our blog, you can find posts dedicated to how to find funding, with much of the information applying equally to nonprofits seeking project funding and to those seeking research funding. In addition, you may want to review 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 highlight grant awards and the names of funders; and
Looking up individual researches 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 as well as more than 86,00 foundations in the US?
It happens because your list of potential funders has to be winnowed down to the select group of funders that fund 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 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. In other words, 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 Bill & Melinda 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 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation might show up in this search as well, but only if their global health program is actively seeking applications on the topic.
The distinction between the databases is an important one. If your goal is to identify open funding opportunities (as opposed to learning about funders that fund your area of research), 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. At nonprofit organizations, database access is frequently limited to development staff because the organization can only afford a handful of licenses. At universities, both faculty and students may have access to one or more funder databases, which they can access 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, although it does include 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 does include 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, which you can access for free if your institution’s library has an online subscription to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. (You can also purchase an annual subscription to GrantStation for just $95/year through a link found on our member site.) Another funder database we recommend for its balance of ease of use and information is Instrumentl (a discount code for Instrumentl can be found below). To see if you like Instrumentl’s interface, you can sign up for a free trial. Unlike FDO and GrantStation, Instrumentl does contain 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 how to use the database and familiarizing yourself with valuable features like the ability to save search results. You can also access video tutorials for many of the funder databases through their websites or YouTube.
If you do not know which, if any, 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 outward-facing webpages that anyone can view. Additionally, some universities maintain opportunity databases that are accessible to those outside of the university. 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, you need to check one website regularly, and that is grants.gov. Grants.gov posts opportunities released by 26 federal agencies and 12 independent federal agencies, 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 as well as 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 it is 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 multilateral agencies like the World Bank, you may already have the tools you need. Funder databases that specifically target academic institutions, such as SPIN, generally 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 their 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.
IV. CHALLENGING FUNDING SITUATIONS
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 to pursue grant funding. From your perspective, you may feel like an external grant is needed because you are unable to get institutional support to develop and host your course. From a foundation's perspective, educational institutions are in the business of teaching courses and charge tuition to develop and offer those courses. 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 develop your course. 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 exist through services like Google’s Blogger and the Evernote-based web platform Postach.io (you can learn more about Postachi.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 when it comes to 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, you haven’t established the need for the research. This is one reason why 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 goes back to the issue of generalizability. Some funders may question whether what you are proposing to do at your institution (or in your city with a vulnerable population unique to your area) will lead to findings that will be more broadly applicable. The other, related issue has to do with the funding eligibility and the pool of potential funders. Depending on the focus, your project may be of interest to only a small number of 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 of the variables 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 are not going to be appropriate for everyone. NIH has the R03 small grant mechanism, for example, which specifically lists secondary data analysis as something it covers. Unfortunately, the R03 is not intended or necessarily ideal for early career investigators.
Another challenge with finding funding for secondary analysis relates to the grant amount. When we have seen grants from foundations that can be used for secondary analysis, they tend to be small grants, too small to enable the faculty member to reduce her teaching load through 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, our suggestion is to look for internal funding opportunities offered by your home institution, which are more likely to be open to funding secondary research as well as less competitive than external grants.
Another approach to bypasses the challenges associated with secondary analysis is to include secondary analysis as one of your sources of data instead of 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 sponsored by foundations and advocacy organizations associated with these issues. Issue-specific organizations sometimes fund secondary data analysis of their dataset or public data. The one thing to be aware of is that the organizations may have specific questions to be answered through the data analysis and may not be open to funding investigator-driven research questions.
Urgent Funding Needs
Another challenging funding situation relates to timing rather than to 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 can take several more weeks to finalize the award. If, for example, 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.
V. UNDERSTANDING PROPOSAL BUDGETS
When you search for potential funders, it is beneficial to have a sense of how much your project will 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 successful investigators and program directors share is that they know how to build, interpret, and manage a budget. 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 necessarily 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 to a week or so, not in 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 make sure the activities described in the narrative have been captured in the budget. What kinds of things should be part of your review? It means realizing that if you are doing data collection in the field, you may need to budget for the purchase of some kind of 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, does your budget have two community coordinators listed under personnel, 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 that will be 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, you need to think through how much money you need to do what you want to do to achieve the results you want to achieve. 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 you not to back into your budget by taking the award ceiling as your budget’s starting point. Doing so runs the risk of 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 come up if you aim for a random budget figure is that it can lead to a total disconnect between your budget 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 a fiction, you may be tempted to skip the review of the budget against the proposal narrative (because they are only loosely related anyway). By not conducting a careful review, you could fail to spot places where you have actually under-budgeted line items.
Understand the implications of overhead rates. Overhead covers general operating expenses like rent, utilities, and administrative expenses. 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 before you apply what they are. 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 impact your relationship with the funder and how the funder views your institution as a whole.
USG negotiated indirect cost rate: In the case of USG grant applications, many institutions (this includes both 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, the way it works is that an organization will negotiate an indirect cost rate with one federal agency, and most other federal agencies will 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, one that is presumably acceptable to both parties.
Understand the implications of match requirements: Both foundations and government agencies can require that applicants commit matching funds (also referred to as cost share). If you are unfamiliar with cost share, we recommend you check out our blog post ˚Making Sense of Cost Share” for an orientation. Briefly, when cost share is required, the funder is saying they are not willing to foot the entire bill for the proposed work. They want you, the applicant, to share the risk. Sometimes even meet them half-way: A requirement of 50% matching funds 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: In other words, if you have a volunteer data collector, your institution cannot apply her volunteer hours as a source of match on multiple grants. If she works 10 hours a month, you have 120 hours of her time that you can use as cost share 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. In other words, you can share office space or equipment purchased with one USG grant to support another USG grant, which will reduce 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 cost share, you need to be careful about offering cost share when it is not required or offering more than is required in the hopes of achieving a competitive advantage.
VI. CREATING A REALISTIC TIMELINE FOR PREPARING YOUR GRANT PROPOSAL
Preparing a high quality, competitive grant proposal takes time, beginning with the preliminary work you need to complete before you start writing through the writing process itself.
Preliminary Tasks Before You Begin Writing
The writing phase of the proposal development process falls roughly in the middle of the grant-seeking process. Long before you start writing, you need to do some homework.
Before you start writing 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 to confirm that the funding opportunity you plan to apply to is appropriate. Moreover, by the time you start writing 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 some sense of the scale of your project, such as its duration, cost, and required resources (human and equipment).
How Long Does It Take to Write a Grant Proposal?
The length of time it can take to pull together a grant proposal can vary considerably. In the case of NIH proposals, it could take anywhere from 6 to 12 months for a new submission. 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. The fact that some foundations have short application periods is yet another reason why it helps to have your current project or research ideas fleshed out to some degree of detail.
Grant proposals are not written in a single sitting, which means that any proposal development plan has to factor in multiple drafts and opportunities to collect 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 like budget drafts and any internal reviews that need to take place. 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, and 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 even several times a year, if you have any doubts about whether you will be able to prepare a quality proposal by the deadline, we recommend holding off and waiting 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.
VII. TAKING THE LEAD IN FINDING AND APPLYING TO GRANTS
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 proposal development for several faculty members. You may not be at the top of their minds when they scan funder databases. More importantly, in many ways, you are in a better position to find relevant funding opportunities than development staff. 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 you 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. The addition of 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. For less technical sections of the proposal, the grant writer may take on a more significant role and possibly serve as the lead writer. Examples of 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 depend on 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 when it comes to 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 for a single 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. Tying 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—some private foundations that provide research funding have adopted an NIH-style application—the application process for a foundation grant looks very different than the application process 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 have similarities, 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 trying to find 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 manager instead of a grant writer. Not only do proposal managers manage the proposal process, but they also can write non-technical sections of the proposal.
Knowing how to interpret standard proposal guidelines and draft a proposal is a skill set you should cultivate if your livelihood in any way 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.
VIII. TIPS FOR WORKING WITH RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT STAFF
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, we have 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 identifying potential funding sources, plan on doing some preliminary work before you schedule a time to talk to 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 work, but these tasks are not their primary purpose. 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 skillsets, which will benefit 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 probably be required to submit most foundation grants. 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 terms of the award. For all these reasons, you need to learn the procedures at your institution for submitting grants. Your organization or institution probably has some kind of process for internal reviews 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 getting your grant application to the office of sponsored research, the staff may bend over backward to get the reviews done so your application can be submitted by the deadline. However, rushed reviews increase the possibility that something will be overlooked.
Additionally, if you get your application to the development staff late and something goes wrong with the submission, there may not be time to fix the error 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 will, and will not, be able to 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 not successful 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!
RESOURCES
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:
Cost Share: For more information on cost share, this infographic from USAID provides a nice, easy-to-digest overview.
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 they redirect to grants.gov), and they also often post helpful information on how they evaluate proposals.
Grants.gov: Grants.gov is the site you should be monitoring 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 tutorials on YouTube.
NIH-specific Resources:
Sample Proposals: For sample NIH research proposals, the single best resource is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Podcast: NIH periodically releases short podcasts on topics related to proposal development. The podcast host interviews NIH staff members about common questions related to finding the right opportunity to 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 Health by John D. Robertson, Stephen W. Russell, and David C. Morrison
RePorter: NIH RePORTER is 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.
NOTES
HOW TO SPIN A PROJECT: EXAMPLE OF A PROJECT VS. RESEARCH PROPOSAL
To illustrate what we’re talking about regarding proposal types, let’s explore the way you could spin a hypothetical project. In our example, you live in a city where there is a sizable refugee population. From various sources—school administrators, talking to local food banks, and to the staff at the refugee center—you’ve heard that many refugee families seem to be experiencing food scarcity. You decide that you want to apply for a grant to address this community problem. You could prepare a proposal that is more focused on an intervention, or you could develop a proposal that, while working with the same population on the same issue, has a different structure and intended outcome and is more focused on research.
A project-oriented grant might be based on an outreach campaign to try to improve food access and healthy eating within the target community. It could include distributing information about food assistance programs at the refugee center and other community gathering places and providing cooking demonstrations on how to make inexpensive, healthy meals. In your proposal, you would describe how you plan on partnering with the local food bank, houses of worship, and the refugee center. You plan to keep track of how many pamphlets you distribute, how many cooking demonstrations are held, and how many people attend your events. To document impact, you will survey the cooking demonstration participants at the time of the demonstration and a month later to see if they have made any changes to their diet or if they have gained confidence in their ability to prepare healthy meals. To incentivize participation in the surveys, you will give participants gift cards for the local grocery store. Your team includes a project director, an outreach coordinator, and volunteers who assist with outreach activities and data collection. You have submitted an institutional review board application (IRB) per your institution’s policies. At the end of the project, you plan to write up the project results, publishing them in various formats for academic and mainstream publications. In your proposal, you indicate that this is a short-term project and that after it ends, the plan is for community partners to continue with the outreach.
A research-oriented grant might begin with what you don’t know, such as the scale of the problem. You might design a project that will attempt to quantify how widespread food scarcity is among the refugee population and identify what the barriers to food access are, with the goal of subsequently testing targeted interventions based on that data. Your project might include baseline data collection as well as end-of-project. Just like with the project proposal, your research proposal might involve partnering with community partners, and you might use a similar survey design to evaluate behavior change. Your budget might include time for a statistician as well as survey and data specialists and co-investigators. You plan to write up your results and publish them in peer-reviewed journals. You have IRB approval and have a data management plan, and your de-identified data will eventually be made public. In your proposal, you indicate that your phased approach includes data collection, testing interventions, and follow up. Regarding impact, you state that your data will help to answer public policy questions related to integrating refugee populations and improving refugee communities’ access to public benefits.
