 |
||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||
 |
|||
|
Tips and Resources For Your Grant Proposal's Success
Here are some Tips and Resources to help improve your success rate. Check out seven great tips for success in Science Funding.
Both will help you to write a winning proposal by providing concrete advice on your proposal and offering suggestions of where to find your funding.
Seven Great Tips For Your Success In Science Funding
#1 Sell Your Idea to the broadest audience possible
Your proposal must sell your ideas not just to experts in your field (the peer reviewers who will score your proposals), but also to other scientists and generalists (panels, program officers, even the lay public and government officials), who have the responsibility of ranking your proposal against other highly recommended proposals.
Write to the broadest audience possible to improve your success rate
#2 Look For A Good Match With the Right Agency
The best proposal in the world will fail to be funded unless it is submitted to an agency whose aims it addresses.
Research the agency and grant program carefully. Talk to their Program Officers before you invest a lot of time in writing a proposal.
Agencies have goals that they want their grants to address, and they are not shy about telling you what these goals are. Be sure that your proposal addresses each agency goal explicitly.
#3 Your title and Abstract Can Make Or Break Your Proposal
Word for word, the title and abstract (sometimes called the project summary) carry more weight than any other part of your proposal. Don't take them lightly!
The title and abstract are the first thing that a reviewer or a panelist reads. Preliminary, but important judgements about your proposal are often made on that basis alone.
#4 Don't let your budget and secondary materials be your downfall
The budget and other secondary materials such as the bibliography, institutional setting, indirect impacts, timeline, and so forth, can either support an excellent scientific idea and help it secure funding, or undercut and endanger the proposal.
Make sure that you give the budget and these secondary areas the attention that they deserve; a quick route to denial is to show a careless or cavalier approach to these business-like details. Take the infrastructure of your proposal as seriously as you take the science itself.
#5 Don't let small errors undercut your opportunity
Likewise, a great scientific idea can be sabotaged by typos and by careless or nonstandard English.
Reviewers and panelists may well decide that a investigator who writes unclearly might be sloppy about other "trivia" such as reagent purity, sterile environments, record-keeping, and budgets.
Don't flirt with deadlines; finish your proposal in time to ask a colleague to read it over before your submit it.
#6 Move beyond a denial graciously
The best grant-getters in the world have all had good proposals denied nearly as often as they are funded.
Take denial of your proposal not as a fatal blow, but as a necessary preliminary step toward success.
Read your reviews carefully, respectfully, and as exactly what they are: signposts toward a stronger proposal next time around.
#7 Build on your success by handling your results and reports professionally
Keep your grants coming after your first success by reporting accurately and conscientiously. Publish your results promptly! Funding agencies care deeply about this. Leverage even a small initial grant to produce the preliminary results that will support bigger grants in the future.
Find out More in our Book, Getting Science Grants
If you have found these seven tips to be helpful, we invite you to check out our book, Getting Science Grants.
You can read excerpts on www.Amazon.com, read reviews, and purchase it online from www.Amazon.com or from our publisher Wiley/Jossey-Bass. Either way we think that you will find the information contained informative, lively, and thought provoking
Our information may change forever the way you write proposals!
© 2003- Getting Science Funding. All rights reserved.
Web site design by McCord Web Design.