I wrote my first grant in 2012 as a Ph.D. student, and it was the first grant application that I made a major contribution to. It had a complicated budget, a logic model, and a human research component. I learned a lot and very quickly. Luckily, I was just a graduate student on a team of staff and faculty collaborators, so they led the way for me.
As a graduate student, I wrote two more grants, one in collaboration with that same team and another on my own for the National Science Foundation (I got that one for $50k!).
So my entry into the grant writing world came through academic research. After 5 years as a grant writing consultant for academic researchers, nonprofits, and government entities, I still find academic research grants to be the most complex, and I know that for graduate students and new faculty, they can be downright mystifying.
So I asked my husband, a professor of English and his department’s Director of Technical Writing what he thinks his students and fellow faculty members needed to know the most when just getting started with grantseeking.
Here’s what he came up with:
1. Who do I need to coordinate with at my academic institution to submit the grant application?
Most universities have an Office of Sponsored Programs or Office of Research that will help you get started, submit your grant application, and then manage the grant award (the money doesn’t go straight to you, unfortunately).
Reach out to the contact person or general contact email on their site to get started. Many universities have staff that you can schedule a consultation with to help you find funding and explain the application process to you.
They also usually have online resources available to teach you some of the basics of grant writing, so you can learn remotely.
Once you’re ready to write the grant, you will most likely need their help with developing the budget and submitting the application. They know the numbers that you don’t, like how much it costs to buy you out of a course for a semester so that you can do research or how much a graduate student stipend + benefits would cost.
They also have the permissions to submit applications to portals like grants.gov on behalf of the university/a faculty or staff at the university.
This leads us to Will’s second question:
2. Where do I find grant opportunities for academic research?
The first way I would search for grants is by going to your university’s Office of Research site. They’ll have links to both internal and external grant sources.
If you don’t have that site at your institution, you could go to the site of another big research university and check their resources.
Or, if you want to go beyond what they offer there, check these resources:
- Grants.gov: A free search database for federal grants only.
- Instrumentl: A paid search database with foundation grants, some of which might sponsor academic research.
- Research Professional: A paid search database for research grants.
- OEDB: A list of grant lists and databases, organized by type of research.
- Colgate University: A list of both internal (scroll past those unless you’re at Colgate) and external grants.
- Science Magazine: A list of research grant databases and lists.
- SPIN: A huge sponsored research grants database, with 40,000+ opportunities. It does require an institutional subscription and login.
That should get you started. If you’re really stuck, especially because determining eligibility and evaluating opportunities is much harder than finding opportunities, I can help via a 1-on-1 coaching session.
And finally, let’s talk about the content of the grant application. Will said another important question faculty and students often ask is:
3. What are the genre expectations of academic grants versus other types of academic writing/proposals?
Unlike a research or book proposal, a grant proposal is written for an audience that will likely not have expertise in your subfield.
Now, if you’re applying for a cancer research grant with the American Cancer Society (ACS), your reviewers will be M.D.s and Ph.D.s with expertise in cancer research, and a few might even have expertise in your specific type of cancer research.
However, if you apply with a family foundation that sponsors medical research, your grant reviewers might not have the expertise to understand every concept and term you used in our ACS application.
Therefore, you have to make different assumptions and accommodations for the different levels of knowledge and types of expertise your audience will likely have by defining key terms, simplifying and explaining complex concepts specific to your field or subfield, and writing abstracts or executive summaries that a general public audience can understand (because that’s one way they’ll likely be used).
If you have written an IRB application, a research grant application will differ in the level of detail about how you will protect your participants and data, but will be complex in other ways, such as the budget.
You will also need to work more with others than you likely will for any other research proposal you’ve written, perhaps gathering letters of support from stakeholders, developing partnership agreements, and working with your institution’s research office on the budget.
Grants are outcomes oriented, so you might also need to connect resources, activities, goals, and outcomes through a logic model or in your project description. You will likely need to explain how your research will have a larger impact on your field of study.
Whereas in a book proposal or other research proposal, the inherent value of research is often assumed. Furthermore, you will need to list deliverables that will result from your research, whether that’s presentations, journal articles, a book, a new course curriculum, a website, or a video, to name a few.
Those are some of the major differences you’ll encounter with an academic research grant proposal.
I hope this post has been helpful for those of you thinking about getting started with academic research grants.
If you would like 1-on-1 help with your grant search, grant planning, or grant writing, you can book 1, 3, or 5 hours with me here.
You can also learn my detailed strategies for searching for grants in my new 50-page digital workbook: How to Find Grants.
