How to write a grant proposal

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Date

20/12/2017

Summary

Nine tips every academic should use to improve their grant proposal.

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There are many potential perks to being awarded with external funding. If you are a researcher on a fixed-term contract, external funding can add time to your contract. If you are an academic on a permanent contract, external funding can pay to reduce your teaching workload, so that you have more time for research. You can also seek external funding to temporarily take on a position with another research group at another university, to extend your connections. External funding also provides important prestige, because it suggests that your research ideas were deemed more promising than those of others, by a review panel of your peers. Being a member of a research team, either as a Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator, is a rewarding experience that can greatly enhance your research and leadership skills.

In the UK, funding is available from many sources. You might be eligible for funding from one of the UK Research Councils (soon to be brought together with Innovate UK, under UK Research & Innovation), the British Academy, and various charities such as Leverhulme or Cancer Research UK. With any luck, UK institutions will remain eligible for funding from the European Union.

To learn more about potential funding opportunities, you might check Research Professional. Your institution’s Research and Innovation Office should also be able to provide you with more information about potential funders. Moreover, they may be able to provide you with examples of proposals that have successfully been submitted to that funding scheme in the past, and to put you in touch with people who have written successful proposals.

Writing a proposal for research funding is a very specific skill. Unfortunately, many academics have never received training in writing research proposals. The format and writing style of research proposals and journal articles are quite different. However, in both cases, the practicalities of writing can be learned through guidance and practice.

It is also important to plan ahead and get the timing right. Your grant proposal will look stronger if you first take the time to publish any relevant research you have already done. If you are new to grant writing, then you many need to allow several months to work up an application. 

Below, I summarise what I learned from my many years of proposal writing - or what I believe I have learned. Of course, there are many other ways of writing successful proposals, but my advice is based on what has worked for me, and for the various people on my team.

Each of the tips presented below is supplemented by comments from Gabriella Eriksson, Cäzilia Loibl, Simon McNair, Yasmina Okan, and Natalie van der Wal – all of whom I have helped to write successful grant applications.

1. Apply your expertise to solving a real-world problem
2. Involve relevant project partners
3. Involve colleagues from other relevant disciplines
4. Propose a limited set of research questions
5. Create a budget before you start writing
6. Explicitly address all of the funder’s criteria
7. Write the proposal in clear language
8. Seek lots of feedback
9. Don’t give up

1. Apply your expertise to solving a real-world problem

Like many academics, you may have only thought about your topic of expertise in theoretical terms, and conducted your research mainly in the lab. You probably have thought a lot about the studies you might do to advance theoretical knowledge in your field. But you may not have thought as much about the real-world relevance of your research. Yet, most funders in the UK want to support grant proposals that bring the promise of solving an important real-world problem, in addition to propelling scientifically grounded research.

Perhaps you have argued, at an abstract level, that your research is indirectly relevant to a real-world problem. For a grant proposal, that argument needs to become concrete. Funders are awarding taxpayers’ money, and would like to see that you give something back to these taxpayers.

Before you start writing your proposal, it is therefore of the utmost importance that you think of a real-world problem that your research might solve. Your grant proposal can then start with the description of that real-world problem, including statistics that hint at its scale and importance. Subsequently, follow with a description of how your expertise can be applied to potentially solve this problem. Ultimately, you want to be able to argue that your proposed research might save lives, save money, improve people’s well-being, or contribute to society in some other important way. 

2. Involve relevant project partners

To make it more likely that your research will have impact, it is important to involve an organisation that is tasked with addressing the specific real-world problem. If, like Gabriella Eriksson, you say that your research aims to reduce speeding, then involve car companies or road safety organisations. If, like Yasmina Okan, you seek to inform patients’ decisions about cancer screening, then involve health practitioners and agencies that communicate to people about cancer.

It is not enough to say that you will present your findings at the end of the project, in a meeting with the project partners. If you do so, your research may end up being well-designed for testing your theories, but not for benefiting the real-world problem. To increase the promise of real-world impact, project partners have to be actively involved from the start, to ensure that the research is designed in a way that is relevant to their practice, and could actually be implemented by them if it turned out to be effective. In fact, it is even better to involve project partners in the proposal writing, so that the proposed research already reflects everyone’s expectations for the project.

You may find the idea of contacting potential project partners daunting. To avoid having to make cold calls, it may be helpful to ask your academic colleagues as well as staff in your Research & Innovation Office to introduce you to anyone they know at relevant organisations. Even if no one can introduce you, do not hesitate to reach out to the leadership of any organisations you would like to involve. Think about what you are offering. If you get funded, you will give your potential project partners an opportunity to improve their practice at no cost, on the basis of the best available science. You are providing expertise that most project partners do not have in-house, and that they may otherwise not be able to afford.   

Of course, potential project partners may not have time to spend hours in meetings with you – because they are busy with their actual jobs. Very rarely would a grant pay for their staff time.  When you contact them, you may therefore offer varying of levels of involvement. At a minimum, you may want them to look at your research ideas before you start, and provide insights about how to implement findings. To formalise this type of advisory role, you could ask your project partners to serve on an advisory board for your project. You could also ask your project partners to help you with the dissemination of your findings after you’re done. Your grant may pay for those efforts, including travel to meetings, and production of communication materials. You may need your project partner to provide access to their employees and their networks. If your project partners want to be more involved, then by all means, give them the opportunity to do so – perhaps even to the extent that they become co-authors. Your research will be better for it.

To show the funder that your project partners are committed to the project, you may need to ask for a so-called ‘letter of support’. That letter needs to be printed with the letterhead of the project partner’s organisation, and signed by your contact person at that organisation. Examples of letters of support should be available from your Research & Innovation Office. The letter should state:

• the name of the project and the main researcher(s) involved
• the project period
• a description of the project partner’s organisation and what it is that they do
• the usefulness of the project from the project partner’s point of view
• the contributions that your project partner agrees to make and might additionally make.

I often provide my project partners with a draft of such a letter, which they can then adapt as they see fit. Even if the funder does not require a letter of support, it might be a good idea to ask for one. By the time your project gets funded, a few months may have passed. Your contact person may have forgotten the details of your agreement. Or they may have left the organisation. The letter of support will serve as a useful reminder.

3. Involve colleagues from other relevant disciplines

As noted, many funding agencies in the UK seek to support ground-breaking research that will solve a real-world problem. Most real-world problems cannot be solved from the perspective of one single discipline. Other disciplines may offer a different take on potential solutions, with each discipline having its strengths and its weaknesses. Interdisciplinary research is often considered novel, because the insights from each discipline can contribute to the other. Even if you think that your field provides the most useful insights, the review panel working for your funder may not think so. Your proposal will therefore be stronger if it involves a team of researchers from different, relevant disciplines.

Your team should be the best team for the proposed research. Therefore, think hard about what your ‘dream team’ would look like. Who would add to your expertise? If you could ask anyone, who would you ask? Is there someone who you have always wanted to work with? This is your time to ask! Your funding scheme may allow you to pay for some of their time. Even if you can’t pay for their time, your funding will allow you to conduct the research in ways that might otherwise not be affordable, or to collect unique data through the involvement of your project partner. Most likely, some of the people you would like to involve on your dream team will gladly say ‘yes’ to such an exciting opportunity.  

4. Propose a limited set of research questions

It is a common misunderstanding among first-time applicants that promising a lot of work will make your research proposal look better. However, promising less work may be better. If you promise a lot of work, the funder may be concerned that your project is not feasible for the proposed budget and time period. It may also be difficult for the reviewers to see what the most important contribution of all of that work will be.

My preferred way of focusing the topic of a grant proposal is to present a limited set of research questions. For a 2-3 year project, I recommend having at most 4 research questions. If you can propose 3, that might be even better. I typically write my research questions so that they clearly require one study each, with the entire set reflecting a range of methodologies relevant to the topic. To aim for a coherent proposal, I tend to design each research question so that it leads to an insight that is necessary before proceeding to the next question. If one research question does not seem to fit the sequence, then reviewers may question whether it is necessary. My final research question tends to lead to the most important insight, and preferably, provide some initial evidence of the real-world impact that was promised.

For each research question, it is important to present a justification based on the literature, as well as a research plan and a list of planned outputs. Specifically, the literature review should make the case that each research question will contribute a new insight that is relevant to both theory and practice. The research plan should provide enough detail about the methodology for each research question, but without getting lost in confusing technical details. You want to present just enough information so that the funder can be confident that you know what you will be doing, that the proposed methods are appropriate for answering the research question, and that your approach is grounded in the literature. The planned outputs should include one publishable paper for each research question, following the argument that each research question makes a contribution to the literature.

Even after you have proposed 3 research questions, you will find that you will barely have enough space to provide an adequate literature review, a research plan, and a list of planned impacts for each. This is another reason to provide no more than 4.

There are, of course, other ways to organise your grant proposal, and to ensure that the scope is appropriate. As noted above, you may therefore want to contact academic colleagues and staff at your Research and Innovation Office to ask for examples of successful proposals.

5. Create a budget before you start writing

To ensure that your research fits within the available budget, it is important to create a budget before you start writing.  Because it requires specific expertise to create a budget, it should be created by the Research and Innovation Office, if your institution provides such support. At the Leeds University Business School, the professionals in the Research and Innovation Office have extensive experience in creating budgets for grant proposals. If you tell them about all of the activities involved in the proposal, including the proposed research, the planned meetings and so on, they will be able to estimate how much it will cost. They have records about how much it will cost to conduct interviews or online surveys, and will remind you of materials you may need to complete the research. They have estimates, for example, on how much it will cost to go to a conference in the US to present your findings. They will also know what your funder will (and will not) allow you to cover. 

If your proposal involves a collaboration with other institutions, you and staff at your Research and Innovation Office will also need to take a careful look at the proposed distribution of funds. Especially as Principal Investigator, you need to be sure that you do not end up with a large amount of responsibility with only a small share of the overall budget. For everyone involved, the funding needs to match the assigned responsibilities.

If your estimated budgets is under the available limit, you may not have thought big enough. Reconsider your plans and ask yourself whether they could be better. For instance, it is a common tradition among psychologists to recruit our own students as research participants so as to cut research costs. However, nationally representative samples will allow you to generalise to the overall population. Select the best methods for your research. Also make sure that your proposed sample size is large enough to answer your research questions and that you have included funds to cover every activity for which you have planned, including meetings with your project partners, the maintenance of your project website, or open access publishing of your papers. Another good use of your funds is to plan for end-of-project meetings to share your findings with academics, policymakers, practitioners, and members of the general public. Staff at your Research and Innovation Office can help you to develop the associated budget.

If your estimated budget is over the available limit, you may be proposing too much. Depending on how much you are over, you may need to check that all costs are accurate and reflective of what you need. You may need to remove a research question, or limit the scope of your proposal. Promising less can actually improve the quality of a proposal, by making it more focused on the main activities, and by making it more feasible to be completed within the available time. Hence, having to cut down is not necessarily a bad thing. While cutting down on costs, do keep in mind that you want to have enough budget to complete every proposed task well. After all, you want to maximize the likelihood of generating useful findings for addressing the real-world problem you have identified. 

6. Explicitly address all of the funding criteria

Your funder will most likely send your proposal to a group of reviewers, who will be asked to rate your proposal on a set of criteria. Those criteria will be described in the funding call. If reviewers are finding it hard to understand how your proposal meets the funding criteria, you will get a lower rating. In the past, I have found that reviewers gave me a low rating on criteria that I believe I did address. They would complain that I did not address a certain issue in a certain section of the proposal – even though I did address the issue in another section of the proposal. This is how I learned that some reviewers might skim parts of the proposal, and that I need to repeat how I address the funding criteria in each and every section of the proposal. If you do not make it very obvious for reviewers how the proposal addresses the funding criteria, they may not think you have addressed it – and reject your proposal.

To make it very explicit that your proposal meets the funding criteria, I recommend the following three approaches: 

• Use headers that refer to the criteria. If your proposal will be rated on ‘the novelty of the approach’ and ‘grounding in the literature’ then include headers that use those words. Even if a reviewer skims the proposal, the headers will make it more likely that they will find the text they need to read to rate the proposal on these criteria.

• Write the text so that it explicitly shows how details fit with the criteria. If your proposal will be rated on ‘contribution to the literature’ and ‘appropriateness of the methods’, then write sentences such as ‘this proposal will make a contribution to the literature because…’ and ‘the methods are appropriate because…’. If there is more than one reason that, say, the proposed work will make a contribution to the literature, then you might write ‘the proposed work will make a contribution to the literature for three reasons. First, … Second, … Third’

• Do not hesitate to repeat yourself. Because reviewers may be skimming parts of the proposal, they may miss an important argument for why your proposal meets a specific criterion. I therefore try to mention how my proposal meets the funding criteria in each section of the proposal. I do so in a way that is fitting with the section, so that the literature review section focuses more on the contribution to the literature, and the method section more on the appropriateness of the methods. However, I might also briefly write something in the literature review section about how the methods deemed appropriate in the literature are the ones I will use – as I also might in a journal article. In the methods section I may repeat how, by using a specific method, I will be able to make this new contribution to the literature.

7. Write the proposal in clear language

Once you have decided on a real-world problem to study, built a team of project partners and interdisciplinary colleagues, compiled your 3-4 research questions, and reminded yourself of the funding criteria, you are ready to start writing your proposal. Although you may have written general project descriptions for your potential project partners and colleagues from other disciplines, many of the details were probably not fleshed out until now.

The proposal should be written in easily accessible language and assume that the reader is not an expert in your field. Most funders will send your proposal to a team of reviewers, who will likely have PhDs but may be trained in a variety of fields. Reviewers may also include practitioners focused on your real-world problem.

Because the reviewers will likely not be in your field of research, you should avoid the expert terminology that you would commonly use for academic publications. If you feel that you must use expert terminology, then make sure to introduce each term every time you use it. If the term is unfamiliar to reviewers, you will still run the risk that you confuse and alienate them – because by page 7 they may not recall that you introduced the term on page 3. In the meantime, they may have made a cup of coffee or answered a phone call, or gotten otherwise distracted. For the same reasons, it is important to avoid acronyms (eg, write ‘judgement and decision making’ instead of JDM and ‘Centre for Decision Research’ instead of CDR).

Research on reading comprehension suggests that texts that are written in less complicated language are easier to understand and liked better, even among readers with higher levels of education. Texts become easier to read if you use shorter words, of 1-2 syllables, because those words tend to be less academic-sounding and less commonly used in everyday language. Most words of 3 syllables or more have shorter synonyms you could use instead. For example, you could write ‘study’ instead of ‘investigate’, ‘plan’ instead of ‘propose’ and ‘test’ instead of ‘examine.’ If you consistently use shorter words, you will also end up with more room to discuss the necessary elements of your proposal.

Texts are also easier to read if you use shorter sentences. Sentences that run over multiple lines, and go on and on, while using a lot of commas, like this one, are harder to read (!). As a rule of thumb, I recommend that you use no more than 2 clauses per sentence. If you have more to say, start another sentence.

Finally, texts will be more compelling if you ‘show’ as well as ’tell.’ Do not say that your proposal is novel, but say why or how your proposal is novel. The fact that no one has looked at your topic before is not sufficient evidence of its novelty. After all, it might be possible that no one looked at it before because they deemed it uninteresting. So, explain why your proposal is novel and interesting! 

8. Seek lots of feedback

Even if you follow all the recommendations provided above, there might still be sections of your proposal that are unclear – at least to some. To strengthen your proposal, ask other people to read it. Don’t just ask colleagues from your own field for feedback, because most likely they will share your views and be familiar with your arguments and your wording. Ask your project partners and your interdisciplinary team members to take a look as well. At almost every university, there are also people whose job it is to help with proposal writing.  They will know what funders look for and how to improve your writing. Most likely, they will also know others in the university who have had success in writing proposals, and might be willing to provide feedback. For certain funding bodies eg ESRC and NERC, your university will likely have a rigorous peer review process in place, which you must follow.

The more rounds of feedback you receive, the better it is. If you send everyone who has agreed to provide feedback the same version of your proposal, they might all catch the same typo or the same poor argument structure. Therefore, plan for multiple rounds of feedback from different people. Arrange ahead of time when each person will look at the proposal, and revise the proposal after each set of feedback. Make sure that you have planned your proposal writing efforts over enough time, so that you can have these multiple rounds of feedback. 

9. Don’t give up

There is no guarantee that your proposal will be funded. In fact, it is more likely that it will be rejected than that it will be funded. However, as with a journal article, you might use reviewers’ comments to improve your proposal and submit it elsewhere. Many of my funded proposals were not funded on the first try. As you can see below, many of my colleagues’ funded proposals were not funded on the first try either.

Even if your initial proposal ends up not getting funded at all, the process of writing the proposal will not have been for nothing. You will have generated new research ideas that have expanded your horizons due to the involvement of project partners and academics from other disciplines. Your team will have gotten excited about the prospect of working together. My experience is that other projects will likely grow out of the investments you have made. Some of those projects might be easy to implement without external funding. Some of those projects might be implemented by funding through other means. If you are at the Leeds University Business School, you may be eligible for schemes such as Small Research Grants, Impact Support funding or Engagement funding. There may also be internal funds available from a project partner or another team member. As you develop those projects, you will improve your experience with interdisciplinary and impactful research, your publication outputs, and your research profile. Ultimately, that should help you to write stronger research proposals into the future. 

 

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