Ten tips to help write a successful grant application
Over the last 25 years I have had a pretty good success rate in getting my research grant applications funded. This is probably down more to luck than any particular grant writing skill. However, I thought I would share some tips that I personally use when preparing my proposals. I have no evidence that any of these will make any difference to your grant application, or if they have had any impact on my success rate. You decide if they sound useful.
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1. Don’t underestimate how long it takes
My first piece of advice is to not underestimate how long it can take from your first idea for a new project to finally getting awarded the funds. Things always take longer than you think. I usually budget for at least 12 months, if not more. This might sound like a long time. However, when you consider all the steps involved it is not really that long. The steps involved include having the first idea for a new project, to its development, generating some preliminary data to see if the project has legs, writing the science part of the proposal, applying for ethical approval and government approval for any in vivo work, finding suitable co-applicants and collaborators and persuading them to help, costing the application and getting finance and institutional approval, and completing the funder application form all need to be completed before you submit your proposal. Then you have to wait for the reviewers to return their comments to the funder and nervously await their decision. This can often take up to six months after you submit.
If you are really lucky, your application will be funded straight away. If you are moderately lucky you won’t receive an email rejecting your application and politely requesting that you should probably not bother troubling the funder with it again. Hopefully the email that you receive includes helpful and constructive feedback from the reviewers and encouragement to revise your application and resubmit it.
Don’t get discouraged by what can often feel like harsh or unfair criticism of your application from the reviewers. They are looking at your grant from a different perspective to you and probably see it differently to your perception of it. If they haven’t grasped a concept or idea, it is more likely that you didn’t explain it clearly enough in your application. Often you need to read between the lines of the reviewers’ comments. A long list of comments and criticisms about things not being justified or being clear probably just means you should look again at how you explained things. Did you over complicate it (I am often guilty of this) or not explain things in enough detail? Take onboard the reviewers’ comments and resubmit your application. Wait another 3–6 months and there is a good chance you will be successful on the second go. On second thoughts, scrub the 12 months timeframe, make it 18. I underestimated it!
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2. Have a good idea
This is something I cannot really help with beyond saying that successful grants are based on good ideas and if you have a good idea then the grant application is easy to write. Often, if I am struggling to write an application it is usually because the idea is not strong enough. If you are not convinced yourself that your idea is a good one, you will have a hard time convincing the reviewers that it is. How do you come up with good ideas? I don’t really know. Constantly thinking about your research, reading the literature and not being afraid to learn new techniques probably helps. Be creative.
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3. Three is the magic number
As the rap group De La Soul sang in “The Magic Number”, three is the magic number. I am not sure if this really makes any difference to a grant’s success, but I always try to structure the experimental section of my applications into three parts. The number 3 has always chimed with the human psyche, and your grant reviewers are human after all. The rule of three appears in many forms. The “Rule of Three” suggests that concepts or jokes are much funnier, more satisfying, and more effective when grouped in threes (e.g., “location, location, location” or “a man, a woman, and a baby”, a “Scots man, an Englishman and an Irishman” jokes). In mathematics 3 is the first prime number. Geometrically, it is the lowest number of points required to define a plane and the smallest polygon possible (the triangle). In storytelling, think of “The Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears (too hot, too cold, just right). In psychology repeating ideas or concepts three times corresponds to targeting the unconscious, subconscious, and conscious minds. Listen to any politician. Their slogans always contain three words, “Yes We Can” (Barack Obama, 2008, and the Brexit slogans “Take Back Control” (Vote Leave, 2016) and “Get Brexit Done” (Conservatives, 2019) – the last two being a good example of the power of 3 in persuasion for even the craziest of ideas. The holy trinity. The list goes on, but I am sure you get the idea. Two sections of experimental works somehow feel incomplete. Four could give the feeling that an extra bit has unnecessarily been bolted on, whereas three will hopefully give your application the Goldilocks effect and be just right!
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4. Making your application interesting is not your goal
This may surprise you, but your primary goal is not to make your proposal interesting. Many things are interesting. For example, the latest antics of your favourite celebrity or proclamations of a social media influencer might be interesting. However, they are rarely important. Your goal should be to convince your prospective funder that your proposal is important. Will it help cure a disease, stop people dying, reduce morbidity and suffering? Explain how your work will help achieve this. I am amazed how some researchers ever get work funded for research into things like ‘the preference of domestic cats for litter box size’ (Google it!). Maybe I am just not enough of a cat lover but personally I would struggle to persuade a funder that knowing what size tray your cat likes to poop in was important. Kudos to the researchers who can (and did)!
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5. A picture speaks a thousand words
The adage “a picture speaks a thousand words” is very true when it comes to grant writing. Many funders give you a page limit to describe your proposal, so space is almost always at a premium. A picture or diagram can take up a significant amount of the page real estate but often what it communicates or maybe the way in which it communicates it usually makes this a good investment. A simple schematic, flow diagram, or graphical hypothesis or signalling diagram can often communicate an idea or concept better or more effectively in the space it takes than you could using text that would occupy the same space. I find it worthwhile even as a second chance for a reviewer to get the idea, after reading the text, especially if like me, you tend to over complicate things.
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6. Get your colleagues to give you feedback
It is much better to be told earlier by your friends and colleagues that your proposal has a problem or needs more work, than later by the reviewers. Ask as many people as you can find willing to help and that you can trust to be brutally honest for their opinion on your proposal. Take their feedback seriously. As with the reviewers, if they are having difficulty seeing the importance of your proposal it is likely your fault that you have not explained it clearly enough, not theirs for not understanding it properly. They may have more simple advice that is easy to fix and it is better to get this feedback before you submit the application rather than waiting six months and then having to make changes and resubmit.
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7. Justify why your application is value for money
Funding bodies have a limited amount of money and only want to invest in research that is judged as value for money. With many funding bodies, reviewers are directly asked to comment on the perceived value for money for your grant. Don’t take this as meaning that you must make your grant cheap. Value and cost are different things and an under costed application where the work that you propose doing cannot be completed with the funds you requested is likely to be judged more harshly than an over costed one. Value is judged by the importance of the work that you propose as a function of the funds that you request. This of course goes back to point 4, mentioned earlier. Along similar lines, the funder is unlikely to be willing to gamble on your application. Swing the odds in your applications favour by de-risking it and include some contingency planning.
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8. Support your idea with preliminary data
You might have a fantastic idea for a grant but without some preliminary data to support it, you will struggle to get it funded. This might be data to convince the reviewers that your hypothesis might be valid and worthwhile testing properly or that you or your team have the technical skills and access to the right facilities to be able to perform the work that you propose. How much data you should include is hard to say. Too little and you risk leaving the reviewers unconvinced, too much and you risk criticism that you have already done a large portion of the work you propose (and hence do not need all the funding requested). You need just the right amount of preliminary data. Ask Goldilocks how much that is!
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9. Get the right people to help
Don’t try to go it alone. It is unlikely that by yourself you will have all the skills, knowledge and expertise that are required to successfully deliver your project. Try to recruit a team of willing and enthusiastic co-applicants and collaborators to help you. Help can be in many forms, from providing access and training, to tools and models, technical expertise, co-supervision, co-writing parts of the proposal, and all the way to actually doing part of the work you outline in the grant. Of course, don’t just litter your application with a load of randoms. Having the support of the right people is important.
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10. Publish or Peril
Another true adage. Publish or peril. It is often difficult to persuade a funder to give you a second round of funding if you have nothing to show for the last time they supported your work. This of course is not easy given the three-year time frame of many project grant awards. When you factor in the 12–18 month time frame for writing a grant and obtaining funding plus a 6-month time for writing a paper, submitting it for review, revising it, resubmitting it and getting it published, this generally means getting the data for your first paper by the end of year one. So, no time to hang around. What are you doing reading this? Get back to the lab right away!