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CHAPTER 1
The Two Sides of Planning
We often hear there are two types of people in this world; I believe there are two types of grant proposals, as well.
We have grant proposals, and we have competitive grant proposals. Externally, they appear the same. Both request resources to help accomplish a piece of work. Both ask for about the same level of financial support. Both can be a great deal of work. They differ in one important aspect that becomes clear some time after they are evaluated: competitive grant proposals get funded or fall very close to funding cut-off lines.
This handbook is about developing and submitting competitive grant proposals, which means it is about fairly sophisticated planning and about understanding the relationship between granting agencies and those who seek grants.
The information in this handbook is designed to assist faculty members who are early in their careers or who have little experience in competing for extramural funding. Perhaps it will serve as a refresher for more experienced grant writers, as well.
The handbook has three major sections and seven chapters. The first section discusses the importance of planning in producing competitive grant proposals. The second conveys some basic principles that apply to grant writing. The third section addresses the administrative procedures faculty members are expected to follow in developing and submitting grant proposals. For a specific example, I talk about the procedures that apply to the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Of course, universities and colleges within universities have their own procedures, and it is one of our jobs to follow the systems within our own units.
There are two aspects of planning for competitive grant proposals. First, recognize that the goal of competitive grant proposals is to persuade granting agencies that they should invest their resources in members of our University, rather than members of other, less gifted, organizations. How we conceptualize our projects, how we formulate persuasive and elegant arguments, and how well we understand the relationship between granting agencies and grant proposers all come into play. We must plan to write elegant and competitive grant proposals.
Second, faculty members in any institution of higher education produce grant proposals in the same sense that some assembly line employees produce widgets. Producing affordable, family widgets requires sophisticated planning.
Manufacturing firms employ a class of professionals known as planners, and it is the planners' job to see that all of the hundreds of items needed to make something are in the right place at the right time.
One of the consequences of inadequate planning in manufacturing plants is that assembly lines are slowed or stopped. Products do not get produced, and some of the planners find themselves checking the want ads for possibilities in another line of work. The same idea applies in the grant proposal business.
Inadequate planning results in grant proposals that do not get produced, or that get produced in such a way that they emerge as grant proposals, rather than competitive grant proposals. We can work to minimize these sorts of production problems by thinking of a grant proposal as nothing more than a product. We plan to produce a high quality product in a timely way.
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