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CHAPTER 3
From Idea to Product: Producing a Competitive Grant Proposal
The first aspect of writing competitive grant proposals is planning to produce a product. When this phase of grant writing goes well, proposals are excellent products that get finished on time, with a certain aplomb. Let us work from the idea that the purpose of grant proposals is to encourage somebody to give us money, not to upset the basic structure of our working and private lives.
Most granting agencies evaluate grant proposals and disperse funds in cycles. Depending upon the agency, there may be from one to half a dozen grant cycles per year. The granting agencies usually establish deadlines, beyond which proposals will not be accepted for a particular cycle.
It is up to us to be sure that our grant proposals are planned, written and submitted in accordance with the deadlines. For agencies with one grant cycle per year, a small error—even a very small error—can set a potentially competitive proposal back for a year.
We can use another layer of planning to assure that our proposals are submitted on time. This brings us back to the idea of planning to produce a product: the proposal. Let's consider a series of rather blunt questions, starting with the most important one:
* Who is going to write the grant proposal?
In the most straightforward situation, you are responsible for the entire grant proposal.
You decide which of your prioritized projects will be the subject of a proposal. You plan the experiments, design the budget, work up the standard forms and write the proposal's main body. You do all the typing, word processing, budget calculations and final production of the proposal.
All you need to do is estimate how many hours you will need to perform your best work, multiply that by a large number to arrive at a more realistic estimate of the time required, and then set up your overall working schedule to allow time to produce the finished product.
I estimate the amount of time it will take me to do something, multiply that by two, and adjust it up to the next time level. For example: I expect something will take two hours; I multiply by two. That's four. The next time level up from hours is days, so I allow four days.
Scenarios often are not so straight forward. There is increasing emphasis on collaborative work. The collaborations may be intradisciplinary and multidisciplinary. Many systems are complex, and substantial progress often requires the knowledge and skills of individuals from several disciplines.
Our University is home to an impressive number of interdisciplinary teams. Understanding that collaborative teams are in ascendancy, we need to recognize that the benefits of teamwork contain their own complexities and opportunities. One complexity is gathering input from all concerned to put together the most effective grant proposal. One opportunity is that we find ourselves doing more sophisticated planning.
There are a number of ways to put collaborative grant proposals together. You might write the entire document yourself, then pass the finished product around for your team members' input. Or, your working group may assign specific parts of the proposal to each team member, and then have one person put the parts together, or work together to assemble the overall proposal. There are still other ways for groups to write a grant proposal.
The key point is this: The goal is to submit a competitive grant proposal, not just submit a grant proposal. This means that each team member must contribute the assigned piece of work on time. In these more complex situations, "on time" would be well ahead of the submission date to allow plenty of time to assemble the individual pieces into an integrated whole.
* Who is going to type the standard forms?
Many grant agencies provide sets of standard forms that make up a substantial portion of grant proposals. These include, but are not limited to, cover pages, summary pages, budget forms, pages to describe your working spaces and other resources, forms to list grant support you may have, and a page for an abbreviated biography.
Smaller agencies don't have forms and expect us to provide this sort of information in a readable style. I think of these things as the "boiler plate." In my experience, a highly skilled (read gifted) secretary can knock these things out in just a few days.
We must plan time to get the correct information onto the boiler plate, and we must work with the individual who is going to type the final forms to assure there is enough time to get the work done. This is especially important at times
You need to make sure the individuals who are going to pre-audit and type the final budget are available to help you when you need the help.
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when several individuals in the same unit are planning to produce separate proposals at the same time. Even gifted secretaries cannot do everything at once.
* Who is going to do the budget?
For those of us who enjoy clarifications of the obvious, we write grant proposals to persuade people to give us money to do something. We use the budget section of grant proposals to tell the granting agency how much money we want, and what the money will purchase. We will revisit budgeting later in the section on resources. For now, however, there are some important points to consider in this section on planning to write a proposal.
First, the budget has to be designed. You must decide on funds for personnel, supplies, equipment, operating costs, publication costs and other resources needed to complete the project. If you are planning a multi-year project, you will have to extend your budget over the project's life.
Second, it is important to make sure the budget is correct. For research grants, the budget should be audited a few days before the grant is completed. Extension and teaching grant proposals also should be preaudited a few days before the proposal deadline.
Understand that this preaudit step is not just another administrative hoop to jump through. At UNL, all grant proposals are audited by our Research Grants and Contracts Office (RGCO) before they are signed by the appropriate University official. There are a good number of potential problems with budgets, and many of these can be settled with ease by having the budgets preaudited.
One of the most painful problems occurs when there is an error in something that affects every bit of the budget, such as a small error in indirect cost calculation.
Some people develop their budget pages on a spreadsheet, which can help reduce effort and potential errors. My grant proposals are straightforward, and I can do them all in my head or on a note pad. So I don't bother with spreadsheets.
A Note on Planners
You probably have noticed that producing various sorts of "planners" has emerged as something of an industry. There are Day Planners, Night Planners, Load Planners, Day Timers, Franklin Planners, personal information managers, and software planners, among others. I don't keep track of them.
All are based on the idea that we can improve our effective use of time by planning ways to control the use of our time, not let time control us.
What makes them different from an ordinary calendar is that they can help us proactively plan our activities, rather than respond to events as they arise. Used correctly, planners can be helpful tools for some people.
A friend of mine invented her own planner many years ago, long before planners were sold on the open market. It was a loose-leaf binder divided into sections relevant for an active, effective homemaker. There was a calendar section, a goal section, a household expense section and so forth.
She was in the habit of setting aside a few minutes before dinner each evening to go through her planner, see what was accomplished, and make notes about the next day and the rest of the week. She had a developed contrivance that helped her keep track of things.
We can develop a similar planner to help us plan to produce competitive grant proposals. The commercial firms that produce planners usually have a set of forms to help people with project planning. One project planner has a series of pages.
There is a "Project Planning" page with spaces to write the project name, starting date and target completion date. There also are spaces for things that do not seem to relate to writing a large grant proposal.
The spaces to list resources may be helpful. We can write down the names and telephone numbers of people who will act as our resources, such as personnel who can check our budgets, and individuals who actually will help produce the document. Any notebook can help formalize and keep track of progress on a large grant proposal as a separate project.
Planners also contain "Project Tasks" pages. These can be helpful because they help us disassemble a large grant proposal into component tasks, each of which can be tracked separately. We might list the proposal approval and routing form, the boiler plate, the budget, the budget preaudit, the background and significance, the preliminary data, the experimental section, the literature references, getting letters of collaboration, the summary page and arranging for pre-submission reviews as separate jobs that make up an entire proposal. We could establish starting dates and target completion dates for each job, from the smallest to the largest.
I plan things along these lines. I use my computer to develop a sort of planning form, and to keep track of things as I go along. I also keep a folder for each job involved in the proposal. There is one for the budget, another for the biography section, and so on. As things come together I assemble the components, using a bigger folder for the whole thing. I use a similar system for my research manuscripts, but it doesn't take as many folders. |
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If you plan to develop substantial proposals, spreadsheets can really help.
Third, as with every aspect of a grant proposal, you need to make sure the individuals who are going to preaudit and type the final budget are available to help you when you need the help.
* Who is going to produce the final form of the proposal?
I put this section here to reemphasize the importance of planning proposal production.
Just imagine for a moment: the department support staff falls into an unanticipated personnel shortage. (Okay. Maybe it wasn't so unanticipated for those paying attention!)
One individual is off to hike the western Alps; another is attempting to build their own boat; the accounting clerk has just been buried in an impossibly complex project, responding to an academic emergency. And you need to get your entire proposal produced within the next five days.
Then you recall how slow things seemed in the office during the previous two weeks, before the hiker left for vacation. Ha! You grumble, it would have been easy to knock out a few pages of typing last week. But that doesn't help now, does it?
During this phase of planning to produce competitive grant proposals we really do assume the planner's role. We plan and prioritize the work we intend to do; we plan to produce the product; we plan to ensure that all the support that we need is available to help us when we need the help. We plan to take a little break just after the proposal is submitted.
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