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Grant writing:�Structures & practices

Bradley Dilger for CIGSA – November 29, 2022

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About me: Bradley Dilger

  • Professor of English & Director of Composition, Purdue University
  • PhD, U of Florida, 2003
  • he/his/Dilger
  • Studying writing, broadly speaking, especially transfer & collaboration
  • Home: The rivers of Florida (but I live in West Lafayette)
  • dilger@purdue.edu / dtext.org

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Today’s presentation

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What I hope this presentation WILL do

  • Encourage you to write grants which call on the content, writing processes, persuasive strategies, and community knowledge of your field.
  • Develop processes, templates, and checklists you can use with support from your colleagues.
  • Help you apply for grants earlier in your career than I did — taking advantage of opportunities for new faculty, etc.

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What this presentation WON’T do

  • Explain all the types of grants out there (business, foundation, academic, etc). (Use local resources for this.)
  • Explain all terminology relevant to grant writing (outcomes, abstract, letter of inquiry). (Learn this from a book.)
  • Offer a step-by-step process or templates for your future grant writing. (Ugh. Using either one is a bad idea.)

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What this presentation CAN NOT do

  • Teach you how to write grants which call on the content, writing processes, persuasive strategies, and community knowledge of your field. (I’m probably not in your field!)
  • Ensure you will win a grant. (Nobody can do this — though some claim they can.)

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Contents

The seven elements of grant writing

Finding grant opportunities

Reading RFPs

Planning OR One-pagers

Further reading

Discussion

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The seven elements of grant writing

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Seven elements of grant writing

  • Research: understand the grant and its contexts.
  • Networking: build the team necessary for success.
  • Evaluation: consider (and improve) your winning chances.
  • Drafting: outline, draft, revise, and edit the grant.
  • Reviewing: get feedback from relevant parties.
  • Submission: receive approval for, then submit grant.
  • Follow-up: communicate with stakeholders as needed.

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Seven elements: diagrammed

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Every grant

is different.

But you’ll rarely eliminate any of the seven elements completely.

  • Research
  • Networking
  • Evaluation
  • Drafting
  • Reviewing
  • Submission
  • Follow-up

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Comparing two grants across the seven elements

Internal start-up grant

External collaborative grant

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Research

  • Find grants which are a good fit for your work:
    • Ask colleagues about the grant programs you’re considering.
    • For the long term, you may need to fit your work to grants — that is, you may decide to develop capacity over time.
    • Consider seed grants first.
  • Learn more by reading beyond the grant RFP itself:
    • lists of winners from previous competitions;
    • sample proposals (provided by the funders or found on your own);
    • publications written by past winners;
    • other materials provided by the grantmakers.

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Research, continued

Once you think you’ve found a good fit…

  • Read the request for proposals carefully.
  • Read it again.
  • Read it many times. This is a must.
  • Take notes on the RFP.
  • Begin to build checklists from it. (More on that later.)
  • Contact the grant officer with questions you can’t answer.

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Networking

  • Build a professional network who can help you build capacity for grants and do the writing too.
  • Many grants explicitly require letters of support which discuss your capacity to do the work.
  • You’ll need contacts who can offer frank, constructive feedback for you — both commentary on your grant drafts and the research they support.

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Evaluation

  • Apply criteria used to evaluate the grant to your project.
  • Are you ready to do the work necessary to answer the grant program request?
  • How are you documenting the effectiveness of your work?
  • Are your outcomes SMART — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely?
  • What mechanisms do you have for self-evaluation of your work? How can you share the results?

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Drafting

  • Develop a schedule for drafting that allows for soliciting reviews, sharing in-progress work with supporters, etc.
  • Know if your writing addresses a specialist audience, or a more general audience — and write accordingly.
  • Follow the format and content requirements laid out in the RFP and documented in your checklists.
  • Respect the power of Anne Lamott’s “shitty first draft.”

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Drafting, continued

For larger projects, writing a one-page description of your project is an important first step:

  • Identify the most important parts of your project
  • Consider a problem/solution organizational scheme
  • Explain your methods and relevant literature succinctly
  • Sketch out implications or possibilities

Hearing how others see your short description is invaluable!

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Reviewing

  • Get feedback early and often — don’t hide from reviews!
  • Try to find people outside your team who can help, too.
  • Research the review process and use information provided about it to shape your work.
  • If grantmakers will review a draft, do whatever it takes to take advantage of this opportunity.

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Submission

  • Plan ahead if your department head, and/or others need to be involved in submitting a grant.
  • Budget time to get signatures from required authorities — including time for them to read your draft proposal.
  • Most submission processes are online. Begin early to ensure last-minute glitches won’t derail your work.

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Follow-up

  • Plan ahead if grantmakers expect interim or final reports, mentions in publications, etc — don’t ruin your chances for repeat funding!
  • Know that winning a grant drops you right back into the cycle — evaluation, networking, etc.
  • Communicate with grantmakers if changes to your project are needed. Reasonable requests are often granted.

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Finding grant opportunities

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A few key terms

  • Early career usually means before tenure, but there can be even tighter requirements (three years).
  • Limited submission grants allow for a certain number of applicants from a given institution.
  • Pre-award and post-award offices establish and help manage budgets and other regulatory duties.
  • Foundation grants come from private sources.

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PIVOT help

One of the best ways to find opportunities

Use the built in keywords

Always use advanced search

Set up email alerts

Purdue link

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Hopkins funding list

https://research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-opportunities/

Early career and other divided into filterable spreadsheet

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Reading RFPs

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Read the RFP!

Over and over again.

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RFPs must be read actively and extensively annotated.

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Reading RFPs requires two simultaneous movements:

Actively looking�for the following:

  1. Funder priorities
  2. Deadlines
  3. Instructions
  4. Proposal components
  5. Resources
  6. Criteria
  7. People
  8. Cross-references
  9. Uncertainties
  10. Team strengths & weaknesses

Building supporting documents:

  1. Calendars
  2. To-do lists
  3. Lists of further reading
  4. Evaluation instruments
  5. Questions for your team
  6. Questions for grant officer

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Do this work over time — NOT all at once.

Read recursively and repeatedly.

Spread out the work over time.

Ask multiple people to read.

Complete multiple passes through the RFP to identify important content and to build supporting documents.

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Let’s break each of these down.

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Read for the following (1/3)

  1. Funder priorities: values, goals, objectives that are congruent with your organization
  2. Deadlines: add to your schedule — planning in a manner that provides extra time for major milestones as needed — for both the proposal and post-award (e.g. reports)
  3. Instructions: tasks you need to perform, with an eye to sequencing (what should be done first?)
  4. Proposal components: documents which are part of your application — some you create, some you request from others

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Read for the following (2/3)

  • Resources: help offered by the funder (consultation, sample documents, etc.) — both internal and external to the RFP itself
  • Criteria: guidance about writing a winning proposal (delivered explicitly, such as with rubrics, but also implicitly)
  • People: important individuals working for the funder, such as program officers, and others external to the funder who may be able to help

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Read for the following (3/3)

  • Cross-references: documents, other organizations, or other programs to investigate, again both explicit and implicitly stated
  • Uncertainties: inconsistencies in the RFP, contradictions between documents, or ambiguities that need resolution — through conversation with your team or contact with the funder
  • Team strengths and weaknesses: congruent with evaluation, is team capacity reflected in the RFP? Areas to feature in the proposal or develop in the future.

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Create supporting documents (1/2)

  • Calendars: mark funder milestones; create your own that provide time for all elements of the grant writing process
  • To-do lists: break down research, drafting, and other work and assign across your team
  • Lists of further reading: identify texts to be reviewed on the short and long term, specific to the grant and not

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Create supporting documents (2/2)

  • Evaluation instruments: rubrics or similar documents you and reviewers can use to read and comment on work in progress
  • Questions for your team: when comparing notes, identify differences of opinion to resolve through internal conversation
  • Questions for program officer: ambiguities or other issues where guidance is appropriate — delivered in an efficient manner (don’t pepper the PO with a question a day)

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Example — PGSG Grants

PGSG Grants, specifically the travel grant. Printable version

Criteria for Description of Research

  • Description can be understood by a universal audience and is free of subject jargon.
  • Description of research is brief yet contains all relevant information.
  • Research methods are briefly discussed.
  • Purpose of the research is clearly stated.
  • The innovative nature of the presented work, and its larger impact on the field, is briefly described.

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Grant lifecycles & grant planning

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The grant lifecycle, from Singapore Management U

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Think long term

  1. Start small. Grants beget grants!
  2. Look for seed and internal grants.
  3. Seek roles on grant-funded projects which offer you relevant skills, experience, and knowledge.
  4. Consider opportunities which are only available to new faculty (early career fellowships).
  5. Look to professional organizations for grants and grant writing assistance.

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Make and use checklists

  • Make checklists based on your careful reads of the RFP and other materials.
  • List documents and proposal elements you’ll produce (budget, narrative, your CV, letters of support, etc).
  • Pay attention to guidance for writing well-received proposals (specific content to include or address).
  • Make your own even if they are provided.
  • Actually use the checklists! Don’t pretend.

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Make and use calendars

  • Start early. Allow time for revision, reviews, and rest.
  • Include the milestones noted in the RFP.
  • Address all seven elements in your planning.
  • Allow time for others to review your work and to complete essential tasks (writing support letters, central budgeting).
  • Add time for unexpected problems.
  • Be ready to say, “Wait until next year” if you can’t create a workable schedule this year.

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Be methodical

  • Back up your grant work (and your research too!) using the 3, 2, 1 method — three copies, two media, one offsite.
  • Develop conventions for naming files so you submit the right versions and are able to reuse them from year to year.
  • Work with your grant office to develop an approach to moving from smaller grants to larger funding streams.

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Budget carefully

  • Use spreadsheets to plan your grant.
  • Build relationships with business offices.
  • Follow rules for spending funds.
  • Track expenses as you go.
  • Learn about shared or matching costs (your team contributes $$$) and indirect costs (your institution takes a portion of the award).

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Other best practices

  1. Ask program officers and grant administrators questions you can’t answer — they want to read good proposals!
  2. Pay special attention to: (a) summaries or abstracts;�(b) budgets (and budget justifications if required).
  3. Never underestimate the value of a review from an honest, constructive reader.
  4. Take follow-up seriously — allow time for it and use it to make your work better on the long term.

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One-pagers

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Lots of different “one pagers”

  1. Abstract (narrative)
  2. Abstract (structured)
  3. Brief history
  4. Cover letter
  5. Executive summary
  6. Grant application
  7. Letter of inquiry
  8. Mission & goals
  9. Problem statement
  10. Project description
  11. Résumé (or biosketch-style CV)

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Dilger’s general rules for differentiating 1-pagers

  • Summary: Represents the most important parts of the whole
  • Executive summary: For decision-makers, summarizing consequences for the organization, such as financial impact
  • Abstract: Summary that tries to represent every section of the whole
  • Structured abstract: Summary that duplicates the structure of the whole, summarizing each one, often in discrete paragraphs
  • Cover letter or email: Accompanies, introduces, and transmits a grant application package
  • Letter of inquiry: A brief grant application that is followed by a more extensive proposal

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Comparing executive summaries & abstracts

Executive summary

Abstract

Audience:

Decision-makers in an organization

Anyone who might be reading a given document, but usually its principal audience

Purpose:

Efficient and effective decision-making

Provide summary of entire document to help readers be efficient

Organization:

Background, problem, solution, impact, recommendation

Varies; usually follows document, but can be one long paragraph or several short ones

Approach:

Uses descriptive subheads, lists, and other organizers

Varies; can be a single paragraph, or divided into sections

Length:

Less than 3pp, usually 2pp

Varies; usually 200± words, but structured abstracts can be 500±

Essential content:

Address financial and/or structural issues related to proposal

Summarizes entire document

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Follow provided guidelines,�or imitate examples

And remember that shorter�is always much more difficult.

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NIH Specific Aims

  1. Hook
  2. Known info
  3. Gap in knowledge
  4. Critical need
  5. Long-term goal
  6. Proposal objective
  7. Rationale
  8. Hypothesis
  9. Payoff

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Crow NIHSA example (1/2; see all of it)

The increased use of technology and multimodal writing in the humanities, greater participation of multilingual and multicultural students in U.S. universities, and economic and political pressure on humanities programs—demands new approaches to research, teaching, and mentoring in the field of writing studies. Technology is creating new potentials for translingual and transcultural global communication, particularly as and the increasingly diverse makeup of students in our universities is pressuring traditional modes of inquiry. At the same time, networked and digital media are influencing writing profoundly, sometimes in unexpected ways. It is unclear how developing writers negotiate these new modes and approaches to humanistic inquiry across linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Hook Known Information Gap in Knowledge Critical Need

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Crow NIHSA example (2/2; see all of it)

In preparing a new generation of writers, critical thinkers, and scholars, we need to understand how developing writers create arguments, engage critically with journalistic and scholarly sources, and work to communicate the increasing amounts of information that their future disciplines and careers require. We also need an infrastructure by which writing studies scholars in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences can work together to answer these critical questions.

Hook Known Information Gap in Knowledge Critical Need

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Use the format that works for you

The increased use of technology and multimodal writing in the humanities, greater participation of multilingual and multicultural students in U.S. universities, and economic and political pressure on humanities programs—demands new approaches to research, teaching, and mentoring in the field of writing studies. Technology is creating new potentials for translingual and transcultural global communication, particularly as and the increasingly diverse makeup of students in our universities is pressuring traditional modes of inquiry. At the same time, networked and digital media are influencing writing profoundly, sometimes in unexpected ways. It is unclear how developing writers negotiate these new modes and approaches to humanistic inquiry across linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In preparing a new generation of writers, critical thinkers, and scholars, we need to understand how developing writers create arguments, engage critically with journalistic and scholarly sources, and work to communicate the increasing amounts of information that their future disciplines and careers require. We also need an infrastructure by which writing studies scholars in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences can work together to answer these critical questions.

Element

Actual Text (using a table instead of color)

Hook

Multilingual and multicultural writers are becoming more common in both educational and commercial contexts of writing.

Known info

This growth is changing how writing works, while pressuring existing methods for studying and teaching writing.

Gap in knowledge

Even so, tools for studying writing lag behind other areas of studies in the digital humanities. To date, data-driven studies of writing have not successfully integrated the power of large-scale quantitative methods such as corpus linguistics with quantitative approaches that highlight individuals’ writing choices and acknowledge the complexities of contexts. The sites of writing scholarship focus on higher education, especially research universities, too often neglecting important contexts such as community colleges, and leaving out under-represented minorities.

Critical need

Researchers need digital tools and approaches to collaboration which support not only the mixed-methods study of writing but diversify research sites and provide systematic ways to acknowledge the influence of writing contexts.

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Fill in the blank: AIMS or Stanford questions

Fill in the table above… then copy out the text and edit to create coherent prose.

  • Our proposal is creative and original because…
  • Our contribution is transformative because…
  • We advance the field by…
  • The educational goal is…
  • The project benefits our organization by…
  • The project benefits society by…

Fill in the “mad libs,” then delete some of the signal phrases, say the same thing in different ways, and/or invert sentences to create variation.

Hook

Known info

Gap in knowledge

Critical need

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Further reading

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Two grant specific books

O’Neal-McElrath et al, Winning Grants Step by Step

Karsh & Fox, The Only Grant Writing Book You’ll Ever Need

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Books about writing

  • Style manual for your professional organization
  • Williams, Colomb, &/or Bizup, Style: Lessons in Clarity & Grace
  • A discipline-specific book, like Economical Writing
  • Redish, Letting Go of the Words
  • Pressfield, Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh•t

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Questions?

General or specific

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Thank you

I’m happy to talk more�with you — just ask.

Bradley Dilger�dilger@purdue.edu�309–259–0328