Dear Colleagues,
Starting this month, Contracts and Grants will begin featuring a blog series, ANR ADVISE$, aimed at sharing effective grant-writing practices and perspectives across the organization.
This first blog posting highlights advice from Dr. Jeremy James.
Dr. James joined ANR in 2012 as the Director, Sierra Foothill Research & Extension Center (SFREC). In this role, Dr. James has successfully conducted a number of federally funded projects related to rangeland management. We recently inquired with Dr. James to find out how and why he has had such grant writing success.
"In my experience, there are a couple of lessons I have learned around grant writing. Below I outline my top 5 points that seem to be useful to me:
1. No two proposal development processes are the same. Understanding early on everything you can about the program can be really helpful, including why the program exists, what they have recently funded, how the review process is handled, as well as program budgets over the last few years.
2. Just like everything else, relationships are key. Usually calls for proposals have very short time windows giving you almost no time to assemble a team. Having an established network of colleagues that could mobilize quickly around an opportunity can be helpful.
3. Researching potential calls for proposal ahead of time can be useful. Many programs put out a regular annual call for proposals. If you find one that fits your research interests you can began to work on solidifying ideas and collaborations way ahead of the call, sometimes years ahead if preliminary data are required or helpful.
4. Being able to stylize your most important ideas is helpful. Often the research ideas we propose to pursue in a research proposal are not that easy to describe. If you can stylize your idea or main concepts in a sophisticated way it could really help reviewers understand the value of what you hope to do.
5. Remembering it is not about you, it is about them. Here the “them” refers to the funding program and the proposal reviewers. While as researchers we bring the expertise to funding agencies, the proposals are there to address funding agency needs and goals and the panel reviewers help to make sure the agencies are best meeting their goals. Structuring your proposal with this in mind can help connect what you offer to the program."
We greatly appreciate Dr. James sharing these important five points on planning and developing a successful grant proposal.
Thank you.
Kathleen Nolan, Director, ANR Office of Contracts & Grants (OCG)