(Continued from Part I)

2. “The science/project/idea should stand on its own.” Many a novelist and painter has died poor and bitter having clung to this belief their whole lives. When I tell people that my mother was a successful artist (successful meaning it provided her a living income), most people are amazed. I’m not. She quickly figured out the basics of how to “market” her work. This wasn’t rocket science – she did things like getting the right kind of paintings exposed to the right buyers (e.g. ones with money) at the right time. But, if she had just taken the attitude that “my art should stand on its own” and not done any marketing, I’d probably be stuck supporting her financially right now. The same goes for your project.

3. “Marketing is not an unbiased, independent science, and we want to avoid anything that isn’t rational and logical” – This is perhaps the biggest mistake in thinking you could make when it comes to grant writing. Let me make a bold claim: it is impossible for a reviewer to make an unbiased, independent assessment of your proposal. Let me prove it: nobody can accurately predict the future. Your proposal is about a project that hasn’t been done (or completed) yet. Because of that, nobody can know whether your project is going to be successful or not. When your proposal is weighed against a set of other proposals (for none of which the future can be known), how can your reviewers choose? Certainly not by logic alone, since logic can’t predict the future. Hence, your reviewer is going to rely on something else – intuition, interest, excitement, etc. In other words, the reviewer is relying on those “touchy feely” things, and in order to optimize your chances of success, you have to get him or her excited at an emotional level. This means you have to have a great project – and sell it really well!

You may still object to this notion. You may be someone who just dislikes the whole idea of going out and “marketing” yourself and your work. That is totally fine if you are content with always working for someone else who will do that “marketing” for you. But if you are or want to be an independent leader (e.g. a professor leading a lab, a business owner, etc), you will have to adopt this mindset – or struggle.

I’ll give you one action step that you can start taking immediately, and in the next post, follow up with more action steps.

This is the single most important step you can take: figure out what your “audience/customer” wants, and produce your project to fit what they want. This means emphasizing what your funding agency and reviewers think is important – not what you think is important.

This is really hard. We all think we’re “right.” Whether we are “right” or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that if you butt heads with reviewers, they will always win. They have all the power in the situation. As one mentor of mine has said, “you can be right or you can get paid.” Which is more important to you? You have to make a decision on that point. If you decide that getting paid (i.e. getting money for your project or idea) is more important, then you’ll have to drop the “I’m right” approach.

Instead, you’ll need to figure out how to fit what you want in the context of what your funding agency and reviewers want. This can usually be done using a “piggyback” approach. You satisfy the needs of the agency, and your own ideas come along for the ride. In this approach, you don’t emphasize your own “rightness,” instead, you simply point out that there is this interesting extra thing you plan to do that may give some additional payoff. That way, you transform your idea from a potential liability into a bonus.

I’ve realized that the person I talked to very much held the “I’m right” approach. Most of us have that – especially if we’ve risen to the highest levels of education and training. But at the same time, I know that the lab she works in has struggled for funding. I can say with confidence that if they could drop the “I’m right” approach, they would have far less struggles with funding.

To your success,

If you’d like to dive more deeply into the concepts here, to double your funding and halve your rejection rate, grab your free “Back Door To Funding” report.

Yesterday I was talking to someone I met on a bike ride about the grant proposal writing tips that I teach here and in my online grant writing courses. I mentioned that I help people get more grants and less rejections by applying the principles of “Marketing” to grantwriting.

Her response?

“Grant writing isn’t like marketing! You have to be a lot more technical in a grant.”

We went back and forth for a while on this, me making points, and her making counterpoints about the nature of science grants, and whether “marketing” was relevant or not.

I pointed out to her that when I mention “Marketing,” I’m not talking about anything underhanded – I’m talking about having a great “product” and then effectively conveying to people – like your reviewers – that it is great. A lot of us have a great project but don’t do a very good job of selling it. Others do a great job of selling but don’t have a good project. You have to have both to really be successful at “marketing”.

Even this didn’t convince her.

Finally, I gently mentioned my track record on funding, and suddenly she got quiet, so we moved onto another topic.

—

What this conversation tells me is that there is major resistance to the notion of “marketing,” especially when it comes to technical/science projects.

But have you ever asked yourself why someone like Lee Hood or Craig Venter (both very successful modern scientists involved in systems biology and genomics) are where they are?

They are smart scientists. But are they really smarter than you or I? I’ll bet they are not smarter scientists than we are.

But they probably are smarter when it comes to marketing their science. They know how to get other people onboard and supporting their ambitious plans. They could not have done the work alone – they both have relied on huge amounts of help from other people. This includes everything from financial backing to creative new approaches to problems, contributed by others.

Along the way, I’ve heard some of the following objections to “marketing”:
1. “It is underhanded” – this misperception is based on bad experiences with the worst kind of marketers, such as siding salesmen, telemarketers, etc. But think about this – have you ever bought a product from a Fortune 500 company? If so, in all likelihood it was because of their marketing efforts. The best marketing is “invisible” to the consumer – a far cry from the “pushy salesman” that you might think of when the word “marketing” is used (in the video, I use the example of a Siding salesman). Apple is a great exemplar of this – they do very good marketing, but in a low key way. Without Marketing, they wouldn’t exist as a company, to continue producing the great products that they do. Marketing is vital to their survival – as it is to yours if you want to be a leader who is responsible for a lab or for large projects.

(To be Continued in Part II. I will provide one key action step that you can start taking immediately to improve your funding chances).

—-

We all waste too much time on grant writing. If you want to stop wasting your time, double your funding, and halve your rejections, sign up for the free “Back Door To Funding” report.

Ok, so it turns out Google was saying my site was “infected by malware,” and traffic was dropping off.

But you didn’t bother to tell me (nobody did). Please – if you ever see a message like this on my site, let me know!

The problem appears to be fixed now. I’ve submitted the site for a re-review by Google to make sure.

I have a few new blog posts ready as soon as it clears Google.

Until then, I hope you are have a great weekend.

Morgan

Over at the Naturally Selected Blog I’ve been writing the occasional post about science careers. The most recent post: “Who are you to deserve grant funding?” garnered a few “skeptical” responses.

One writes:

A very plausible pep-talk, but what objective evidence is there that excellence and self confidence are the most important, or even significantly important, determinants in grant funding? I know a lot of anecdotal evidence to the contrary, including my own experience. I know, I know, the purpose of a motivational presentation is to energize and inspire, and toward this useful end, fairy tales may serve better than facts. I’m just saying.

This person missed the point of the post entirely (and he is also wrong about the self-confidence issue).

First: Self-confidence is critical in any human endeavor – especially one as complex as grant writing. All great accomplishments come from a sense of “confidence” that we can pull it off. If we don’t have that confidence, we don’t even get started. Fait accompli. Study the history of any great accomplishment, from flight to relativity to the lightbulb, and you will see that the originator had confidence in their ideas and their ability to implement them.

Second: this wasn’t about having self confidence per se – it is about knowing that you are doing worthwhile work, and being willing to show that in the proposal. The commenter says he knows of “anecdotal evidence to the contrary.” What, exactly, is that evidence? I’m just saying that if you don’t have the confidence in your ability to do great work, then your grant writing will reflect that. But I’m not saying that if you have confidence, you’ll automatically get the grant. It takes a lot more than that.

Third: There is this view of the world – particularly widespread in scientific circles – that we are just machines, part of a big universe that is like a clock winding down. In that view, everything is pre-destined. We are given certain talents and circumstances, and we have no control over what happens beyond those things we were given. That’s because a machine is deterministic, meaning that its ultimate trajectory is completely determined from the beginning. However, taking that point of view is both contradictory to many observable facts, and more importantly, if you act like that’s true, your life will go nowhere.

The poster’s comment reflects this deeply-held point of view. “It’s all fate” is the underlying message here. Belief has no role. The clock was wound so that you’ll either get the grant (or not) and there’s nothing you can do. It’s a “fairy tale” to believe that you can improve your odds, or do better.

But this whole universe-mind-as-a-machine is just another fairy tale!

Hence, if you adopt that view, you’ll permanently suffer from the view that life just happens to you, and there’s nothing you can do.

In the meantime, people who don’t suffer from that view will continue inventing, creating, and building.

And that’s what grants are ultimately about – getting the funds to create, build, invent, and test.

We all live within our own particular “fairy tales”. There is no objective reality that the human mind can grasp. Reality is far too big for our minds. We tell ourselves stories in an attempt to make sense out of the bigness of it all.

Which story are you going to tell yourself? I choose to tell myself stories that will help me accomplish more of what I want and less of what I don’t want.