So I have it on reasonable authority that the pay line at the NSF/MCB is hovering at around the 10% mark (May, 2013). This is in contrast to their usual pay line, closer to high teens.

In a few areas at NIH, the paylines have dipped to around 6%.

Is it time for NIH and NSF to implement a pre-proposal mechanism (like the DOE already uses)?

When pay lines are so low, it is a big waste of time for everyone involved to write and review these 12-15 page proposals, 9 out of 10 of which are going to go without funding.  We could all be spending our time in better ways.

What are your suggestions for making this process more efficient?  Let’s discuss it in the comments.

For many of us, the getting of grants is the one thing expected of us in order to get tenured, promoted, and recognized.

Yet this function that is at the very heart of expectations for us, is one for which:

• The odds of success are remote.  Not quite as remote as being struck by lightning, but almost.
• The actual training provided in this vital skill is minimal. We’re expected to be like “concert pianists” in grant writing, and somehow a few occasional seminars here and there are supposed to be enough for this.  Could you learn to play concert piano by going to a few half-day seminars per year? The notion is entirely silly that a deep skill like playing piano can be gained through a few occasional seminars.  Writing great grants is no less complex than playing great piano.

In this post, I’ll tell you how I discovered exactly what my administrators wanted from me (and it wasn’t what I thought I was hired for), why this viewpoint has become endemic in the academic culture, and five things you can do about it.

Some crazy deans and chairs (fortunately, not all of them are crazy…)

I’ve heard more than once that certain chairpersons think that proficiency at getting grants is a sign of scientific merit, and that if you can’t get grants, you obviously don’t have any merit.  They somehow seem to think that, even if you haven’t had much training, you should simply figure it out by osmosis, and if your brain is not “osmotic” enough, you are clearly deficient and shouldn’t be hired or tenured.

Worse still, the people who suffer the most from this situation are women, minorities, and those at smaller universities with less support.  This is not universal – certainly I’ve met some males at large universities who suffer from this as well.  But when the odds of funding are so low right now that what differentiates a funded grant from an unfunded proposal can often be a minor “little” thing like whether the name of the PI is Susan versus Steve.

Do the impossible!

I know of more than one small university that expects its faculty to get just as many grants funded as for the big universities – often while teaching a full load of three or more courses per year.  With no resources, no support, no network of colleagues, nothing but sheer will, grit, and determination.

Grit and determination do carry you far in life. But they don’t make up for a complete lack of support, of mentoring, of an attitude that faculty can be forever squeezed to produce more with less that seems to plague most university administrations.

Squeezing a dry sponge

I like the analogy of the sponge that’s full of water. You can squeeze that sponge many times, each time getting a few more drops of water out.  But eventually there’s no more water – no matter how hard you squeeze.

Many of us are at that point now (or beyond it). We’ve been squeezed dry. We have nothing left.  We just can’t keep producing more with less, no matter how much pressure is applied by thirsty administrators.

When I was faculty at a “brand name” university, the dean once came before our faculty, explaining that the university hospital was bleeding money from unpaid bills. He then went on to explain that we faculty – who were bringing in lots of grants – were the “bright spot” because we helped balance the books.

I’m not here to do science. I’m here to raise funds.

I had an “aha” moment at that meeting.  I realized that from their perspective, I wasn’t really there to do science. I was there to raise funds that could be used for stuff like balancing the books on unpaid hospital bills.

That’s not all bad – it was a relationship of mutual convenience. They gave me a place to work and to do science, and I brought them in (lots) of money.

A strictly one-sided relationship

But the problem is, they didn’t see it as a two-sided relationship.  No, to them it was strictly unilateral.  I was bringing in $1M/year in grants, and my lab was an old, 1,200 sq ft, dilapidated and cockroach infested space that didn’t even have a window I could look out of. For the ~$430,000 worth of overhead money I was bringing in each year, they could have done a little better than that. But they didn’t.  They felt that they could get away without doing that. Stupid.

I had the last laugh when I resigned unexpectedly and took all that overhead with me.

It became clear to me that they were only looking out for one thing: how could they get me to bring in more money, without any additional investment in me or my lab’s happiness or well being?

After I resigned my tenured job and changed universities, I saw exactly that same attitude play out.  The first year I was there, I brought in over $1M in grant funding (and, again, ~$400k in overhead).  In return, I had 800 sq ft of office space, and that’s it.  There were promises of building me a lab – but after two years it hadn’t materialized.  I was expected to bring in more grants with almost no startup funds, with very little space, ancient/outdated computer equipment, restrictions on new equipment purchase, and a very weighty bureaucracy.

The one-sidedness was not unique to the university I had left. It’s endemic.

I’m not trying to play a victim here. I’m not unique or being singled out. I’m not the only faculty at these two universities who was treated this way. It is the norm. I talk to clients all the time going through the same kind of bullshit.  They are expected to “make do” with ancient equipment, dilapidated (or absent) space, glacial bureaucracy, and no mentoring.

As a result, many universities have become God-awfully dysfunctional places, where the expectations are extremely high and the support and training is extremely low.

Even weirder, I’ve talked to some faculty who are perfectly content with the situation.  They will offer up excuses for their universities, as if this is the best the university could do.  Is this the victim making excuses for the perpetrator?

It is not the best a university can do.  There’s been plenty of academic study on what differentiates positive, growing, successful organizations from negative, dysfunctional, and failing organizations (or soon-to-fail organizations).  A lot of it is the culture.

Is the culture supportive? 

Does it see the relationship as a two-sided one of mutual support and interest, or as a one-sided affair of “let me squeeze you evermore until there’s nothing left?”

Is it a culture of investing in employee development and happiness, so that the employees bring a great attitude and ever improving skills to the job, or is it a culture that expects people to “go it alone?”

It is telling. I have quite a few clients who pay me out of their own pockets for their skills development in grant writing.  It is almost a crime that their universities aren’t paying for this kind of skills development.  This development leads to two essential things: 1) improved abilities to bring in grants, which will pay the university back manyfold; and 2) improved happiness and career satisfaction, which improves the functioning of the entire organization.

Yet I’ve heard about many administrators who say something like, “I don’t have the money for that!” or “You can figure it out on your own, you don’t need to pay for that!”

Have these administrators forgotten their basic math? Have they never heard of “return on investment?”  A single extra R01 will bring ~$300-500k of overhead to a university.  That’s a mighty big return. But universities think they can do that by just a carrot-and-stick approach – reward and punishment. Without training. Without development. Without investment.

That’s just one small example of the much larger problem: an attitude of squeezing blood from stones (as one of my colleagues frequently says).

It’s time for faculty to call this BS for what it is. It’s time for faculty to push back. It’s time for faculty to tell administrators that they’re full of crap when they ask for more, without support.

One lone voice in the wilderness isn’t going to make any difference. But lots of voices, raised in a chorus against the insanity, will create momentum, and will create change.

Here are some ideas:

1. When you’re asked to do more things without more resources or pay, simply respond by asking: “ok, sure, but what do you want me to drop, since I’m already overloaded?” Do this with no hesitation in your voice, do this with firmness of will. Otherwise you might get drawn into a debate about it, and that’s the last thing you want.
2. When you’re asked to get grants without support, resources, teaching release, or space, tell them: sorry – that’s a waste of time, until I have proper support to make it happen. Reviewers will likely see through the charade, anyway. Let’s not waste time on something that has no better odds than a lottery. If you want me to write grants, then invest in the support, resources, and space that it takes to do so.
3. Join together with your colleagues in standing up against the madness. Machiavellian administrators understand that the best approach to get more with less is to divide and conquer – pitting one faculty against the next – creating an environment of fear and paranoia so that nobody will stand together. Don’t fall for that. Your colleagues are in the same boat, and you have more to gain by working together than you have to gain by being paranoid.
4. Refuse to work all the time (more than 50 hours per week!) Somehow, many faculty have gotten the idea that working all the time will offset the madness. But this kind of martyrdom is silly. Multiple studies have proven that if you work too much and take too few breaks, you become far less productive, far less clear, and way more likely to suffer from health and/or mental problems.
5. Understand that if you do work all the time and/or fall prey to the fear, you will be unable to gain clarity. Lack of clarity is the #1 problem that every single one of my grant writing clients face. To get clarity, you must be relaxed, rested, and in the flow. Most universities are set up for the opposite of relaxed flow. But don’t let them deceive you. It is the only way to true success.

We’ve gotten ourselves in a bind, and just putting the blinders on isn’t going to get us out of it.  If nothing else, I do hope that this message will stir some ideas, some inspiration to not accept the status quo. The current status quo sucks. We all deserve far better.

Morgan Giddings, PhD

Former associate professor, UNC Chapel Hill

Former professor, Boise State University

Bestselling author, Four Steps to Funding

This video was shot at a seminar I gave for my high-end grant writing students last spring. It walks you through the 3 things you MUST HAVE to get your grant funded. Your “Trifecta”.

And if you don’t get these 3 things in order, then you might just end up in the Cycle of Doom. I go over what this is, and how to break out if you find yourself there.

Enjoy!

If you’ve ever been camping at one of those RV park places, you’ve probably experienced the pay shower.  In order to get hot water to flow (or any water), you have to periodically feed in quarters.

Now here’s the thing. Say you only have two quarters. And, say that each quarter only buys you 2 minutes of water.

After your first dose of precious hot water runs out, you fumble around, all lathered up, for your second quarter… by the time you get it into the slot, you’ve got goose bumps building from the cold.  (Why would they bother heating the bathrooms?)

With only two minutes left, you hurry to get your hair washed.  But you’re not quite fast enough… when the clock ticks off the final 119th second, and the water goes off.. your hair isn’t quite rinsed.

Now you’re cold, lathered, and out of water.  After toweling off, you go over to the sink (that has only cold water) and try to fit your head under the tap to get the rest of the soap out of your hair.

Just then, a family walks in, and one of the kids says: what’s that lady doing with her head in the sink?

Never again, you swear. You stop trying to jam your head under the tap (which didn’t really fit, anyway), and go looking for a few quarters to finish your shower.

You walk across the campground to your vehicle, dig through your stuff, and locate a few dollars.  You head over to the campground office, and after giving the 16 year old clerk a few choice words about their oh-so-stingy-showers, you get some more quarters and head back to the shower room.

20 minutes later, you’ve finally had a complete shower, you’re re-dressed, and ready to start your day for real.

“What a waste of time and energy that was!” you think to yourself, “I could have been out enjoying myself on the trails an hour ago if it weren’t for the stupid quarter-eating-shower!

That’s exactly what’s happening with research funding

We go through a very similar rigamarole just to do our research.  In this metaphor, “the shower” is the funding that flows to maintain our research.

The “quarters” we plug into the slot to keep the funding flowing are the grant proposals that we write.

Yet… there’s one important distinction from the coin-operated-shower in the story above.  When it comes to grant funding, the quarter-taking shower machine is broken. It only turns on the shower (i.e. funding) for about 1 in 8 of the quarters that you put into it.

You can up the odds a bit through careful quarter selection, and by developing the perfect quarter-insertion-technique (with just a little lilt to your wrist as you drop it in to give it the perfect spin)… but no matter how hard you try, you can’t get it above about 1 in 3 odds…

Does it sound ridiculous? It is. Nobody would put up with a shower machine that operates like that.  They’d either complain to management and ask for a refund, or just never come back again.

Can you imagine going to your PhD alma matter and asking them for a refund? “Hey, you set me up for a defective career! I want my tuition money back!”

Maybe I should try that.  Watch out Wisconsin, here I come!

Ok, if you’re not going to ask for a tuition refund, then what?

I got a semi-panic’d email recently from a group that has been lobbying for better US federal funding for the sciences. They’re freaked about budget sequestration.  Budget sequestration is what will happen here if congress and the president don’t agree on a plan for resolving looming “automatic cuts.”

It would mean a substantial drop in federal funding for the sciences next year.

The researchers on that list were discussing how things are already desperate, and this will just make it so much worse.

I empathize with that view.

But I fundamentally disagree with the complaining

As our quarter-eating shower machine illustrated, funding has become a very silly game.  You can get better at it, but even then it is a stupendous waste of time.

Yet, I believe it’s all part of a process that can have a positive outcome… but only if we look at it appropriately.

How do humans get inspired to create anything new? (Those creative acts being the source of all human progress…)

More often than not, the inspiration comes from a challenge.

In the book I’m writing on creativity, I talk about the story of the Wright brothers. They had tons of challenges building the first successful, powered airplane.  One of them ended up in the hospital. They crashed many planes. But it was those challenges that ultimately helped them achieve flight.

What if, after one of their many crashes, they’d just looked at the situation and said, “It’s hopeless! We’ll never fly!”

Someone else would have eventually figured it out, and we’d have never heard of Orville and Wilbur Wright.

The risk in the current problematic funding situation is making the very same mistake.  We can look at the ridiculousness of it all, and bemoan how bad it is, thinking that it’s all over.  We can get depressed and just try to get by, watching things slowly get worse and worse over time until it becomes unbearable.

Or, we can do what all creators of great inventions and ideas have done throughout time.  We can look at the present challenge as a helpful definition of what it is that we don’t want, in order to bring further clarity to what we do want so that we can start creating that.

The system we have wasn’t planned intentionally. It just happened as a fairly random evolution of the question “how do we fund research?”  So we ended up with an odd quirk of evolution, a “flying buffalope” that is not long for this world.  That’s where we are… the only question we should be asking is: “what do we do next?”

The real danger is sticking with the status quo.  The status quo isn’t working. The plugging-quarters-into-the-machine model does not work. At least not without adequate safeguards that the water isn’t going to run out every few minutes (or years on the scale of grants).

So, the present frustration should be a rallying cry, a defining moment, that helps us all realize that there’s something better out there.

We just have to understand that the present challenges are part of a process of defining what doesn’t work on the evolutionary scheme of research funding, so that we can better figure out what does work!

I’ll share some of my own ideas in future blog posts – but ultimately, this needs to be a community effort.

The NIH seems to be thinking along the same lines, with it’s new “sustainable research” initiative.

Other researchers have proposed the innovative idea of “research bonds” to help address our funding woes.

From the undesired situation, new solutions are arising. More will come over the next few years, because the situation we have isn’t tolerable for the long-term.

So, the only thing we have to do as individuals is to a) survive for long enough that we can benefit from the new solutions, and b) be a part of suggesting and creating those new solutions, rather than being stuck in the mire of day-to-day existence.

On the “survive long enough” front, I have a few suggestions:

1. Get better at grant writing.  If our situation is one where “the fittest survive,” (until we do figure out a better way), then if you want to survive, you need to be one of the fittest.  The fittest in any evolutionary tableau are those that make most efficient use of the resources available. There are plenty of other resources on this blog for becoming more fit at grant writing, including my newsletter.
2. Be entrepreneurial.  A key defining point for entrepreneurs is that they don’t sit around waiting for opportunity to drop in their laps. Instead, they’re on a continual search for how to create opportunity!  Those that can do this in the current environment will survive far better than those who wait for opportunity to fall from the sky.
3. Set a good example. If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that academic culture has become a very dysfunctional place. Most people think that the way to survive is by working all the time with no balance in life, spewing out an endless stream of “spam” grant proposals, with no clarity of thinking and no quality of writing.  However, if you come along, and show your colleagues that it is possible to have balance in your life, to do quality work, and to get a reasonable amount of funding to support your research… that’s the way you’re going to change the system.  People will take notice, and will ask you “how do you do it??”  This is a far more effective way of changing the system than just trying to combat it.

Oh yeah, and one more: hang in there. It may get worse before it gets better, but it always does get better as long as there are people who desire that outcome.  Be a part of the group that looks forward to and stewards us into a future of a better way to support research, instead of being a part of the problem.

There is a huge misconception that most grant writers have.  You may think you’re talking to another rational adult in your grant, but you’re not. You’re actually talking to the “lizard brain.”  Misunderstanding this leads to rejections, miscommunications, and frustrations.   Check out the video to see why that is and what to do.

If you want more help understanding the layers of the brain, and how to communicate to each one in your grant, register for the Grant Dynamo 2.0 course, here.

So I froze my buns off to bring a new video to you, and it has some killer content that you need to see if you’re writing grants.

I didn’t want to bring you a plain old boring video. Nope. It would go against my advice for your grants. It would go against what I stand for.

Now I admit. I’ve screwed that up in the past. I’ve on occasion let things go on for too long and be a bit boring. But you better believe it that when I write a grant proposal, I’m editing it over and over again to make sure that it is crisp, clear, compelling, and snappy.

 Why crisp, clear and compelling?

That’s what I did for this video, too. It’s such an important message that I wanted to maximize the chances that you will watch it, and then share it with your friends & colleagues.

So, I went out on a cold, rainy, 40F day, in my kayak, getting flipped multiple times with my head dunked under the 45F water… so that we could get some compelling footage for the film. After 25 minutes I could barely operate my hands, and had to quit. It took me hours and a warm bath to heat up again… but it was worth it.

See, of that 25 minutes of footage, only ~30 seconds was used in the video. That’s all it needed.

About your grants…

That holds another learning lesson for your grant writing. Many people feel compelled to “tell the whole story” of the project, and it ends up being a long and rather tedious read. When your reviewer tunes out, you’re done for.

I just read yesterday that Jerry Seinfeld, arguably the world’s best comedian, will work for a month or more to develop only two minutes of really good live content.

Really… do what Jerry does… do what I did in this film… edit mercilessly until only the most compelling core of your story remains in your grant.

Be a harsh editor, who cuts out all the unnecessary fat, and leaves in only the core, the juicy stuff…

You may wonder, what is the juicy stuff?

The good news is that I’ve been working on a formula for this, and I share it with you in the very same video I mentioned above! It’s called, affectionately, the “Objection Obliterator” – and I even have a worksheet to help you implement it.

Once you start thinking in terms of “how do I handle deep, CORE objections to my proposal,” it clarifies your thinking about which facts you need to include, and which you can leave out.

This solves the problem of overly dense, hard to read proposals that turn off the reviewer.

The video is only going to be up for 14 days… so check it out.

Cheers!

ps – this objection obliterator is brand new, I’ve not shared it before, and it’s powerful…

Grants are now officially “hyper-competitive(TM).”

I’ve seen more than one great grant not quite make the cut, because there were even better grants in the pool for that round.

Dealing with this requires a shift in thinking. In the past I’ve focused exclusively on “quality” of proposal, but the reality is changing. You now need quality and quantity.

Don’t mistake me. Quantity and quality in grants are often opposed. If you go after too much quantity, your quality will suffer, and so will your odds of funding.

The only way you can make this work is by first developing your quality grant writing skills, and only then, shifting over to speed it up.

I’ve seen plenty of people try to do it the other way around, and all they do is write proposals, one after another, with nearly all of them rejected. What a sad waste of time. There is a better way.

I’ve shown that this works in practice. A grant I wrote over a 1-week span, for a highly-competitive RC2 project, was funded for $1.6M. However, word of caution: by the time I wrote that, I’d already written four successful R01′s, each of which had been funded on the first round of submission. I had the “quality” thing down to an art form. So all I had to do was to speed it up.

I’m going to give a few pointers on how to write a grant quickly, but first, develop your quality grant writing skills, or none of this matters.

Speedwriting tips:

1. Prepare in advance. When I did my speed-written proposal, I’d already talked to the program officer twice, and I’d gone through multiple iterations writing the specific aims page.

2. Get clear. If you’re going to attempt this, you must have total clarity about your project, before you sit down to write it. If you’re not entirely clear, if you don’t have a solid specific aims or project summary, then the rest of the writing you do is likely for naught. You’ll just wander around, and the writing will be like a bowl of spaghetti, but not as tasty.

3. Turn off the critic. When I’m speed-writing, I get into a “writing trance.” This is a mode where I’m not editing at all. I’m just letting the ideas flow, and getting them on the page as fast as possible. Editing comes later. Most of the scientists I work with struggle with this, probably because the word “trance” is so alien to scientific thinking. Yet, it works. Embrace the trance. Tune out the mental critic, and tune into the mental muse.

4. Have your team built, before writing. If you’re writing for a big grant like an R01, you must have a strong team lined up. If your budget justification is full of TBNs (to be named), you’re going to be toast. Line up a solid team well in advance of writing. That was certainly true for my RC2.

5. Become a better grant writer. No, you’re not going to do that by staring at your “pink sheets” (code word for NIH reviews). Those reviews tell you nothing that you need to know about how to write a better grant. I found out the hard way, with 7 rejections during a short span of two years when I’d just started my career (four of those as PI). The reviews didn’t help at all. It was only by finding a hyper-critical mentor that I got better… much better… at writing good grants.

So, that’s the core of speedwriting.

If you want more help implementing these steps, then make sure that you sign up for my newsletter list, because I give my subscribers all sorts of extra advice, strategies, and tactics to use in their grant writing. I show them the Better Way in Grant Writing. Just use that little form on the upper-right of this site (below my picture), and watch your inbox for some cool extras when you sign up.

A client asked me whether she should spend the time writing for a very small grant.

My answer is all about how to generate momentum in your grant efforts.

Watch the video to find out more.

For years I’ve been teaching that grants aren’t a lottery. I’ve been teaching that if you write a sufficiently good grant, you can skew the odds enough in your favor to have a good chance of success. I’ve taught that because I’ve seen some people use the “grants as a lottery” attitude as a motivator to write a whole bunch of not-well-planned grants, submitting them almost willy nilly to “improve the odds.” This clogs the system, and rarely improves the odds much. At one extreme, I know of a person who submitted 29 proposals to get only one funded. That’s in no way, shape, or form a sustainable practice. Imagine if everyone did that? Scary.

I’ve always said there is some randomness. But a few incidents happen that now force me to eat a bit of crow and admit that it’s becoming more uncontrollable.

I worked with a client, let’s call her “Jane” for the sake of privacy. She wrote one of the best postdoc fellowships I’ve seen in years. It wasn’t just me that thought that, but a whole panel of professors who looked at it agreed that it was good.

It just came back “unscored.” For those unfamiliar with the NIH system, that means that the review panel didn’t even discuss it at their meeting, because they didn’t think that it was in the most competitive group.

Proposals are given preliminary scores of 1-9 (1 is best) on parameters of Investigator, Environment, Significance, Innovation, and Approach. Her preliminary scores on these parameters mostly ranged from 1-3, with a few 4′s and 5′s. The average was around 2.5. A pretty good score by all rights. It was shocking that this wasn’t even discussed, and if it had been, the score would have been better; one of the reviewers clearly hadn’t read it that well, and made several incorrect statements. They likely would have been corrected in a study section discussion.

This is a case of randomness affecting what should have been a discussed and scored proposal (if not funded). I’ve been seeing more and more of those cases, though this has been the most extreme case to date.

In other words, with more and more good proposals, randomness is playing a bigger factor. That’s why I have to eat a bit of crow.

This is still no excuse for submitting a bunch of hurried, half-assed proposals. Your odds now are lower than ever that that kind of rushed and poorly written proposal will get a payoff. Remember the 1 in 29 number. The only reason this person got away with it is because his department gave him tenure points for trying (i.e. rewarding failure). In any situation where you actually must get a grant to survive or sustain a research program, this is not the way to go.

Despite the situation I discussed above, the solution is still, more than ever, to write the very best proposal you can. I’m not encouraging excessive delay or perfectionism – no proposal is perfect. Yet I am encouraging spending a good amount of time to develop a really good proposal, getting great feedback from one or more mentors, and doing that in a sustainable way (i.e. 2-3 big, well-written proposals per year is plenty for most people).

The good news is this: in assessing the reviews that my client got, all the critiques are fixable. Some of the concerns have already been addressed by her ongoing work. She stands a pretty good chance of getting this on the next round. Even if not, as long as she produces high-quality proposals like that, she’ll soon have funding of one of her other proposals. You can do that with a good proposal. You can’t with a rushed, poorly written proposal. With an average score of 2.5, it would be easy to move to 1.5 or better, which is in the fundable range. If you had an average score of 5+, then moving to 1.5 or better is highly unlikely.

I’ve been developing a new framework for assessing your “odds” and for maximizing them in your favor. I’ll be sharing it with you on an upcoming webinar. Make sure to sign up for my e-mail newsletter to get notified about that.

Once upon a time, the NIH had you lead the body of your grant proposal with a section titled “Background and Significance.” Then they messed everything up by taking out the “Background” part, quite confusing many a grant writer as to the meaning of a “significance” without a “background.”

Let’s get that sorted out here.

One perspective on this comes from my book Four Steps to Funding. The four steps are The Why, The Who, The What, and The How. I take the position that you need all four of these to truly engage your readers – especially when you have a combination of both specialists and nonspecialists reading your proposal.

If it were only the specialist in your narrow little field reading your grant, you could forego some of the Why and the What – but that is actually quite rare to have such a specialized readership, despite common misconceptions to the contrary. In almost all cases, you need a very strong “Why,” as in, “why is this work important?” to draw in readers who don’t already have inherent knowledge of why your project is vital.

In grant writing lore of old, the “Why” was addressed by a sometimes long and rambling “literature review” that covered all the salient work that’s ever touched on the topic, to give the reader a “broad perspective” on the field.

That’s nice and all. But it completely ignores the reality of your grant reviewer, who is pressed at all sides for time. The last thing he (or she) usually wants to be doing at this moment is reading your grant proposal to get “yet another in-depth review” of the literature. In fact, more than anything, he just wants to be spending time on his own science, or spending time with family, or one of a myriad other more exciting things than reading your grant proposal to be “educated” on the whole field.

Some of the more experienced (read: senior) grant applicants I’ve worked with use that as a reason to skip the Significance step. They realize that the reviewer doesn’t need a pedantic education about the field, and they realize that reviewer time and attention is a scarce resource, but they implement the wrong solution. The result is often disaster.

I advocate this position that, aside from your Specific Aims, the Significance is the most vital part of your grant proposal. I advocate that if you don’t do this part well, then nothing else you do in your grant is likely to matter. While the Significance may be shorter than its following Approach section, it should never be too short.

The goal of Significance
What is the goal of the Significance section? Your number one goal should be to engage your reader. You need to give her a compelling reason for paying attention. You need to give her a compelling reasons for taking interest in your science or your project and for desiring its success.

It is important to remember the context within which your grant is reviewed. It is not reviewed in isolation, but rather, within the context of a bundle of other proposals being considered at the same time. Hence, it’s not just a matter of reviewers taking interest in your project, but of them taking more interest in your project than the other projects being considered.

For example: If you’ve ever gone to the cereal isle in a US grocery store, there are a plethora of cereals to choose from. Do you buy them all? Probably not. In all likelihood, you buy one or two that you like, leaving the rest to sit on the store shelves.

Grants are a lot like that – your reviewer knows that she can only pick one or maybe two proposals to advocate for – and that’s it. The rest are going to “sit on the shelf.” However, there’s one key difference: unlike cereals, where you may have a favorite that you buy on most trips, each time the grant reviewer reviews, there is a new set of choices presented.

Successful cereal makers use quite a variety of ways in which to capture the interest of the prospective consumer, and you can learn from these. They include: compelling but not gaudy graphics and text, catering to the latest health trends, and matching their message with that of the intended audience. On the latter point, you’ll notice that cereal for kids portrays quite a different image than cereal for adults. Likewise, your potential reviewers aren’t just one big, generic mass of “scientists” – rather, they’re segmented into groups like microbiologists, oncologists, physicists, etc. Different audiences respond to different messages.

Whatever the composition of your reviewers, the very first thing that you have to do, then, is to capture the their interest.

If you boringly blend into the crowd, there’s little chance that you’ll get picked.

In your title, abstract, and Specific Aims you should have already started standing out from the crowd. Now you either make that or break that in the Significance section.

Good science isn’t good enough
There’s a lot of “good” science to fund out there, and not nearly enough funding for it. “Good” science doesn’t stand out from the crowd. If all you’re doing is proposing some “good” science, it’s unlikely to be enough. That’s especially true in days of 10% or less pay lines.

Instead, you must be solving a problem that your reviewer cares about. This isn’t just something generic like “curing HIV/AIDS” or “curing cancer.” Scientists are in science because they like science (obvious, but a lot of people forget this!) They want, not only to solve pressing health problems, but to solve interesting scientific puzzles. The puzzles that your peers are interested in change with the times. You need to make sure that the puzzle you’re solving is one that is currently of interest – or your chances of attracting the necessary excitement by a reviewer is much lower.

Where many fail
Here’s where many “significance” writers fall down: they assume that the reviewer comes to read the proposal already understanding what the problem, question, or challenge is. They assume some sort of magical, in-built knowledge on the part of the reviewer, almost as if there had been a brain transplant from writer to reader. In the name of due diligence, most writers will briefly re-state that problem or challenge in the span of a few sentences – but that’s far too little.

You need to spend the time and space to explain fully why this is an important and compelling problem.

You have to remember that your reader is coming from a very different place than you, and there hasn’t been any brain transplantation going on.

If you haven’t built up the challenge and the problem for your reviewer, so that she has a really strong desire to see it solved right now, then how likely is it that your grant is going to be the 1 in 10 (or less) that get funding? The likelihood is low and growing lower as paylines drop.

Your job in a nutshell, is to build desire
Your job in the Significance, then, is to build desire for your project. It is not there to show how smart or well-read you are. It is not there to add even more details to how you’re going to carry out the project. It is there to give a compelling reason for the question: why does this project deserve scarce funding dollars?

Here are a few pointers that will help you do this:

• The Significance section should not be too short. For a specialist audience, it might be 1.5-2 pages. For an audience that includes non-specialists in your field, it should be longer, i.e. 2-4 pages. The extra space is used to educate your reader about the importance of the problem that you’re working on. If they’re a non-specialist, they won’t already know this, and if you fail to convey this in your significance section, then you’ll fail to generate interest or desire.
• Really good grant proposals are always based on solving a problem that peers in your field care about. Therefore, your Significance section needs to clearly delineate that problem, yet it must do so without getting into a boring lit review.
• Use your Significance section to tell a compelling, yet condensed, story of your project. Have you ever marveled at how a great film director can condense a book into a few hours on film? (e.g. Peter Jackson’s renditions of the Lord of The Rings Trilogy is a great case in point) Your goal is the same. You’ve got a “novel” in your mind about your science, but your reviewer doesn’t have time or patience for a novel (and you don’t have the space) – he only has time for the movie version. You must do the hard job of introducing the key villains and heroes with appropriate vignettes, i.e. mini-stories, and having it all flow together. I teach a “layering” approach in my Grant Foundry seminars that is one way of doing this.
• Ask really good questions and provide great insights. The entire time that someone is reading your proposal, she is judging you based on what she sees written. The best way to convince her that you’re smart and capable is not by showing “how much you know,” but instead by asking great questions and providing great insights. Don’t be stingy with your great ideas. I’ve encountered some folks who are so afraid of the competition that they withhold their best ideas. However, if you’re trying to get your grant to be the one that reviewers pick, you are unlikely to do so by being stingy with your ideas.
• Show why your team is poised and ready to tackle the problem right now. Many grant writers make the mistake of writing the proposal as a generic project that anyone could perform. Can you imagine Lord of The Rings as a “generic story?” Of course not. Nobody funds “generic projects” for “generic teams.” Instead, funders fund specific people to do specific projects that they think they are well-suited for and likely to succeed in. In your significance section, you should show the reviewer why you and your team are the right people for the job.

Writing a really good Significance section is an art form that requires practice and patience. Typically, I’ll spend far more time working on the Significance portion of a proposal than on the Innovation and Approach – even though it is a shorter section.

If you would like more help with the “Art of The Significance,” then stay tuned for an announcement of the next Grant Foundry workshop. (Not on the newsletter list? Then you’ll miss out. You can subscribe by filling in that form to the right).