Bidding for funding

The last couple of weeks have been all about bidding for funding. We have three bids on the go, well one just received back with a ‘we are sorry to inform you’, one in submission and another being costed and about to be submitted.  Our income generation targets currently aren’t too onerous – we need one medium sized project each year. So at the moment we are bidding for lots of things, but it will calm down once we are successful.

Amongst all this activity I attended a staff development session on bidding for research grants. The session was targeted at new academic staff introduced by PVC research confirming the benefits of obtaining funding (building critical mass through research assistants, enhancing reputation, improving the research infrastructure). We talked about the importance of full economic costing and the REFs new focus on assessing the impact of the research on other stakeholders as well as the academic community.

Then a panel of seven experienced researchers came to front, to answer questions from the audience. The first question asked the panel ‘do you have to be a man to be a researcher here then?’. The six men shifted in their seats. The one woman reminded us of the need to work evenings and weekends if we wanted to make it.  The need to have ‘a passion’ for research was impressed upon us, along with the benefits of networking with disciplinary colleagues who sit on grant awarding panels. Hmm…

Here’s a quick summary of the more useful advice.

The ideas stage:

• team up with someone who is good
• start with smaller grants
• conceive of what you want to do as a ‘project’ with ‘outputs’
• make sure you are bidding for research, not just your own personal scholarly activity
• look at the awards the funder has already distributed
• go to conferences, get known, find out what fashionable topics are currently being funded
• do a 1 page ‘concept note’ of the project you are thinking about, circulate it to colleagues for comment
• publish at least one paper every year. It’s much easier to write a proposal if you are keeping up with the literature

Writing the bid:

• match your project with the funder
• make a timetable for bid preparation, give it the time it deserves, don’t leave it until the last minute
• be prepared to adapt your interests to what the funders are prepared to fund
• demonstrate your track record (of publications)
• make sure the bid includes a good chunk of time for the principal investigator
• use your school’s research director and grants panel for advice and support
• be prepared to share your draft bids with colleagues
• specify the impact of your research on policy and practice as well as the academic community
• work up the ‘case for the project’ section, give it to people to read, make sure it gets to the point (a common problem is bids spending too long on the background and not getting to the point of what you want to do)
• make sure the bid is costed appropriately. For the institution this means not under-costed, for the funder this means justifying the resources (why do you need 0.2 of this individual rather than 0.1?)

and then..

• the reality is a 1 in 3 success rate
• turn failed bids into papers so the effort is not wasted
• have more than one research theme going at the same time, so you can always have one bid in submission.