WRT333: Notes

Grants and Grantsmanship

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Show me the money!

Federal and state government agencies, private foundations and philanthropies, and corporations are all potential sources of funding. To accomplish predetermined goals to meet specific public or private needs, funding agencies periodically request proposals for work to be performed to advance understanding or to solve specific problems. The articulation of an agenda and priorities for funding is one function of agency strategic planning. In the federal government, planning takes the form of five-year funding bills. The United States Department of Agriculture, for example, regularly submits for Congressional approval a detailed five-year farm bill outlining objectives and purposes for proposed funding; the USDA agenda includes an array of spending proposals to support commodity prices, to provide for food stamps, to fund animal and plant inspection services, and to accomplish a variety of research objectives. The USDA then makes annual reports to the Congress on progress is dispersing allocated funds, and on accomplishments and returns on the public investment. University scientists and a diverse assortment of private citizens, local governments and philanthropies, and smaller companies frequently rely on success in making appeals to funding agencies as a basis for maintaining payrolls and operating expenses, or for periodic capital improvements (new equipment or buildings).

Grantsmanship is a term, analogous to craftsmanship, suggesting that it is possible to acquire skills in the fine art of acquiring funds through grants. Being awarded grant funds is no easy feat. It may take three to six weeks to actually write a grant, including hours spent assembling necessary paperwork required by the bureaucracies. Thousands of grants are written each year, driven by pressures to support research programs, to find salary for summer appointments for faculty and staff, to maintain support for graduate students or student employees, and to cover most of the costs of an active research program that may reach to hundreds of thousands per scientist year. Yet for all of the effort, in many grant programs the odds of being awarded funds may be only one in ten, or even one in 20 or worse. That means that for one successful applicant, 19 may come away with absolutely nothing to show for their effort. Nationally, this amounts to a waste of valuable time from thousands of competing scientists, a situation that should be of significant concern to all tax-payers and their representatives. Nevertheless, competition for funding is certain to remain stiff, and it is most likely to increase in the near term; the task of putting together a successful grant will remain daunting.

The likelihood of succeeding in the competitive grants arena can be improved through experience in grantmaking, and as a normal outcome of the cumulative maturation of scientists and their collective research laboratories. Success in research breeds likelihood of future success (albeit no guarantees). Many senior scientists get to know their research area and their funding agencies very well, often by serving as proposal reviewers (where there is no conflict of interest) or by serving on grants review panels, where funding decisions are made. For such individuals, expectation of success in competitions may raise odds considerably; I know of several colleagues who regularly succeed on half or more of their submitted proposals, even for programs where the overall odds are 10-20:1 against being funded.

The audience for grant proposals

Grant writing is, like other forms of technical writing, an exercise in considering the nature of a very narrow target audience—the grant award panel—and the equally narrow purposes in the charge to the panel from the funding agency. Grants panels are usually smaller groups of senior people whose focus is on expedient distribution of funds within a predefined set of objectives. The panel is typically led by an official from the agency, usually someone with a longer history of working as a scientist and research administrator. The agency program leader most likely participated in the early activities that led to the creation of the program, and may have some sense of allegiance to the agency and the founding group's intentions. They are certainly aware of the intention of the funder and will work to keep funding decisions on target. In addressing the panel, proposals need to show that they are aware of the narrow priorities of the program; simply put, the best ideas and most brilliant proposals don't have a chance if they are out of the confines of the funding agency and the particular goals outlined in the program's request for proposals.

Panel members are experienced and always conscientious. Knowing how important the funding system is to themselves and their colleagues, they know they are being relied upon to make the best possible decisions and to fund the best proposals. But they are also human and may each carry a personal definition of "best." Certainly, supporting work to solve major problems, wanting to use funds to advance the highest quality science, a desire to be fair to newer scientists and smaller institutions or to share the resources for work on minor commodities or less-well attended fields of interest, are all likely to be desires held in the backs of individual panel members. Such considerations are respected and sometimes freely aired as part of the panel's deliberations. But above all, the panel is made mindful—and reminded by the program leader if necessary—of the overarching goals and purposes of the funding agency and the immediate program. Again, grant proposals that drift from the center of this small target will stand little chance of seeing an award.

As dedicated as they are, panel members are faced with the task of reviewing a stack of proposals, and the higher the stack the less likely individual proposals are to be funded. From the perspective of the panelists, the job calls for rapid weeding out of the bulk of proposals that will not be funded. There is usually a surprising degree of congruency among the individual opinions of the panelists once they assemble to compare notes and make final judgments. Typically, the process moves quickly to concensus on the top proposals, allowing a rapid calculation of just how many proposals at the top will consume all of the available funding. Discussion then moves to considerations of the relative merits of only a few proposals just above or just below the "cutoff line," in an effort to perhaps curtail less desireable individual objectives from particular proposals ("We like your first two objectives but feel you should submit a new proposal next year for objective 3, and are recommending a reduced award for this proposal.") and to free up funds for one or two additional proposals from "below the line." Keep in mind how important it is that your proposal not give reviewers any excuse to toss it into the "do not consider" pile. Certainly, poor preparation, failure to conform to format, length, or content specifications of the agency request for proposals (RFP), will earn your proposal an early exit.

Typical Grant Templates

Williams et al. (1996) outline typical government or foundation grants programs, including generic descriptions of the components of typical proposals, as well as mechanisms used to evaluate proposals and to decide on awards. There are many variations, but the content of most proposals includes these major sections:

An experienced grant writer will comb the RFP carefully, establishing an outline of the required components for a template, noting the wording and emphases for targeted work. As the proposal is written, the competitive writer takes care to repeat key phrases, showing sensitivity to agency purposes and congruency to proposed goals, hoping to attract a nod for approval. The one thing that is necessary for success is that the writing pay attention to the wants of the grantor, being mindful not to misread personal biases ("I think work in this area is really important and surely they'll see it my way, even if it isn't really clear from their RFP") for the intent of the funding program.

Williams et al. (1996) offer a studied critique of all components of the generic grant that responds to this generic template. There enters a clear element of "gamesmanship," in which proposals are written in efforts to convince reviewers of great competencies or extraordinary capacities of the proposers. Certainly, there is an element of strategic advantage for larger, established (as evidenced by previous successes in the funding arena, larger staffs in more modern facilities with the latest technologies, etc.) research labs at more weathy institutions (per scientist-year staffing and operations budgets at Cornell, for example,are 2-10 times greater than those at URI). But Williams et al. also suggest a more cynical read of this; what is it about the brilliant potential of individual scientists or techicians that is blurred or lost in the process? What is it that really indicates a higher probability of a greater return on the funder 's investment; and keep in mind that when the funder is government, the question will ultimately translate into the political concern, "what did taxpayers get for their taxes?"

Typical Grant Program Processes

Conscious of the surrounding politics and the need for accountability to government or corporate bosses, grant panels do their work. The system typically revolves around efforts to be fair, which devolves into numerical schemes to rank proposals. Here, the magic of numbers prevails, creating a facade of fairness and equal opportunity; indeed, it is the belief that the process, in weeding out (and totally wasting) the efforts of the bulk of groups submitting proposals, only the best ideas and the best work will be "bought." Again, Williams et al. remain skeptical, offering suggestions as to why the system nevertheless may often fail to be wise, appearances of objectivity aside.

To create numerical ranks, an enormous effort may be made. In addition to having panelists read each proposal (typically there are 20-50 proposals to be read by each panelist, each proposal with several pages of narrative), the funder may enlist outside reviewers to also review, critique, and score each proposal. Scoring typically is based on a system of points, with various numbers awarded for relative strengths of things like relevance to the focus areas of the RFP, quality and originality of the methods proposed, qualifications of the research principal investigators and staff, adequacy of facilities, etc. The score sheet may get to be quite complicated, with points divided among several categories, with totals computed to the nearest decimal place. But again, Williams et al. question, what does it mean if the line between funded is drawn between proposal number 7, scoring 72.3 and number 8, scoring 71.9?

The process itself works hard to maintain legal fairness. Panelists or external reviewers know that they have an ethical obligation to reveal conflicts of interest (and they may be required to sign legally binding documents stating such conflicts or averring that they have none), and may opt our or recuse themselves from decisions which bear a stigma of personal bias. In the end, the panel concludes its work, the program leader oversees letters announcing rewards, grants management offices connect the funder and the recipient, contracts are drawn, work is performed, reports are written and published or filed, and the wheels roll on.

Outcome Funding

The effect of this system has been to create an unusually large and vibrant research enterprise in the United States, with billions of dollars involved in the creation of new knowledge of vast importance to society, and perhaps a lot of knowledge of dubious worth as well. Roger Geiger (1993) outlines the growth of this enterprise in his excellent Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities Since World War II. (See also more recent critiques of the relations between university research and corporate economic interests, e.g., Geiger and Sá (2008)). At the same time, expenditures of large sums on complex research agendas has created countless opportunities for criticism from politicians or citizen groups eager to point out waste and to award a "golden fleece" for poorly understood (or perhaps too-well understood) research into esoteric topics. In a sincere effort to be more accountable, the last several years have shown a switch in emphasis among research funders. That is, increasingly the focus is not on what researchers will do (i.e., write a report or publish a paper) but rather to a focus on what it will mean when used by some targeted group (people or, for example, an ecosystem, that benefit somehow from the application of new knowledge). When the focus is on the outcomes experienced by users of the research, and not on the outputs of the researchers, the approach is called outcome funding.

Certainly, the appeal of outcome funding to funding agencies is great. By pointing to specific entities who have experienced a benefit as a result of good work funded by the agency, it becomes much clearer that there has been a good returned for an investment, public goods for taxpayer dollars. Politicians love to take credit for their good deeds, even though they may forget on occasion to credit taxpayers as the real doers of the deeds. And happy politicians remain eager to continue supporting the agencies responsible for research funding, etc.

The emphasis on outcomes requires agencies and proposals to identify critical target audiences and to specify the intended changes in behavior that will be stimulated or made possible by the completed research. For many university scientists, this has been a difficult concept to swallow. Scientists used to assuming that it was their fundamental mission in life to think deeply and to attain insight into the world of nature and man were able to develop an attitude toward research that championed simple curiosity as the prime motivator, and viewed applications as a tempting source of distraction from the purity of science. Over time, this has led to schisms between scientists who come to think of themselves as "basic" versus "applied," and to a large extent these artifacts of the explosion of publically funded science for the second half of the 20th century (again, Geiger 1991) are frequently visible in universtiy faculty today.

Nevertheless, an increasing array of public funders are mindful of the principles of outcome funding. Even the National Science Foundation, established to provide a bastion for fundamental (i.e., non-applications-oriented) science now is clearly engaged in leading edge research with clear intentions of returning technical knowledge of immediate use in a competitive global economy. Evidence of the entrenched nature of this approach is clear from the larger groups found in governing bodies associated with federal programs, which now include a diverse array of "stakeholders" from outside of "the system," including, for example in the USDA, organic farmers, pesticide companies, environmental groups, food safety groups, consumers, etc.

The chief difference in the templates used for outcome funding proposals is the emergence of new requirements for specification of target audiences, and clarification of how the results of research will be directly accessed and used by those audiences. From a world where such concerns were once "not my concern" among scientists (who were once able to assume that "education" specialists in the state-federal Cooperative Extension partnership would do the actual "technology transfer function"), scientists themselves must frequently demonstrate that they are actively and meaningfully engaged with target audiences, and that their work includes not only the studies leading up to production of research papers, but also lead in meaningful ways to the transmission of research outputs into real actions on farms and in the various fields touched by the "university knowledge production industry."

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