How I assess a funding application: Part 2 – Feasibility

Sea of Wisdom temple (Beijing) by Jonathan O’Donnell (on Flickr)

The previous post in this series addressed the issue of how I assess track-records on grant applications. It talked about a range of X-factors that I look for when assessing applications with (typically) excellent research CVs.

This post focuses on project feasibility and whether the project sounds like it’s going to work.

On one level, it’s a dead obvious question: Can the project be done?

It is, however, an aspect that depends entirely on the evidence presented in the application that:

1. The team (or individual) is good and experienced;
2. The budget’s credible and appropriately linked to a methodology that has integrity; and
3. The project itself has significant intellectual rigour and vigour.

One of the trickiest balancing acts that I find with grant applications is demonstrating innovation and creativity in your research without sacrificing feasibility.

This can sometimes boil down to a question of ‘do you have a Plan A and Plan B?’. If we’re talking about the honest face of research, we’d have to admit that things don’t always work. The project direction that’s so assiduously planned may go awry in the first six months when the research team implodes or the data doesn’t do what you’d like it to. Research is often exploratory, which introduces doubt about what its real final outcomes might be.

If you were being completely honest, you’d have to say that the project may not work.

The auspicious university

Dear reader: Let me save you some time. This post is written specifically for practice-based researchers.

If you aren’t a creative type (artist, writer, poet, dramaturge, designer), you can probably stop reading now. If you are, please keep reading – I need your help.

What’s an artist to do?

Seeking completion by Tseen on Flickr

I work with the cool people at the university: artists, designers, architects, social scientists, humanities scholars and educators – all sorts of excellent people.

Many of them are professionals in their chosen professions. That is, they are professional artists, designers, architects, poets, writers, etc. Their research is ‘practice-based’ research; they create stuff. The process of creation is an integral part of the research process. It meshes with their teaching, which is often studio-based, using workshops and mentoring rather than lectures and tutorials. These people fit very well into a university landscape.

Until it comes to funding.

Arts funding, like all funding, is built for the people who need it. It is organised around independent individuals (or small collaborations) or highly focused arts-based organisations (theatres, for example). These are the people who need the funds, so that is how the funds work.

How I assess a funding application: Part 1 – Track-records

Now that our Discovery applications have been fed into the gaping maw of the Australian Research Council (ARC) competition, I thought I’d take my 2-part series of posts about assessing funding applications out for a spin. Part 1 focuses on track-records and the research team. Part 2 will address an application’s overall feasibility.

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“It’s all a lottery!”

“You need to game the system or you haven’t got a hope.”

“Only those who’ve had them before will get one.”

Sea of Wisdom temple (Beijing) by Jonathan O’Donnell (on Flickr)

The urban myths circulating about grant rounds are as tenacious as those about waking up in ice-filled bathtubs and realising you’ve had your kidney harvested.

No doubt, spending so much time and investing intellectual resources in a major application makes the lack of success bite that much deeper.

Having been around the traps as a supplicant, awardee, assessor, and now advisor, I’d have to say that most funding assessment processes do end up giving money to the strongest teams and most compelling projects. This isn’t to say that the processes or choices are always perfect, or that rogue results (in good and bad ways) don’t pop up. There’s always that story of the ARC Discovery that was written over a weekend and got up.

This post is about how I assess funding applications and, in particular, the track-record components. Over my academic career, I’ve:

• Been part of judging panels for niche academic association committees that gave out travel and small grants,
• Been invited onto a university’s fellowship selection panel, and
• Assessed for a bunch of international funding bodies (in Australia, Canada, and Hong Kong).

I’m not claiming that my process is necessarily best practice, but I thought it might be useful for you to gain insight into one assessor’s valuations (and, it has to be said, biases).

Each funding scheme’s selection criteria may differ in detail but the two basic elements of track-record and project idea are always there.

The role of the assessor, for me, is in gauging the quality and feasibility of the overall proposition. The fact that the ARC now gives ‘feasibility’ an overt weighting in the Discovery scheme gives rise to interesting conversation (but that’s for another post!).

What do I look for when assessing the track-records of researchers on grant applicants?

There’s this conference I want to go to…

I love cloud land by Jonathan O'Donnell on Flickr

One of the most difficult requests I get is for conference travel funding.

Many researchers think rustling up these funds will be easy because it is only “a few thousand dollars”. Unfortunately, a small amount of money can be almost as hard to secure as a large amount of money. In addition, people are usually hunting this money fewer than six months before the conference actually happens, and most funding works on a 12-month cycle.

Don’t get me wrong – I think that conferences are fantastic! They give you an opportunity to look up from your day-to-day work and get a glimpse of what everybody else is doing. They help to recharge your intellectual batteries and find your feet within your research network. Tseen and I like conferences so much that we have written about them several times before: why you should run a conference; how to be a great participant; and how to cope with question time.

But there’s a catch. Most of the time, the interesting conferences always seem to happen ‘over there’ – somewhere else in the world, somewhere that it costs money to get to.

This post provides five ideas for funding your conference travel. Not all of them will suit your circumstances and most of them involve a long lead time, so they may not be the solution that you are looking for.

With a bit of luck, though, them might give you some ideas for how to get where you want to go.

RO Peeps: Brenda Massey

The RO Peeps page lists the research office profiles of friends of The Research Whisperer. It showcases the talent and myriad trajectories that make us who we are.

BRENDA MASSEY

Brenda Massey (Unitec, NZ)

Name & Twitter handle: Brenda Massey / @FundingChickie

Position title: Grants and Funding Advisor

University: Unitec Institute of Technology

Location: Auckland, New Zealand

Highest qualification?  Bachelor of Arts

How did you get into this role, and how long have you been a research administrator/developer? I’ve been at Unitec since March 2010. I don’t have a background in research or academia, but I do have experience running funding schemes and part of my role at Unitec is to manage our internal research funding round and our postgraduate scholarships scheme.

We’re a small research office so even though my job title is ‘grants and funding’, I pitch in to help our ethics, research and postgraduate committees, as required. I’ve organised a number of events such as book launches, professorial addresses and our 2011 Research Symposium and inaugural 3 Minute Thesis Competition.

The Dean of Research was looking for someone willing to get stuck in and create their own niche within the office and the institution and that’s just the type of challenge I was after.

What other kinds of jobs have you had?  Prior to joining Unitec I ran a local government community grants scheme, so I have a background in community development and support. I developed funding guidelines and processes, assessed funding applications and made recommendations for grants to senior management and local government politicians. That experience has definitely helped me put myself in funders’ shoes now that I’m assisting Unitec staff to apply for external grants. I’ve also had roles in pensions administration, accident compensation claims entitlement and legal aid case management.

What’s the most satisfying part of your job?  It’s such a buzz when a grant application that I’ve assisted to prepare has been successful, irrespective of whether it’s a small amount of money or a large amount of money that’s been granted. It’s validation, not just that the proposal has been pitched correctly, but that an organisation external to your institution agrees that the project is important enough to resource.

What’s the thing you’d most like to change about your job?  I love working with staff and students to develop their grant applications, but once they have their funding my contact with them can become fairly sporadic, and might be via email or phone rather than face-to-face. I would relish the chance to be involved in some of the projects that are funded as a team member, rather than as a facilitator.

Favourite hobby-horse?  I’m still passionate about community development. I was recently pleased to be part of a team that put together a successful proposal for funding that will see Unitec staff provide academic guidance on a research project conducted by a local community group. Unitec’s involvement will increase the group’s capacity, and the capacity of other groups that they will go on to work with.

Dream job?  I would love to be on a panel that makes decisions on funding applications!

Best advice to researchers?  I’m a big advocate of the importance of ‘critical friends’ in the grant writing process. 

Unitec’s Professor Linton Winder recently advised his staff as follows:

“Try and persuade colleagues outside your area, preferably with panel expertise, to read and seriously critique your grant [application]. Many will not want to offend and will tell you the application is “wonderful”. This may make you feel better in the short-term, but if they pick out a flaw that the panel would have, that will make you feel better in the long-term”.

How ECRs can fast-track their institutional capital

Alex Burns is an Australian-based analyst, developmental editor and researcher.

He is currently Research Facilitator in the Research Facilitation Unit of Victoria University‘s Faculty of Business and Law, and is writing n a PhD at Monash University about strategic culture in counter-terrorism studies. 

Formerly, Alex was a senior quality and planning officer for Swinburne University, and a senior researcher with Smart Internet Technology CRC for three years.

Alex also blogs at www.alexburns.net.

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In a recent Home Cooked Theory post ‘In Praise of Strategic Complacency’, Melissa Gregg offers incisive, critical advice to Early Career Researchers (ECRs) about navigating universities in their first five years after PhD completion.

For the past three years, I’ve encountered similar issues for ECRs while in the Research Facilitation Unit at Victoria University’s Faculty of Business and Law.

This post engages with Gregg’s ideas, and offers personal advice on two key points:

1. Handling productivity.

Gregg critiques a ‘post-Fordist’ ‘neoliberal workplace’ that values “flexibility and productivity” over the “accumulation and duration of service.” This position leads Gregg to advise a counter-strategy of “strategic complacency.” I’m sympathetic to many of the issues and problems that Gregg raises about organisational ‘routinisation’, and to Gramscian and Foucauldian “counter-hegemonic” critique. But I differ in the solutions.

The workplace transformation that Gregg describes has occurred outside universities for over two decades. It is central to the management philosophies guiding the staffing cuts recently announced at several universities, which can be traced to GE’s WorkOut process under Jack Welch (firing the bottom 10% in annual performance reviews), time-based competition, international research metrics, and the human capital strategies of asset management and private equity firms.

These changes are not going away anytime soon.

Do you have a card?

Star Trek Business Cards by The Rocketeer on Flickr

I know a bloke who works for a bank. Let’s call him David.

David is senior enough that he authorises his own business cards. As he was filling out the form, he realised two things:

1. The people who care about his business card are never going to see the form, and
2. The people who see the form don’t care what goes on his business card.

So, in the box labelled ‘Position’, he carefully wrote “Dilettante”.

Sure enough, when his business cards arrived, David found that the bank was paying him to be a dilettante.

I’ve just run out of business cards, so I’m thinking about what I should put on the form. It seems to me that my business card and my e-addressbook (where I keep everybody else’s business cards) are a bit behind the times.

Life, death and collaboration: How to find research friends

Found zen (Photo by Tseen Khoo)

For the first years of my academic life, I only ever published as a sole author. I worked on projects as a sole chief investigator and, for the most part, started projects by myself. Coming from the humanities of the time, this was not that unusual.

In my later years as an academic, almost everything I wrote or worked on was not as a lone researcher. I co-wrote, co-edited, was part of project teams and event committees.

In academia these days, the collaboration factor is huge. Perhaps even de rigueur. Track-records with no history of working with others are viewed with a suspicion. Heads of Schools and grant assessors may well wonder: is it because you don’t work with others, or because you can’t work with others?

While some ‘collaborations’ can be nightmares that you try to get over and done with as quickly as possible (therefore, aren’t collaborations in the holistic sense…), research collaborations can be the absolute best things in your academic life.

And, because you’re not an Emperor penguin, you don’t have to ‘mate for life’ with one collaborator. You can work with various groups and individuals off and on throughout your career, finding more along the way. Train that creative sensibility to find ways to work with people you respect and like; it will make your working life a happy place.

As with many things in life, the best way for these things to happen is organically. A forced research relationship makes the baby sloths cry.

With this in mind, then, what’s the best way to find a collaborator? First, remind yourself about what academic networking can mean.

Then, check out my top strategies for finding good collaborators:

RO Peeps: Phil Ward

The RO Peeps page lists the research office profiles of friends of The Research Whisperer. It showcases the talent and myriad trajectories that make us who we are.

Today’s RO  Peep is Phil Ward, who writes the Research Fundermentals blog. If you’re in the UK or Europe and interested in following the intricacies of the UK/EU funding circuit, make sure you follow Phil’s blog.

PHIL WARD

Name & Twitter handle: Phil Ward (@frootle)

Position title: Research Funding Manager

University: University of Kent

Location: Canterbury, UK

Highest qualification? MA

How did you get into this role, and how long have you been a research administrator/developer?
Like many in the sector, I fell into research administration. I was made redundant from Waterstones Online, a bookseller in the UK, and a job came up at the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC). I applied not knowing anything about the sector, and loved it. I’ve been on a steep learning curve ever since.

Now I’ve moved from grant giving to grant getting: it’s tougher, but more rewarding.

What other kinds of jobs have you had?
After university I had a whole range, from charity worker in Sweden, farm worker in Norway, care worker for children with learning difficulties, teaching assistant, book seller and literature sub editor.

What’s the most satisfying part of your job? Getting the grants! If only it happened more often…

What’s the thing you’d most like to change about your job? Funder success rates!

Favourite hobby-horse?
This is pretty much the same as ‘best advice to researchers’: think about the person who’s going to read your proposal, and make it easy for them to understand the basics of your project: What’s your research question? Why’s it important? How are you going to answer it? How are you going to disseminate the findings?

Dream job? Cartoonist

Best advice to researchers? Don’t give up!

Help! I Have To Write A Grant Application

This post, jointly written by Jonathan and Tseen, first appeared in the March 2012 issue of Connect. Connect is the Australian National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) & Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (CAPA) magazine for casual academics. It is excellent.

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How did this happen to me?

Demotivating! by Jonathan O'Donnell on Flickr

You might be reading this because part of your role is described as research assistant (as opposed to ‘marking assistant’, ‘lecturing assistant’, ‘attend meetings I don’t want to go to assistant’).

Or perhaps you were chatting to another academic who is working on a topic you are interested in and you said, innocently enough, “That sounds great – if you need any help…”

Maybe they sought you out and asked for your help because your PhD is related to the topic.

Looking back, you may not be able to identify the exact moment when you agreed to write the grant application, or the sequence of events that led up to it. However, the moment that you first stare at a blank form and a confusing set of instructions – that moment will be absolutely clear.

Don’t panic! Fear is the mind-killer. There is a way through this, and it isn’t as scary as it seems. After all, you probably know professors who can’t find their coffee cup but can still get grants. If they can do it, how hard can it be?

How the hell does this grant-thing work, anyway?

First up, it is important to be clear about your role. You should be writing a draft that your collaborators will review and revise. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t need to be polished. As a first draft, it just needs to be technically complete. You are trying to sketch out the idea and get feedback on it as soon as possible. So don’t sweat the small stuff. Just hammer through the bulk of the application as quickly as possible, knowing that there will be a lot of polishing that happens later on.

Secondly, understand that the funding agency is not actually a demon or monster. They are a group of people, often other researchers, who have set out a standard way for people to provide information about their research. Even though it may not be clear to you at the moment, there is a method to their madness. A published method that you can download and read, no less.

For any given grant application, there will be two or three documents that you must have: