Print This PostYou have a great idea for a grant, and you know it can work. You’ve done your background work — now you just need to convince someone to “give you the money!” Getting a grant funded is a daunting task. The key point is that you need to communicate what you want to do and convince at least two people who will read your grant that it is a great idea, that you are the right person to do it. You’re the person with the right expertise and the best environment to carry it out. So how will you convince them? And who are you convincing?
Who will read your grant?
Most grant panels will have two, or possibly three, Independent Members or “IMs” (IMs). In a panel of perhaps 100+ grants, a couple of individuals, selected for their expertise in a particular field, will read your grant in detail. They will need to do this relatively quickly, depending on how many others they must also read. Some panels use a whole-panel scoring system, while others take scores only from your two or three expert readers. Some panels will also have expert reviewers who have examined the grants carefully and written detailed feedback, which you may get the chance to respond to. This feedback informs the final scores of the IMs and potentially the rest of the panel.
So, imagine you are a grant panel member. You are trying to finish a paper and respond to a reviewer’s critical comments on another. You have just finished teaching, and you have two students in the lab and a master’s student needing help. You find a few days to focus on your panel materials. What are you looking for? What will stand out? Dense blocks of text are hard to read quickly and even harder to skim back through later, so use clear headers, short paragraphs, and white space generously. Bold or highlight your key points where the format allows it. A grant that is easy to navigate signals clarity of thought, and a panel member who can find what they need quickly is more likely to represent your case well to the rest of the panel.
Short summary
Arguably, the short summary (around 500 words) is the most important. This should explain exactly what you plan to do and how. What is your overall research question? Within this there can be a hypothesis to be tested, but most important is what you aim to find out, and what impact this might have in the field. Does the proposed work aim to explain a key mechanism, or fill a gap in knowledge? Might your work use cutting-edge methodology or techniques to do something no one has been able to do before? This is perhaps the section most worth perfecting. It is the one the whole panel will read, and the one the IMs will return to later when presenting your grant to the panel, to explain why it deserves funding. Your aims and objectives should be clear and grounded in what you intend to find out and investigate. Here the reader should understand what the potential outputs will be. You may also choose to include, briefly, how you intend to tackle the aims.
Lay Summary
Some grant applications include a Lay summary, which may be read and assessed by a lay panel and/or used later to share your grant approaches with the general public. Think carefully about how you communicate this section, avoiding technical language and using plain English to explain any complex terms. Make sure it is clear how you expect your work to result in tangible impact, perhaps for patients, or driving research forward.
Getting a grant funded – Source: retrospective study of over 20,000 applications to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), published in FACETS
Case for Support
The case for support requires you to read the guidelines carefully to make sure you include everything required. Some grants, for example, will ask for a case for impact, benefit to patients, or plans for management, and so on. This is an essential section in which you set out the previous work leading up to the proposal and explain why you are best placed to carry it out, particularly for a fellowship. Preliminary work is often genuinely important (except where early-career fellowships state otherwise), so include as much as you can to demonstrate your expertise in the field and the strength of your approach. You may also want to include collaborators and explain the value they add.
Be clear about your timelines and how each part of the proposal, or work package, complements the next. Avoid linear plans in which the first part must succeed before the second can begin, particularly where that first part is risky. Be ambitious, but not overly so. You need to explain how you will complete the work within the timeframe, and make it believable and sensible. Do you have the expertise for all of it? If not, make sure you have support from others, including your collaborators. This section will be read carefully by your IMs and, where relevant, by expert reviewers, so make sure every claim is supported by literature (yours and others’), that caveats are acknowledged, and that mitigation plans are included (e.g.”if this doesn’t work, we will try this…”). Think about who might be asked to act as your expert reviewer, since you will probably need to suggest names, and what questions they might raise given your knowledge of the competition and the wider field. Give enough detail about your approach to demonstrate that you know what you are doing, and to avoid the kind of major omission that invites a reviewer to question your proposal. This is hard within tight word limits, so take time to work out what is genuinely needed to show your expertise and the likely success of your approach.
Make sure you summarise, ideally at the end of each work package and certainly at the end of the proposal, carefully connecting back to your original aims and objectives to show the outputs your approach will deliver.
Justification of Resources
A word on costing: justify, justify, justify. Why do you need that new, expensive rheometer? What will you do with it, what will it add, and why is it needed? Who will do the day-to-day work, and at what level are you asking for support? Contact your institutional finance team early, and consider meeting with them to go through costings and check they fit the advertised budget. Costs are often higher than expected, particularly for UKRI grants, which require overheads.
Gather feedback
Once you have a reasonable draft, ask people for feedback. Find colleagues and senior colleagues who will give you useful, honest criticism. Seek out people with grant panel experience who can guide you, and find someone close to your field to sense-check anything you are unsure about. A logical flow and clear communication are essential. Have a final and careful read through. Make sure there are no typos or grammatical errors. Find and read the funders scoring criteria. This is what the panel members are scoring against and this will give you excellent insight into what is needed to increase your chances for funding.
Reviewers comments
Once it is submitted, for some grants you will receive reviewers’ comments to respond to. This matters, and it requires careful, dispassionate reading. Address each comment thoroughly, politely, and with adequate evidence if you want to argue and defend your position. Provide further preliminary data to support your view if you can. If a suggestion is useful, acknowledge it and explain how you might incorporate it into your proposal. In my experience, responding to comments can be difficult emotionally. This is your work, something you may have spent weeks perfecting and years building toward. The comments can be upsetting or even feel unfair. Even so, responding well matters: the panel needs to hear your response and understand your perspective.
Interview
Now, the final hurdle: the interview. Exciting, daunting, maybe even scary. This is your work, and you are the expert on your proposal. You know what you want to do. Go in with confidence, but listen carefully to each question. Pause, consider what is being asked, and respond as clearly as you can.
Good luck. Getting a grant funded isn’t easy, but a positive outcome is a genuinely great feeling. And if you aren’t successful this time? Allow yourself to mourn for a day or two, then get back on the horse.
Professor Louise Serpell
Author
Professor Louise Serpell is an Emerita Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Sussex. Her research focuses on how proteins misfold and form amyloid structures linked to Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative conditions, using approaches from structural biology and molecular biophysics. Louise completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford and later established her own research group in the UK. Alongside her research career, she has been active in mentoring, public engagement, and supporting early career researchers.
Professor Louise Serpell
Dementia Researcher
NIHR