Source: Alamy

In the running: the intense competition for funding means that ¡®luck plays a big part, even for very strong proposals¡¯

The crucial thing for anyone submitting a proposal for research funding, says Jacqueline Aldridge, research and impact manager at Kent Business School, is to remember that it will be ¡°read very quickly by non-specialist assessors on grants committees in conjunction with dozens of other proposals on a wide variety of topics¡±.

Although funding bodies often provide applicants with ¡°a telephone book of guidance¡± about what they are looking for, this can make it easy to lose sight of one¡¯s central purpose. Yet there are four fundamental points that are vital to get across: the project is important; the project will be successful; the project is good value; and the investigators are competent. Applications that home in on these key areas are also far easier to recycle.

Ms Aldridge has extensive experience as a research administrator helping academics to improve their grant proposals. She has also often joined forces with her former colleague Andrew Derrington ¨C now executive pro vice-chancellor of humanities and social sciences at the University of Liverpool ¨C on workshops and then a book, The Research Funding Toolkit: How to Plan and Write Successful Grant Applications, published by Sage in 2012.

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So how can researchers attempt to fulfil Ms Aldridge¡¯s four essential requirements?

By a project being ¡°important¡±, she explains, non-specialist assessors mean not ¡°within-discipline importance but something any intelligent person would recognise ¨C your project has to be addressing a big interesting question¡±.

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To show that it will be ¡°successful¡±, Ms Aldridge continues, ¡°you need to explain the steps to be taken, so the academic reviewer can see how they will generate the answer¡±. Ideally, it is also desirable to ¡°create a blueprint, so that in theory someone else with the right skills could take it over if you fell under a bus. Such a plan is particularly important if you are an early career researcher and don¡¯t have a track record.¡±

¡°Good value¡±, meanwhile, ¡°doesn¡¯t necessarily mean cheap¡±, but it does mean ¡°showing why the project legitimately will cost that much money¡­If you are not asking for enough money, it raises the question of whether it will be successful and the grant will be wasted.¡± On the other hand, assessors tend to look askance at proposals that include a good deal of funding for conference travel to exotic destinations.

Finally, proving that ¡°the investigators are competent¡± usually means setting out how the team brings together people with skills in areas such as methodology, project management, line management and public engagement. It also often means offering ¡°evidence from previous experience that you can manage a large budget or a large international team¡±.

For those embarking on the laborious application process, Ms Aldridge offers a final thought: learn how to deal with rejection. Intense competition for funding, not to mention unforeseeable factors such as a gap between the theoretical perspective of researchers and reviewers, ¡°means that luck plays a big part, even for very strong proposals¡­in my experience, good research does get funded in the end ¨C but it may take five or six goes¡±.

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matthew.reisz@tesglobal.com