This year UTS Aspire hosted the Grant Writing Practicalities series. Over four sessions, attendees gained insights from grant writing experts led in discussion by Dr Fiona MacIver. Each session provided useful information on how to refine proposals, strengthen research narratives and improve the chances of securing competitive funding.
Tips for writing winning grant applications
Writing a grant application goes beyond laying out a proposed research question and methodology. It typically also involves justifying why funding is needed and how it will be used. When writing a grant application, you must provide a description of expected benefits and impact, evidence of feasibility and address various administrative requirements. Critically, the audience for grant applications is mixed: assessors may include a combination of expert peers, non-specialist academics and non-academics.
The basics
In the first session, experienced grant writers Associate Professor Heather Ford, Associate Professor Mojtaba Golzan and Professor Ho Kyong Shon shared practical steps for improving the practice of grant writing. They discussed how habitual writing can be leveraged for grant applications, how strong structures can be built within the writing and how expression can be finessed.
Professor Ho Kyong Shon said there are five main factors to remember when grant writing.
“The top five things to remember are: clarity, national priorities, having a broad range of team members, having a strong storyline and plan for your project and integrating feedback,” he said.
The top five things to remember are: clarity, national priorities, having a broad range of team members, having a strong storyline and plan for your project and integrating feedback.
Watch the recording for Grant Writing Practicalities Part 1: The Basics.
Writing Fellowship applications
Fellowship applications and a research project applications may share the same goal of securing financial and other support. However, Fellowships and project grant applications are different, each with their own focuses and requirements.
In the second session of the series, Professor Rachel Landers, Distinguished Professor Brian Oliver and Dr Peter Su delved into how to tell a compelling a story about your journey, communicate your vision and describe the ways a Fellowship will propel you.
Fiona said, “There are three key messages that you are trying to communicate. You need to explain why you are the right person for this Fellowship, how your project will enhance your research career and why the host institution you are nominating to accommodate your Fellowship is the right place for you to do your research.”
Watch the recording for Grant Writing Practicalities Part 2 - Writing Fellowship Applications.
Writing grant applications as a team
The third part of the series explored how teams work together to make multiple voices in a grant application sing as one. Professor Juliet Willetts, Associate Professor Nick Bennett and Professor Justin Seymour considered the practicalities of sharing writing tasks and the time it takes to develop a proposal as a team.
They discussed how you ‘project’ the writing and how to make best use of support coming from outside the research team. Other issues they considered included: when you might bring in a facilitator to help collaborators reach agreement on a research program and its structure and whether generative AI is a player on the grant writing team.
A good team is a team where everybody has a role and is going to contribute to the project.
Justin emphasised the importance of clearly defining team roles and the need to demonstrate that you are a team that can accomplish the goal of the project together.
“A good team is a team where everybody has a role and is going to contribute to the project,” he said. “Sprinkle this information throughout your application so the assessors can see it is a project built upon contributions from different people.”
Watch the recording for Grant Writing Practicalities Part 3: Writing grant applications as a team.
Balancing bold and ambitious with feasible
The last session of the grant writing series was delivered as an interactive workshop addressing questions such as:
- How do you convince the funder that the proposed research is both ‘academically’ feasible and practical as a project or program?
- How do you convince the funder that you have considered ethical and practical issues that may arise during your project and that you have anticipated and mitigated challenges and risks such as access, consent, safety, security, and quality?
- In an increasingly competitive environment, what does value for money look like in grant applications?
“During our final session, researchers brought in their semi-fleshed out ideas to discuss with different experts across research impact, strategic grants development, ethics, finance, grant writing and major initiatives,” said Research Capability and Development Administrator Alexandra Nicolas.
Participants had the opportunity to bring their ideas to a room full of experts in the ethics, practicalities and governance of research projects. They moved around the room speed-dating style to sound out ideas, receive a range of perspectives and advice on how to create a bold, ambitious and feasible project that would be likely to win funding.