New ORDE Website, New Resources

I'm happy to announce that ORDE has re-worked our website and we're offering a clearer, better-organized home base to our faculty and research development community.  Along with this "new skin," we also are offering a variety of great resources, which I'll highlight below.

Faculty Seminars & Events
We're now listing all of our Spring seminars and Know Your Agency (KYA) Lunches, including those open for registration and those upcoming. They include:

• Grant-Writing Structure and Mechanics
• KYA Lunch: Institute for Education Sciences
• NSF CAREER Grant Planning
• NIH K Grant Planning

Additionally, if you miss a seminar, we are capturing and editing clips from our seminars and lunches and offering them in our archives.  All clips are around five minutes long. Check out our archives under the last tab here.

Funding
On our funding page, we're offering the following services and resources:

• Information on our fund searching services
• Our funding e-books (these currently list funding opportunities for pilot projects, sabbaticals, and for new investigators)
• Various funding source databases

Resources
We are offering and linking to a variety of high quality articles, worksheets, and other media to support you in the following categories:

• Sponsor information
• Proposal development
• Collaboration
• Research career development/strategies

ORDE Blog
Certainly, you're familiar with the ORDE blog, but on our website, we're also linking to other blogs that we like, particularly from some of the major funding sponsors. So, be sure to take a look at these other great blogs!

We think our new and improved website is more easily navigable to our research community, but you decide. Check it out and don't hesitate to make comments or send us email with other resources you're looking for or that you love that we should be including. Thanks and enjoy!

Long-Term Research Planning

What if you were given $200,000 today to be spent on your research however you wanted?  What would you do?  Would you be ready, poised to launch a major project that aligned with your research trajectory? Or would you be somewhat dumbfounded by your great luck and be at a loss for what to do with your new research fortune?

Many early career investigators have not considered the big picture of their research and all of the possibilities open to them. This is quite natural as one starts his/her research career, but if you remain in that space for long, what opportunities will you be missing?

Many faculty we talk to are focused on the bare minimum, thinking, "if only I had enough money to hire a graduate student or get this piece of equipment, or could participate in that conference." This is certainly understandable given our funding climate and the reality of the dearth of funds for most researchers. However, if you continue to think of your research in terms of the bare minimum, you ensure that you will never be able to get any more than that.

You may miss big opportunities when you are so focused on small ones. So, what to do? We suggest a couple of things:

First: have a pie in the sky plan. Know what you would do if you were given big funding for your research. Do this, not because someone is actually going to come around handing out that kind of money, but so that you notice the opportunities for partnerships and funding opportunities that may be a fit for your big project. Then when you find yourself at a reception with donors or program officers, and they ask about your research interests, you don't come back with wanting to hire a graduate student.

Second: Make a 5-10 year realistic research career plan. One that is feasible without the miracle funding I talk about in my first suggestion, but one that depends on more than the bare minimum in terms of funding and support. Your plan should be a stretch, but be possible.

Once you've set your five year goals, work backward to set benchmarks that you must achieve and when to get you to your goal.  Think about when you must collect data or run pilot projects, when should you be applying for external funding (and resubmitting grants)?  How and when should you publish? These three threads are not mutually exclusive, of course. Nor do they get placed on one point of your timeline. For instance, determine when you need funding (besides immediately), and then give yourself six months before to be identifying sponsors and beginning to do background work to prepare you to write your grant. If you need pilot data before you can be competitive for a grant, back up even further in your timeline to identify how you will run your pilot... and so on.

Many researchers are uncomfortable thinking of themselves as fundraisers, but that's often to their disadvantage. One core element that the best fundraisers understand is that major donors or major grant funders do not tend to give major funds to a need or a deficit. They think of those funds as an investment, and they don't want to make it in a sinking ship.  They do want to invest those funds in a vision, in a game-changing or world-changing project that makes a real impact. So, make sure you have one!

Resources:
Planning Your Research Program - Carleton University (see Worksheets)
Charting a Course For a Successful Research Career - Professor Alan M. Johnson

Budgets and Justification

Budgets are a requirement for most, if not all, grant proposals. Although, it may be tempting to look at the budget as an afterthought as your developing your research project and framing it in just the right way to appeal to the sponsor, it is important to instead make it a priority.

Budgets and budget justification are a key convincing factor for reviewers. Good budgets tell your reviewers that your project is realistic, well thought out, and likely to be successful. Poorly constructed budgets and budget justifications tell your reviewers just the opposite.

So, how do you create a budget that will give your reviewers the confidence in you and your project to support your proposal for funding?

Do's and Don'ts

• Do start working on your budget early to ensure that it is not an afterthought
• Do work with the grants administrator in your school or college to craft the budget
• Don't pad your budget to try and have some reserve money in case your estimates are off
• Do realize that a budget is your best estimate of costs, and that if you need to amend the budget, you can work with your Program Officer after the award to revise
• Don't guess at what things will cost (work with your grants administrator to get the right costs) 

As suggested, it is important to work with your grants administrator on your budget. If you are a CU Denver faculty member and your school or college does not have a grants administrator or you need additional support for a complex project, Stefan Reiss, Senior Grants Administrator in the Officer of Research Services is available to work with you. See Stefan's bio and contact information here. To learn more about what should and should not go in a grant budget, see ORDE's Quick Guide: Budget Proposal Checklist. Note: for this link and the budget justifications link, if you get a pop up when you click asking for username/password, just hit cancel and you'll get to the pdf.

Your budget justification is another essential element of your grant, and serves as your explanation for why you've included the costs in your budget.

Your budget justification should:

• follow sponsor solicitation/announcement instructions
• mirror the sponsor's detailed budget page headings
• give additional details about items summarized on the budget page
• explain why each of the items on the budget page is needed to accomplish the proposed research
• make it clear that all budget requests are reasonable and consistent with sponsor and University policies

For more information, see ORDE's Quick Guide: Tips for Creation of a Budget Justification. 

In following these guidelines, you can use your budget and budget justification to punctuate your competence as a Project Manager and likelihood for success in your project in the eyes of your reviewers.

Resources

ORDE's Quick Guide: Budget Proposal Checklist

ORDE's Quick Guide: Tips for Creation of a Budget Justification

Support Network is the New Mentor

In talking with successful early career investigators, one thing they hold in common is that they have had good mentors as they've developed as researchers, mentors who have brought them into their grant-writing and publications and strengthened them in a variety of ways.

However, finding a mentor who functions as your guru can be difficult. As faculty researchers today have a diversity of responsibilities and needs, finding one mentor to fulfill those needs is both difficult to do and taxing for that mentor if you do find him/her.

Donna J. Dean, in her book, Getting the Most out of Your Mentoring Relationships, suggests that there are a variety of support/mentoring needs:

• Credential building
• Coaching
• Research area needs
• Funding support
• Life/work balance
• Project management skill-building

These needs are all important to professional development in research, but they need not all come from the same person. Dean suggests that faculty researchers identify what they want out of a mentoring relationship and then seek out the right person to support them in that capacity. In this way, you create a mentoring network instead of relying on one mentor for all things.

There are a variety of sources for different types of support. Certainly, senior faculty researchers working in your field make sense, but you can also receive support from colleagues and peers. And, although it may be easier to have people supporting you who are down the hall, it's also a good idea to look for support outside your university and even in other fields, depending on what your particular support need is.

The first step to creating a solid network of support is to map out your support needs and begin to brainstorm people who could fill them. Once you've identified the support you need and prospective mentors, vet those prospects. In her blog, Karen Burns suggests asking a prospective mentor for a piece of advice first to see how that goes before asking them to commit to a mentoring relationship.  Also, once you have clarity on the type of support you need, it will be easier to explain to your prospective mentor what you're asking them for and allow them to decide if they can support you in that way.

By creating a network of support instead of relying on one mentor, you will get multiple perspectives and expertise that will allow you to be successful in the multi-faceted work of a faculty researcher.

Resources:
13 Tips on Finding a Mentor by Karen Burns
Getting the Most out of Your Mentoring Relationships by Donna J. Dean (We're happy to send a copy of this book to interested CU Denver faculty - email naomi.nishi@ucdenver.edu)