Framing Your Grant

It may seem natural when writing a grant to simply tell your reviewers what you're going to do. However, it's important to remember that if you begin by telling sponsors what you're going to do with their money, it forces them into your story at mid-point.

Jumping into the details of what you want to do right away skips over the overarching goals of your project and why what you're doing is important. Now, I'm not advocating for a chronological structuring of grants. You actually want to begin with the end in mind. Take for instance how the NIH or the NSF has you layout your grants - focusing first on Specific Aims or Intellectual Merit/Broader Impacts first, respectively.

This requirement prompts you to begin your grant at the end. What will happen as a result of your research? Reviewers want to know your end game before they journey with you through the details of how you're going to accomplish these goals.

Although these principles apply to the grant as a whole, they can also be applied to the very introduction of your grant, be that the project summary, abstract, or what have you. Aldridge and Derrington (2012) suggest a couple of different techniques for introducing your grant - Priming and Assert/Justify.

Priming is a technique where you preface your project goals with the reasons for why they're important. So, you don't tell your reviewers the purpose of the grant until you have shown them the need for such. Assert/justify is the antithesis of the priming approach in a sense, although either can work. With assert/justify, you immediately tell your reviewers the purpose of the grant and then immediately "justify" why what you're going to do is important, by demonstrating the need and elaborating on the importance of the grant.

In a recent ORDE Grant-Writing seminar we debated the benefits of each approach. We noted that for most awarded grant abstracts we saw, some of which were project summaries, the authors chose a priming approach. However, we also heard from reviewers, including some in the seminar, that they wanted to know immediately what the grant was about, and in that sense, reviewers often preferred an assert/justify approach.

You can certainly be successful, and many have been, with either approach, but always considering what the reviewer experience will be when they review your grant is important in choosing the right approach for you.

Sources:
The Research Funding Toolkit: How to Plan and Write Successful Grants by Aldridge & Derrington
Proposal Development Tips from ORDE