Give them something to look at

I've certainly pestered you about including visuals in your grants in previous blogs, but I recently gathered more fodder, so I bring it back once again. A year ago, I heard one of our faculty members who was a long time NIH reviewer say he had never seen a grant funded that did not include a visual in the Specific Aims. This floored me and I began sharing this anecdote in all of our seminars. Some argued that they had seen grants funded without visuals, but still to have one long-time reviewer make such a strong statement about visuals? I was sold!

Given my grant-visual evangelizing tendency, I was very excited to get more information on why these visuals in grant applications are important a couple weeks ago. Dr. Bob Murphy, Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology on our Anschutz Medical Campus, gave a talk at our seminar on the NIH Review Process. Dr. Murphy described how those assigned as primary, secondary, and tertiary reviewers on a grant application are usually the only folks who will read the proposal. When a proposal is discussed in a study section meeting, those assigned to a proposal present the proposal and their review to the entire group.  At this time, the specific aims pop up on a computer screen for the rest of the reviewers. As a reminder, all reviewers submit scores for each grant application, and most have not read the applications themselves before they are asked to score them.

Dr. Murphy stressed that when a grant is being discussed that has not been assigned to you as a reviewer, you're trying to listen to the presentations of those to whom it was assigned. Although you have the specific aims pulled up on a computer, you really don't have the time to read prose. You instead depend on the assigned reviewers to explain it. However, although you can't read prose, you can look at a visual that has been strategically placed in the specific aims (you knew this was coming).

If a clear visual helps your reviewer to understand your project and make sense of the presentation/review of your colleague, they're more apt to realize the true brilliance of the project and score it accordingly.

Resources:
How to use visuals in grants - Grant writing for dummies
The incorporation of visuals into grants - Platte