Storytelling in your grant

This week, ORDE offered a panel on Positioning Your Work and Yourself at our Anschutz Medical Campus.  Our panelists included Kathrin Bernt, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Dana Dabelea, Professor of Epidemiology and Pediatrics, and Anne Libby, Professor of Emergency Medicine. One of the themes that arose in our discussion was the idea of story-telling as a great tool for branding yourself, and especially in your grant. Below are some different ways to use storytelling in your grant.

Tell your story
This idea of storytelling can manifest in some different ways. Some researchers have been successful in sharing their story in a grant. As Dr. Libby suggested, this is a particularly useful strategy when applying for a career development type grant, such as an NIH K grant. For these, sharing your passion and explaining your personal career trajectory can give reviewers a solid sense of who you are and your potential. Reviewers are likely to advocate for a career grant when they have a sense of the applicant and their great potential.

Tell your patient's story
Another approach to storytelling is to integrate patient stories into your grant. If you're able to tie the results of your research to potentially alleviating trauma for your patients, you take your case for your research a step further to not only show the impacts of your work, but to personalize them.

Make your research a story
Dr. Bernt cautioned the group about the use of personal story when it will not make you unique. If you're hearing the same type of story again and again in a grant or in any other venue, it loses its power. However, if a personal story is not going to resonate with reviewers for whatever reason, you can still incorporate story-telling into your grant. This can be done by identifying what makes narrative compelling, things like context and the hook. Certainly, the importance of giving context to your reviewers so they can stick with you is important, but also creating a hook that grabs your reviewers, and invests them in your research story is also smart.

Tell someone else's story
Upon leaving, one of our faculty members shared with us her struggle to use storytelling in her grants. Her research focused on a health issue that wasn't necessarily life threatening, and she had no personal or patient stories that would work. Yet, she found compelling stories on the blogs of those afflicted by the issue or the parents of those afflicted. She was able to translate these stories and concerns into her grants and has found success with this approach. I thought this was a particularly creative strategy.

So, don't be afraid to tell a story in your grant whether it's yours, your patient's, your research's or someone else's. It will make you real and likable in the eyes of reviewers.

Resources
How to win grants with great storytelling - The Grant Training Center
The clues to a great story - Andrew Stanton TED talk