Know Your Agency: The Spencer Foundation

OVERVIEW

 The Spencer Foundation, located in Chicago, Illinois, was founded in 1962 by Lyle M. Spencer, a sociologist. Mr. Spencer was a life-long advocate of quality education, having started Science Research Associates (SRA) in 1938. SRA was best known for its SRA Reading Laboratory Kit found in most elementary and secondary classrooms in 1957 and after. Following Mr. Spencer’s death in 1968, the Foundation received its initial endowment, and agency personnel spent the next three years charting the Foundation’s vision and mission based on their Founder’s wishes concerning support of educational research. The first grants were made in 1971, and to date the Foundation has provided over $500 million in research funding.

Approach

The Spencer Foundation takes a broad approach to the subject of education, and funds projects worldwide. Educational improvement through research is the overall Foundation mission, and research efforts within a variety of disciplines have been supported including education, anthropology, economics, history, human development, literacy, psychology, public policy, sociology, and statistics. Investigators are expected to make a strong case for the importance of the proposed project in terms of educational improvement as well as Foundation needs and interests.

Specific Interests

Grant awards made by Spencer reflect a wide variety of topics within education including achievement, leadership, assessment, civic engagement, cognition, diversity, early childhood, higher education, human development, language, math and science education, organizational theory, race/ethnicity, literacy, special education, teacher education, and teaching with technology.

AGENCY ORGANIZATION

The Foundation is led by a President and Board of Directors. Current Board membership consists of six educators, primarily within higher education, and two

members from the business community. The current President, Na’ilah Suad Nasir, was selected in 2017, and is working with the Board toward evolution of the Foundation’s grants programs to ensure supported research efforts translate into educational practice more effectively among other priorities. At this time, a number of previously established funding priorities have been suspended.

AGENCY GRANTS PROCESS

The two largest grant programs offered by the Foundation are:

·    The Lyle M. Spencer Awards – designed to support large-scale research efforts with budgets between $100,000 and $1 million; the Foundation offers this grant competition once per year, and typically funds up to 10 awards

·    Small Grants – designed to support smaller-scale and/or pilot projects with budgets of $50,000 or less; there are four deadlines a year for this program

Last year the Foundation hosted informational webinars for both of these programs to outline expectations. Note that principal investigators (PIs) are limited to one active Spencer Foundation research award at a time; current PIs may submit another grant application set to start after their current grant project ends.

FY 2017 Awards/Success Rates

The Foundation provided 186 awards in 2017 including Conference Grants, Lyle Spencer Research Awards and Small Grants. Specific to the Small Grants Program, through which the Foundation makes the majority of its awards, they generally receive over 1000 proposals and are able to fund up to 10%. (Source: Small Grants Eligibility and Process web page)

Additional Funding Mechanisms

The Spencer Foundation also offers Doctoral Dissertation and Postdoctoral Fellowships, both administered through the National Academy of Education. The Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is open to early career faculty.

Resources:

The Spencer Foundation
Know Your Agency Brief: Spencer - ORDE

How to pitch your research

Many researchers cringe at the thought of marketing, selling, or pitching their research. This is in part due to folks being uncomfortable 'selling' their own work or themselves in a sense. Yet, I think this hesitation is built on a flawed perception of what pitching yourself and your work is. It's easy to understand how it happens. We live in a world where we are bombarded with people calling, emailing, or catching us on the street to pitch their product or cause. Yet, most of these folks aren't interested in what we need or think; it's sell by any means necessary.

But, that's not what pitching your research is about. You're not trying to trick anyone into investing in you or collaborating with you. Even if those tactics worked for you once, they would only work once. Instead, pitching your research is first and foremost about understanding your audience and their needs, and aligning your own needs and interests with theirs. For instance, when you're applying for a grant, you must first understand what the agency is looking for in the type of project they'll fund and then develop and pitch a research project that will further your research agenda and meet their needs.

Below, I offer some tips to consider when developing your pitch...

Have a hook
We're all familiar with hooks; that's the part of the story, novel, or pitch that piques the audience's interest enough to get them to want to learn more. To figure out your own hook, think about what is most intriguing or exciting about your work and start there. Is the problem you're solving really awful? Has your solution never been used before? Will the impact of your work change the world? Figure out what will grab your audience's attention best, and that should be your hook!

Make it compelling
Beyond an initial hook, think broadly about what your audience is interested in. If this is a conference presentation, think about what they came for and then respond to that. Also, think outside the box about all the reasons your research is important to different people. Are there health implications? economic implications? social or environmental implications? Make sure to construct your case to include all of these important points.

Keep it simple
Academic researchers are notoriously bad at gauging what is jargon and what is not, and unfortunately, there is no faster way to lose your audience than to throw a concept or word at them that they don't understand. This is particularly true when your audience includes laypeople, but also a danger when your audience includes people in your direct field. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to a conference presentation in my same focus in my same discipline where the presenter uses a word or mentions a theory that I'm not familiar with. Next thing you know, I've abandoned listening and am looking the word or concept up on my phone...

Make the connections
Steven Pinker in his book, The Sense of Style, discusses the difficulty that experts have in conveying their craft to non-experts. Quite simply, experts forget how they learned and developed what they're experts in; those neural pathways seem like they've always been there. For our purposes, this means that researchers forget to connect the dots when they are pitching their work. For them, it's obvious that the problem is a problem or how their solution will indeed solve the problem. But for those of us outside their expertise, listening in or reading their proposal, we feel like we're in a haze and worse, we feel unintelligent. Since we can all agree that these are not the sentiments we want to leave our reader or listener with, go to great lengths to connect all the dots explicitly. Although it may seem too obvious, your audience will be grateful.

To close, as I hope you've noticed, all of these pitch suggestions are grounded in one thing, your audience. I don't think it can be overstated how important understanding your audience is for any clear communication but especially for pitching your research.

Resources:
Elevator Pitches for Scientists - The Postdoc Way
Crafting a Sales Pitch for Your Grant Proposal - Robert Porter