Writing an LOI

This week, I was asked to review a Letter of Intent (LOI), and it had been a minute since I had, so I figured it was a great time to brush up on best practices and to focus our blog on the same!

LOIs are generally brief pre-proposals that are requested by a foundation. The foundation reviews the brief LOIs and requests full proposals from those groups who submitted the best projects. This culls the best ideas and limits the number of full proposals the foundation needs to review.

Your LOI should respond to the needs of the funding agency to be most competitive. Also, if the agency offers you guidelines to use for the LOI, use them! Aside from this, as the name implies, the LOI should be short (letter length) and it should give a brief and compelling overview of your project. It should be written for the layperson and should be written in the first person and active voice.

If the funding agency does not specify guidelines for an LOI, UMassAmherst recommends the following format:

Summary Statement: Give a summary of your project, what it is, what need it meets, and how much you're asking for.

Statement of Need: Why is this project important?

Project Activity: What will the project entail?

Outcomes: What do you expect to achieve?

Credentials: Why are you and your team the best team to do this work?

Budget: How much are you asking for and briefly what will the money be used for?

Closing: Briefly return to why this project is important and offer your vision. Give any final contact information and offer to answer any questions they may have.

Signature: Make sure you know who is designated to send LOIs on behalf of the university to a particular agency (sometimes an Advancement Officer is the liaison for an agency and LOIs must go through him or her).

LOIs are your opportunity to pique the interest of funders. Once you are invited to submit a proposal, you are already competing with a much smaller pool of applicants. So, always make sure your project aligns with the agency's needs and mission and pitches your project clearly and succinctly.

Resources:
Guidelines for a Letter of Intent - UMassAmherst
How to Write a Winning LOI - Grant Writer Team

Bolster your proposals with tips from the summer

This summer, given that folks were stuck at home, ORDE offered our first ever summer e-Seminar series, focusing on a few key strategies for bolstering your proposal development game. I'm happy to announce that these are all now available on our Vimeo site in case you missed them. Below is the run-down of these seminars and a couple of tips from each. Click on the e-Seminar title to go back and watch these for yourself. 

Writing Your Specific Aims

If we think of the grant proposal as real estate, then the Specific Aims or Project Overview is the front door of our proposal. It tends to be where reviewers start when reading your proposal, and it tends to be where they decide if they like your proposal or not. Given its importance, in this seminar, I suggest that you start your overview with a hook or sentence that grabs your reviewer's attention and highlights the necessity of the work. I also suggest that you end your overview with a vision of your research that reminds your reviewer of the importance of your work.

Working with Program Officers

Program Officers (POs) often can give you additional insight into an agency or grant program to which you may be considering applying. I recommend that you reach out to POs early and often. The two most important times to connect with a Program Officer is early on as you are developing your grant proposal. Once you have a solid one-pager on your research project, reach out to your PO and ask to have a conversation about the fit of your project and solicit advice as to how to best hone your project for their program. The other important time to reach out to a PO is when you are not funded and are making decisions related to resubmissions. After considering the feedback and your options, reach out to a PO to get their advice as to what revisions should be made before resubmitting.

Revising and Resubmitting Your Proposal

When your grant proposal is not funded, it's a bummer (to say the least), however, remember that the researchers who are the most well-funded tend to also be those who have had the most rejections. So, take heart in knowing this too shall pass and funding may lie in your next resubmission. So, once you've gotten past the heartache and read your reviews, you have a decision to make. At the NIH, you can resubmit your grant as a revised proposal with a response to reviews (an A1), or you can submit as a brand new proposal (an A0) - this might make sense if you've done a major overhaul of your proposal. Your last choice is to resubmit to another institute or agency. If, after going through the reviews and talking with your PO, you feel that the problem was really one of fit, it might be time to go in search of a program where your project is a great fit!

Resources:

ORDE Vimeo site

Fall 2020 ORDE e-Seminar Schedule

I'm happy to announce ORDE's fall e-Seminar schedule. Faculty at our CU Denver /Anschutz Medical Campuses as well as our affiliates can register here: https://research.ucdenver.edu/research-development-and-education/home/faculty-seminars-and-events/faculty-seminar-registration. For others, these will be posted on our Vimeo site the day after the presentation, so you'll be able to find them there.

ORDE Faculty Seminars Fall 2020

Grant Writing e-Symposium

The Grant Writing Symposium this year will be completely online and will consist of the three parts below. Each piece will be offered separately, approximately a week apart. Participants from both campuses and our affiliates can sign up for any or all of the e-symposium components.

 e-Seminar: The Grant Development Process

September 23, 2020 / 12:00 – 1:00

Faculty Expert: Chris Phiel, Associate Professor, Integrative Biology

This e-seminar will orient participants to the grant development process, from researching the grant-making agency, through working with Program Officers, and writing the grant proposal. A faculty expert will discuss their own process for developing successful grant proposals.

e-Seminar: What Reviewers Want

September 30, 2020 / 12:00 – 1:00

Faculty Expert: Jeff Stansbury, Professor, School of Dentistry

This e-seminar will discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of grant proposals from the reviewer perspective. A seasoned reviewer, will discuss their experience as a reviewer and offer advice to PIs on how to craft proposals with the reviewer in mind.

 e-Workshop: Honing Your Grant Writing

October 7, 2020 / 12:00 – 1:00

Faculty Experts: Naomi Nishi, Associate Director for Educational Outreach, ORDE

For this e-workshop, participants will attend an online mini-seminar to receive instruction on grant-writing tips and strategies. They will then use a provided grant-writing checklist to revise a Specific Aims page or Project Overview. Following their revisions, participants will submit their revised project overview to Naomi and receive additional feedback via email.

ORS/ORDE Orientation (Denver only)

October 6, 2020 / 12:00 – 1:00

Speakers: Bob Damrauer, Associate Vice Chancellor for Research; Michael Jenson, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Research; Lynette Michael, Director, ORDE; Naomi Nishi, Associate Director, ORDE; Stefan Reiss, Senior Research Development Analyst; Rachel Sturtz, Research Communications Specialist

In this e-Seminar, ORS and ORDE staff will describe the services and opportunities available to Denver research faculty, walking them through who to contact for what and when as they conduct research. This will target new research faculty on the Denver campus, but will also be open to other early career Denver faculty who want to better understand what’s available to them through ORS and ORDE.

NIH Review Process

October 14, 2020 / 12:00 – 1:00

Faculty Experts: Michael Schurr, Associate Professor, School of Medicine

This e-Seminar will walk through the NIH review process, offering tips on selecting the right study section and institute. A seasoned reviewer will talk about their experience in the study section, in terms of process and what happens “in the room where it happens.”

Know Your Agency: PCORI

November 2, 2020 / 12:00 – 1:00

Faculty Experts: John Corboy, Professor, Neurology, University of Colorado School of Medicine

In this e-seminar, a seasoned PI, funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), will discuss PCORI’s priorities, and offer insight into how to work with PCORI and how to develop a competitive application for PCORI.

Tips on Developing Your K

November 9, 2020 / 12:00 – 1:00

Faculty Expert: Elena Hsieh, Assistant Professor, Pediatrics, School of Medicine

This e-Seminar will offer an overview of the NIH K mechanism and feature an interview with a recent K awardee to get at their experience, along with tips and potential pitfalls in developing this unique grant application.

Resubmitting at the NIH

Today, ORDE offered an e-Seminar on Revising & Resubmitting Your Grant Proposal, and Dr. Jennifer Kemp, Director of Research in the Department of Medicine within CU's School of Medicine offered us fantastic insight into what to consider when resubmitting your proposal to the NIH,

and I condense some of her key points below:

When you submit to the NIH and you're not funded, you have three options when it comes to resubmissions. You can resubmit as an A1 proposal where you make revisions based on reviewer feedback and submit your revised proposal with a summary statement of responses to reviewer concerns. The second option is to overhaul your proposal and resubmit it as a brand new proposal (A0). This means you will have no summary statement and it will go through the review process as if you submitted if for the first time. Third, if you realize that there was not a good fit at the study section you submitted to, you can resubmit the proposal to a different study section, Institute, or agency altogether.

So, how do you choose? Here's what Dr. Kemp recommended:

Submit an A1

This is a good option for you if your score was near the funding line and it seemed that reviewers were overall enthusiastic about your project. If the changes reviewers allude to are relatively minor, an A1 with the responses and revisions requested might be enough to push you over the pay line.

Submit an A0

If your score was well below the funding line (or above, since the lower the score, the better at the NIH) and/or if your proposal was triaged and did not get discussed at study section, it may be that the changes needed to bolster your proposal towards funding are so significant that you might want to completely rewrite the proposal and submit it as if it were brand new. Although the reviewers will likely recognize your proposal from reviewing it before, it may be better to start with a cleaner slate than to try to respond to the major and many criticisms they had.

Submit to a different study section, Institute, or agency

If upon seeing your reviews, it looks like you and your work are not a good fit for the study section to which you applied, you should consider going elsewhere. A conversation with a Program Officer can help you make this decision. One of our participants in the e-Seminar mentioned that he had asked his PO about submitting elsewhere, but the PO had argued that he should stay and even connected him with other funded PIs to help him build his competitiveness. But, if the PO agrees that you belong somewhere else, be sure to heed that advice.

You'll notice that not re-submitting is not listed among possible options here. :) This is because, although getting a rejection is brutal, you must remember that the most funded researchers have also suffered the most rejections, but they kept at it until they were funded and kept going. So go for it!!!

Resources:

Revising & Resubmitting Your Grant Proposal (ORDE video)