Science and Art of Successfully Attaining Grant Funding
There are the formal and practical steps that you must walk through to apply for a grant
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Then there are 3 subtler, best practices that we see repeatedly:
Compelling Science Stories
Effective Networking
Transparently Showing How you Employ Funding
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Openness + Effective Storytelling are Powerful Persuasion
- What is a great science story?
- Telling a great science story is important for getting the attention of funders.
- They read so many applications—many of which are highly technical—that a clean, clear narrative is compelling and somewhat rare.
- Anna Greka's lab conveys her beautiful mission, supported by visual imagery and up-to-date areas of current investigation. This is best practice science story-telling.
- Collaboration pays when it comes to getting grant funding:
- Collaboration across disciplines continues to receive the support and encouragement of the major governmental grant making bodies.
- Funding for cross + multi-disciplinary grants continues to increase each year.
- Aligning with more established, senior and prolific researchers can also help
- For that reason we built the LYNX search engine into OpenScholar to enable you to network better and find collaborators faster.
- When you do receive grant funding, be open about your work:
- Good stewardship of grant resources means transparency on the part of the researcher.
- Putting your current research into the public realm, in Pre publications and working papers, a funder can see what you're doing, remain informed and not surprised.
- A website in the public realm online, unlike a report that gets put in a drawer, is more easily seen and shared and allows a funder to track a project’s progress.
