Internal funding opportunitiesStage 2 – The Proposal Application Process
Point of contact: Charlotte Backholer
Write the Proposal
Read the advice offered by your funding agency, announcement and or supporting guidelines carefully, as your proposal can be disqualified for something trivial as exceeding the word limit or using the wrong font.
Research councils provide “guidelines”, which can be accessed below:
“Case for support”
The majority of applications require some form of “Case for Support”, which often is the most substantial part of the application for peer reviewed grants. The following points should be considered and aim to assist you in writing a good document.
- When writing your proposal remember that it is likely that the majority of the panel members and programme managers( Research Councils) may not be experts in your specific field, so ensure that the proposal is written in a way that can be understood by non experts.
- Grab your reader’s attention and ensure the first page includes a summary of the proposal.
- Ask people (friends, colleagues, family) to review your proposal and listen to their feedback. If they do not understand something or have misunderstood your intensions amend the document so it cannot be misunderstood.
- Address the criteria required for the evaluation process for Research Council applications:
- Does the proposal address a well-formulated problem?
- Is it a research problem, or is it just a routine application of known techniques?
- Is it an important problem, whose solution will have useful effects?
- Is special funding necessary to solve the problem, or to solve it quickly enough, or could it be solved using the normal resources of a well-found laboratory?
- Do the proposers have a good idea on which to base their work? The proposal must explain the idea in sufficient detail to convince the reader that the idea has some substance, and should explain why there is reason to believe that it is indeed a good idea. It is absolutely not enough merely to identify a wish-list of desirable goals (a very common fault). There must be significant technical substance to the proposal.
- Does the proposal explain clearly what work will be done? Does it explain what results are expected and how they will be evaluated? How would it be possible to judge whether the work was successful?
- Is there evidence that the proposers know about the work that others have done on the problem? This evidence may take the form of a short review as well as representative references.
- Do the proposers have a good track record, both of doing good research and of publishing it? A representative selection of relevant publications by the proposers should be cited. Absence of a track record is clearly not a disqualifying characteristic, especially in the case of young researchers, but a consistent failure to publish raises question marks (extracted from Peyton Jones & Bundy, 2007).
Please contact the Finance Office, who will be happy to advise you concerning any questions you may have relating to writing your proposal.
“Costing and Pricing your proposal”
All figures must be approved by the Finance Office and Research Support unit prior to submission. Proposal Budget
a) Notify the correct people & Inform Finance Office (If not already done in Stage 1c)
b) Establish the type of proposal & the type award
c)Write the Proposal, Proposal Budget, and complete the EIRA1 SoM ethics form & RS1 form
d) Obtain Approval Signatures
e) Submit the Proposal
f) Go to Stage 3 - Managing the Award (S3)