We may be alone in the universe, but you are not alone in your pursuit of external grants and contracts. The materials we have collected for this Web page can serve as a reference, but if you have questions, concerns, or ideas, please do not hesitate to contact us and we will work with you to find the information or tools that you need.
As you start into this process, there are some basic ideas that can help you.
Grants can make great things happen.
Principal Investigator's Checklist (a guide to key information you'll need)
To win at the grants game, you have to play.
- A 25-percent success rate is considered phenomenally successful.
- Our success depends on submitting many strong proposals.
Grants aren't free money.
- They require a lot of effort to get and execute them.
- It is a world of "bosses," not "sugar daddies."
- If an agency thinks that the proposal is just a way for Penn State to "make more money," it will never be funded.
- The solution may be "change the model," not "get external money."
Pursuing grants takes time.
- To be successful, you build it into your weekly/monthly schedule.
- If you need money tomorrow, don't look for grants today. Assume a nine- to twelve-month lag time.
Look before you leap.
- Identifying a good call or funding source is a several-step process.
- Is the deadline possible? Does the award amount make it a strategic time investment? Does it play on our strengths? What else has the agency funded?
Barriers or tools--attitude makes the difference.
- You can make your life harder or easier by how you engage the Penn State machinery around external funding (e.g., Office of Sponsored Programs and the Office of University Development).
- Death, taxes, and indirect costs. Don't spend time resisting the inevitable.
Collaborations strengthen proposals.
- Partnerships must be fair, coherent, and intrinsically relevant to the proposed project.
- While they strengthen proposals, they make the proposal development process significantly more complicated and consequently require more time.
A $5K and a $250K proposal take about the same amount of work.
- It is even possible for larger proposals to take less work because agencies that process large numbers of requests become exceedingly efficient.
Anticipate Murphy's Law.
- It always takes significantly longer to complete a proposal than you anticipate.
- Once you have estimated the time you think it will require, double it.
Accept the horseshoe nail principle.
- You can invest 100 hours in a proposal, but be disqualified for a minor thing (e.g., the margins of the proposal are too small) if you work too close to deadline.
- Plan to submit all proposals one week before the deadline.
Costs are real.
- Short-term "gains" can have long-term costs if:
- the project requires more resources than allocated
- it damages relationships between Outreach and the agency
- it damages the relationship with the partners
It isn't over when you get the money.
Continued contact with agencies enhances long-term success.
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