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Know Your Project

This question gets at method... you should have an answer to this in mind, and develop the detailed logistics. This question will matter greatly when it comes to outlining your research methods and budget.

So you need funding for your project and want to write a grant proposal…what comes first?

Clearly understand what problem you are trying to solve. 

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Many individual research funders are interested in participating in a type of advancement in the field.

- How will your project be either solving a problem or answering a question?

- How will your project contribute to a body of existing research?

Be able to answer: What problem or obstacle is there? How would you like to solve it? 

A body of existing research this funder is perhaps a part of, or at least familiar with and cares about.

If you are wondering how these questions may be posed in a call for grants, below are annotated excerpts from a call for applications from the National Endowment for the Humanities - Mellon Fellowships for Digital Publication. The annotated breakdowns of both the call and an applicant's narrative give one (the utmost emphasis on this) example of how to understand project goals in the grant's language. 

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Before moving forward and reading these examples, know that your project's goals and expression of those goals will be quite different from what you see here. This example serves as exposure to types of successful narrative structures that include the grant's requirements. The call may explicitly describe the funder organization's priorities and values in the projects they will choose to fund, like this one does. 

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A pivotal aspect of these specific grantee projects is the necessity for "digital expression." It will be crucial that a successful applicant both inherently needs digital expression and that the applicant explicitly outlines why digital expression is required for their project to work. To see the applicant's response, you can either visit this page of our guide or see the full Narrative response here. 

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In answering the question above about project goals and solutions, you should be able to answer the following question(s) about context: 

  • What research community are you entering? How does your project fit into an existing context and environment around this topic? 

If you’ve been able to identify your research question as a problem already, you must have had an understanding of what is missing… (err, we hope). You should be able to articulate the following: 

  • Who else is doing work that is similar to the work you want to do?

  • Develop a way to clearly communicate how your project fits into that larger movement or conversation, yet also fills specific needs and does something unique.

  • If someone else has already tried to solve this question, why didn’t that work? (What are you adding?) 

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Some may call this an environmental scan or a landscape analysis. In some disciplines, it's called a literature review. In short, be able to describe why your project fits into and is different from work like it.

It's important to point out that if your project isn't based on a knowledge of the gaps, maybe you need to hone your project!

What is your project doing that would motivate your funder to value it?

Also included in this first step is understanding who you’ll be impacting. 

  • Consider your scope, your audience. Who do you want your project to interact with? How? Why? What will that do? 

  • How will your project be able to help ___? (Possible subjects include: the public, students, faculty, researchers at X place, museum go-ers at X place, residents of X place, etc.) Ask who does this funder serve, and insert that audience into this framing.

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Here are some other guiding questions and topics you should consider, or be able to articulate about your project goals, specifically: 

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  • Construct a general timeline of how long your entire project will take—this can be sectioned into bits depending on which grant you apply for.

    • For example, are you applying for funding to write chapters? Maybe your overall project timeline can benefit from using smaller fellowships and stipends to pull the project together.\

    • Establish an idea of budget for each increment—this will help you determine how to either break up the project (into chapter, steps, phases, etc.) 

    • This site is a great step-by-step that will guide you through how to create that budget. 

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  • Establish a plan for auxiliary funding at many stages...who (which funders) will help you and at which stage? Will your institution cover travel costs? Will X funder cover access to collections? This is useful information for funders to know—how much support do you have from other funders? 

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  • Describe the organizational partnerships and qualify the resources (in-kind and/or financial) that you will leverage to perform the work.

 

  • Consider creating a name for the project that you are proposing that communicates that it fulfills the objective of the solicitation in an acceptable, innovative, yet proven, manner, maybe conforming to a meaningful acronym.

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