Grant Proposal Writing: How to design and communicate your project convincingly

Course Description

Successful grant proposal writing is a fundamental basis to fund a career in research. There are plenty of national and international funding programmes with different funding schemes. Each scheme has its individual context and thematic focus, eligibility and funding rules, submission and evaluation process, and evaluation criteria. Thus, the detailed features and aspects of a successful proposal in one funding scheme are naturally differing from those of a successful proposal in another funding scheme. However, the process of how to work out these details is a common denominator to the different funding schemes. It requires skills way beyond the ability to work out a research idea in detail.
Therefore, this workshop focuses on a) how to develop your idea for a project into a sound work programme, b) how to match it to the requirements of the funding programme and c) how to facilitate the communication with the reviewer by presenting your complex ideas in an easy-to-understand way.
To achieve this, we will try out the RaumZeit Toolkit for designing and communicating your research project convincingly by working on your own research project. This may be a new idea for a real grant proposal or your current research project.
Besides, you will obtain a lot of background information on different funding programmes, evaluation processes and potential pitfalls.

Workshop contents
SESSION 1: Funding programmes and how to read the documents
SESSION 2: Develop your idea into a work plan
SESSION 3: Communicate your project convincingly
SESSION 4: Impact and Budget

Transfer of workshop contents into real-life grant proposal writing
Participants can get individual feedback on their proposal with respect to the workshop contents once they have written the first draft any time after the workshop.

Methods 
This is an online workshop including presentations, group work and individual work. Some “homework” will be provided for those, who want to use the time between the sessions to work on their grant proposal. There will be the opportunity to obtain some feedback – either in the group or individually – on the homework.