The purpose of this paper is to describe how a college-level research office has used a variety of services and tools to increase faculty grant activity. A dozen practices will be discussed. Results indicate that the grant dollars received in the most recent fiscal year (FY2019-2020) are almost 150% higher than in the year before these practices…

The impact of resubmission assistance on grant proposal success is relatively unknown. Given that a significant proportion of proposals, up to 90%, are rejected by the sponsor, this lack of information makes it difficult for Research Development (RD) professionals to decide whether to invest resources in this service. This study responded to New…

Departmental research administrators offer a wide range of support services to research communities, university central offices, and fellow research administrators in other departments and institutions around the world. It is important for department-level research administration offices to function as a unit to provide centralized services that…

Bibliometric benchmarking can be an aid to researchers pondering whether to apply for competitive grants. In this paper, the highly prestigious grants offered by the European Research Council to young scientists of any nationality were scrutinized. The analysis of the 2014-2015 data indicates that over 75% of life science grantees in the starting…

The need to understand efficacy and outcomes from grant-funded activity is common to funders, the academic community, and the public. Yet, few articles in the research administration corpus offer details on and considerations of applying the concept of return on investment (ROI) to grant activity. To determine the volume of material available…

Call it innovation, creativity, imagination, cutting edge, paradigm shift, or any other term for new information, an assessment of innovation may now impact the final decision on awarding grants to investigators. What exactly is innovation and how does the reviewer perceive innovation in the research approach? Procedures, the approach, and…

Although the Faculty Learning Community is not a new structure or initiative in the higher education arena, adapting this model for faculty development focused on grant proposal writing is relatively new. This article describes how the concept developed by Milt Cox of Miami University has been successfully modified and implemented twice on the…

The University of Southern Maine (USM) designed and implemented an internal Research Cluster Seed Fund competition with the goals of building USM faculty expertise to address industry and community needs, deepening the impact of research through an interdisciplinary approach to solving problems, and leveraging external funding to sustain…

Experienced grant writers know that reviewers are quick to decide whether they like or do not like the proposals they are reading. Therefore, much of the success of any given proposal rides on the strength of the first page--its capacity to "sell" the research idea to skeptical reviewers. This paper describes a writing technique designed to elicit…

As researchers turn to industry over government for research funding, it is proposed that research administrators provide substantial assistance to faculty in the different strategies and skills needed to win grants. Differences between corporate and federal sponsors, basic strategies found effective in winning grants, and elements of effective…

A study of 163 colleges and universities examined 33 variables seen as incentives for faculty to engage in sponsored research. Results suggest a small predictive relationship between released time to write proposals, reduced faculty loads to work on funded projects, availability of graduate and research assistants, return of some direct costs to…

A survey of tenure-track faculty in the Texas A & M University college of education investigated attitudes concerning the environment for grantsmanship. Results indicate the need for a system providing faculty with assigned time for proposal development, provision of start-up money for competitive grant-writing, equal emphasis on grant writing…

To demystify the grant-seeking and proposal-writing process, two administrators at Kutztown University (Pennsylvania) began a standing committee to train, encourage, and help faculty members assist each other. The committee has offered collaboration, social support, and technical expertise; the result has been an increase in grant proposals and…