A version of this article first appeared in Funding Insight in December 2021 and is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com
How to nudge your draft-bid reviewers to deliver their sharpest insights
Have you ever asked a colleague for feedback on a draft grant proposal and been told: “looks fine to me, but it’s not really my area”? Not particularly helpful, is it? Well, in this article I’m going to help you avoid ever hearing those words again, by detailing how you can raise your chances of getting better feedback on draft bids. (Next week, I’ll try and help you avoid ever uttering those words again with some tips on giving good feedback.)
Ask for early feedback on the core idea to make sure you’re barking up the right tree. You should seek a sense check from your friendly neighbourhood Research Development Manager and/or from a senior academic colleague familiar with the scheme. Ask whether the idea is in scope, whether it’s a good fit, whether it has a realistic chance of success, whether applying is the best use of your time.
There’s no shame in submitting a competitive but ultimately unsuccessful application—there’s only so much money to go round. The real waste in the research funding system is generated by applications which are uncompetitive and/or targeted at the wrong scheme. Your time is too valuable to waste, so get an early sense check. It could save you weeks of fruitless work.
Identify your reviewers early. You should approach colleagues who can help you as soon as you’ve made sure you’ve passed step 1 above. You should seek feedback from colleagues with similar characteristics to the actual reviewers. Most funders publish details of their selection process on the call web page. Ideally you’ll find someone with experience with the funder, perhaps a grant winner, panel member, or regular reviewer. If not, ask someone who’s served as a panel member for another funder and is used to reviewing grant applications. You should find one reviewer who is very familiar with your research area, to represent the expert peer reviewer. You should also find another reviewer works in another discipline within the funder/panel remit, to represent the perspective of a funding panel member. If you can do this with two people, that’s great.
Colleagues are likely to be busy, but some will be in research leadership roles, so it’s literally their job to help you. Once again, you should approach them—and your research development manager or equivalent—as early as possible. Ask them if they’ll read and comment on a full draft if you can get it to them by date X (where X gives you lots of time to read and respond and redraft before the deadline). If you ask early enough, it’ll seem ages away, and they’re more likely to agree. Remind them as the date gets closer and send a full draft by the date you promised.
Work on the official form. Always enter your draft onto the online system and print off a PDF to send for feedback. There’s something about reviewing an application in its natural habitat—in the same form that panel members will see it—that prompts better feedback. I’ll spot things once it’s on the official form that I won’t see on an MS Word version, even if it has the same order and word count. Maybe it’s because it’s easier to see how the sections work together, or maybe it’s because it’s more official, more real. Also, engaging with the submission system early prevents unpleasant surprises later.
Share the scheme criteria with reviewers. Funding calls don’t exist in a vacuum; there will be aims and objectives of the scheme, and there will be assessment criteria. You must share these (perhaps in summary form) with reviewers. It matters whether it’s a fellowship or a project grant. The importance that the funders place on impact/knowledge exchange matters. Reviewers need to know the broader context to give you useful feedback.
Written or conversational feedback? My advice is to go with whichever your reviewers feel more comfortable with. Written feedback gives them more time to say what they want to say and means you have a record of their comments to refer to, which you won’t with a discussion. But sometimes the written word can lose the nuance of a discussion and is inevitably a one way rather than a two-way process. Sometimes a discussion is quicker and easier for the reviewer. The ideal is written comments with a conversation to follow up and check understanding, but time doesn’t always allow.
Accept that the first draft probably won’t be very good. You should expect constructive criticism and major revisions. Writing an application is difficult because you’re trying to explain something that’s obvious to you to a reader to whom it’s not obvious at all. Reviewing your own work is near impossible because you will read it through the tinted lenses of what you expect to see and what you already know. Of the first drafts I see, I reckon the best grant writers have about 80 per cent of their idea down in written form, and the other 20 per cent—implicit assumptions, ambiguities, and missing detail—is still in their heads. For less experienced applicants, it can be 50 per cent or more.
Remember that you are not your application. Keep a clear distinction between you and your ideas, on the one hand, and the application, on the other. The application is a work-in-progress, it’s a fallible, imperfect artefact, a mere simulacrum or avatar of your ideas, forced to assume written form in a restrictive application format. In its current form, it may be doing a great job of representing you and your ideas. But it might be letting you down badly. All applicants are poorly placed to tell, which is why you need help. But even more importantly, remember that you are not inviting judgement on your value as a researcher or as a human being. Understanding this puts you in a better, less defensive position to receive feedback. Just as importantly, it gives the reviewer permission to be critical because in constructively criticising the draft, they’re not criticising you.
Ask specific questions. Don’t ask reviewers what they think, ask them how it could be improved. Some people are held back by misplaced politeness, by concerns about their suitability to comment on work in your field, by lack of faith in their own instincts. But you can prompt your reviewers with specific questions to help prompt better feedback and show that you’re open to what they have to say, and to reworking the application in response.
With the expert in your discipline, a good question to ask might be about specific weaknesses you’re worried about. You might also ask them where they think the draft is vulnerable to a hostile reviewer… if they wanted to sink the bid, how would they do it? What thread would they pull on? What in the proposal might be misinterpreted? If you give your colleague permission to play the implacably and inexplicably hostile ‘reviewer 2’, you’ll get a lot more from them.
For the more generalist reviewer, you may need to help them get past the fact that it’s not their area. But that’s precisely why you’ve asked them. Did they understand your proposal? Perhaps not how it works, but what it’s for, the overall shape of the project and why it matters. Is the novelty obvious? What was confusing or puzzling? If some element isn’t clear, perhaps they lack the background, but more likely it’s because… well, because it isn’t clear enough. Whatever their reaction is, whatever their instincts tell them, is correct because it’s their impression. Ask them not to self-censor. It’s your job as applicant to pick out what you should respond to and change.
Ask the big question. You can ask everybody this, my favourite review question: imagine we’re six months in the future and the application was unsuccessful—why? This is a really good way of flushing out the most serious weaknesses which you may be reluctant to admit.
Pay it forward. If you’ve benefited from colleagues’ feedback on your application, it’s incumbent on you to help others in turn. How can you do that effectively? More on that next week.