Going after Grants:
The Benefits and Opportunity Costs
By
Bryan R. Early
Associate Professor, Political Science Department
Director, Center for Policy Research
Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy
University at Albany, SUNY
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Grant-Funded Research
• Seeking out funding to support
research and outreach activities
• Many different kinds of sponsors
• “Internal Awards” from within the
University
• Government Agencies
• International Organizations
• Private Foundations
• Corporate Sponsors
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What Grants Can Fund
• Grant funding can be used for a
myriad of purposes
• Course Releases
• Summer Salary
• Students
• Travel
• Equipment / Software
• Consultants / Services
• Conferences / Workshops
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Why Go After Grants
• Support Basic Research
• Surveys
• Resources for field work, archival work, and interviews
• Course releases
• Research assistants
• Access expensive resources and data
• Collect new data
• Get better equipment
• Travel funding for conferences and for workshops
• Publication support (Open Access / Editing / Indexing)
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Why Go After Grants
• Supporting yourself, your students, and
your department
• Grants can pay for summer salary, maxed at
around 30% of base salary
• Grants can fund undergraduates
• Grants can fund graduate students
• Grant money helps to pay for departmental travel to
conferences
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Why Go After Grants
• Applied Projects and Outreach
• Grant-funded projects can involve you in the
policymaking and policy implementation process
• Grants can support community outreach activities
• Grants can incentivize creating works for public
consumption
• Grants can allow you to pay for your scholarship
to be “open access”
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Why Go After Grants
• Professional Rewards
• Appreciation and recognition within your department, college, or
university
• Makes you a more attractive academic job candidate
• Makes you more attractive for other professional opportunities
• Gives you a new, broader skill set that can also be attractive for other
professional opportunities
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Grant-Writing as a Skill
• Grant-writing is a skill that can be
improved with practice
• Grant-writing is a persuasive endeavor,
balancing:
• Expertise
• Clarity
• Organization
• Showmanship
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Grant Funding and the Sponsor’s Dilemma
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Craft of Writing Grants
• Requires clear, concise writing
• Requires recasting your project to make
it maximally attractive to sponsors’
goals
• Your credibility, reputation, and trackrecord are very important
• Must communicate the project to a
more general audience and focus on
substantive implications
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Costs of Pursuing Grant-Funded Research
• Grants take time
• Finding Them
• Writing Them
• Implementing Them
Highly Competitive
Grants Have Low
Probabilities of
Success
• Reporting on Them
• Grants enhance the scope of your responsibility
• Grants force you to interact with multiple bureaucracies
• Grants force you to learn new things… administrative things
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Strategies for Reducing Opportunity Costs
• Lower “search costs” for finding appropriate grant
opportunities
• Dovetail grant-writing into pre-existing projects
• Re-use literature reviews
• Re-use grant application material for your book prospectus
• Pitch the same idea or project to multiple sponsors
• Revise your project ideas and re-submit them
• Collaborate on grant projects
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Experience and Writing Grants
• You will likely have a lot of unsuccessful
grant applications, especially early on
• The more grants you write, the faster
you can write them
• The better you become at writing grants,
the more likely your grants are to
succeed
• The more you succeed in getting grants,
the greater your probability of getting
new ones
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Conclusions about Grant Writing
• Grants are a great way to fund the scholarly activities you
otherwise might find to costly or challenging to take on
• Grants are an increasingly important resource for
universities
• Grants are an investment:
• By spending time on them, you hope to be awarded with time, money,
and reputational benefits
• Grant-writing is a skill that can be invested in and improved
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