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Develop a funding strategy
Advice to help you complete the Funding Planning Workbook
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer number and variety of funding schemes, only to be underwhelmed when you realise how few are actually applicable to you! To cut through the chaos and become as efficient as possible, you’ll need to develop a funding strategy.
Key takeaways
- Start leading with smaller bids, collaborate as co-investigator to grow your track record.
- Create a diverse funding portfolio such as internal, external, government, and industry sources.
- Develop a pipeline of successive planned bids aligned with career goals, factoring in how each will build on the previous.
- Research fellowships focus on personal track record, so timing is key for competitiveness.
- Be cautious about ‘trying your luck’ with an under-developed application, as this has risks.
Read time: 5 min
Here are some initial tips to help you become more strategic and efficient in the almost never-ending quest for money, and as you complete the Funding Planning Workbook.
Advice for ECRs: To lead or collaborate?
A fundamental strategic question is deciding which funding applications to lead and which to collaborate on. You’ll find that successful senior researchers’ track records have a combination of both.
Growing your funding track record as co- and lead-investigator
Leadership of projects is essential for establishing strong credentials and independence as a researcher. But if you’re just starting out, you’re probably going to be competitive in a leadership role only for small seed-funding grants. While you should definitely be applying for these, you could also consider joining larger, more competitive funding bids as an associate or co-chief investigator. In either of these roles you are considered a ‘named’ investigator, which is important for your track record. In effect, collaborating on grants with established researchers lets you ‘piggyback’ on their track records. Your challenge will be to persuade them to include you. Asking your supervisor is an obvious place to start, but start spreading the net wider.
Challenges of leading a bid with collaborators
If you plan to lead a funding bid that will require collaborators, be realistic about two things. First, it can take a long time to assemble the right team. You may already know someone who would be perfect for a particular role on the project, only to discover that they don’t have the time or capacity. You may have to reach out to people you haven’t worked with before, which can introduce its own complications. Second, it’s not uncommon to discover that, as project leader, you will end up writing and putting together the lion’s share of the application. Collaborators will have good intentions but little time.
Make sure to build in realistic lead times for major tasks such as organising collaborators and/or industry partners for a particular grant. This will help you avoid starting too late. A useful rule of thumb is that most things will take twice as long as you expect!
Useful resources
Building a portfolio of funding prospects
Diversify your funding
There are many types of funding you can apply for. Just as investors diversify their investments to maximise returns and spread risk, you can build a varied portfolio of funding prospects. This might include a mix of internal and external grant schemes, plus some options for contract research, consultancies or tenders. There are numerous federal government grants beyond ARC and NHMRC, and don’t forget about state government schemes as well as funding opportunities from the philanthropic and industry sectors.
Health/medical research and the ARC
Unless your research is exclusively health/medical, don’t automatically discount ARC grants from your portfolio of funding prospects. Although the ARC does not fund health/medical research itself, it does fund research that may, ultimately, lead to improvements in health/medicine. Read the ARC Medical Research Policy to find out what kinds of research are, and are not, eligible.
It’s a fine line sometimes, so read the policy carefully and email the ARC grant strategy team in Pipeline and Pre-Award (Research Portfolio) if you’d like advice.
Developing a funding pipeline
When putting your funding portfolio together, plot the schemes you’re interested in on a timeline. Your funding portfolio and timeline should reflect your career goals. Into the timeline you can build a pipeline of prospects with a logical sequence, including a plan for staged growth. For example, if you’re starting out, be realistic and start small: first, plan to win seed funding for a small pilot project, then plan to use the pilot results as preliminary data to support a larger funding application.
Another example, for more experienced researchers, is to establish a pipeline from pre-clinical work, to clinical trials, to effectiveness-implementation research.
DIY funding calendar
Many funding schemes are offered annually. You can therefore create your own personal funding calendar of any annual schemes you’re interested in. This will ensure you know well in advance what’s coming up, helping you to be prepared. You will of course need to check periodically that the deadlines haven’t dramatically altered. Also remember that the University’s internal deadlines will fall a few weeks earlier.
Useful resources
- Internal funding opportunities (UniKey required)
- Current and forthcoming external opportunities (UniKey required)
- ARC funding calendar
- NHMRC funding calendar
Finding funding: Research Professional
The University has a subscription to Research Professional which is an external, searchable database of funding opportunities in Australia and overseas. It has tools that enable you to conduct (and save) targeted searches, create bookmarks, and receive email alerts. As an example, you can search by discipline, funder, and categories such as ‘early-career fellowships’ and ‘seed funding’.
Research Professional is free to University staff members and affiliates with an ‘@sydney.edu.au’ email account. Use this email account to register.
Word of caution about international funding opportunities. Although Research Professional has been customised so that it only returns results for which Australian researchers are eligible, further investigation can reveal that certain overseas grants and fellowships have in fact never been awarded to an Australian researcher. Fortunately, Research Professional provides links to funders’ websites, so you can check these things for yourself.
Fellowships – a special case
At some stage most research will want to apply for a research fellowship. A fellowship is different to other kinds of funding because it’s all about you, not a team, and because more emphasis is usually placed on your track record than on the project proposal itself (but this can vary depending on the scheme, particularly in the relative weighting). Timing when to apply for a fellowship is therefore essentially a function of where your track record is at. The critical question is: what must I have achieved to be at my most competitive for this fellowship?
To answer this question, you will need to (i) understand the fellowship’s objectives and assessment criteria, (ii) identify any gaps or weak points in your track record, relative to those objectives and assessment criteria, and (iii) allow yourself plenty of lead time to address them.
Useful resources
- Funding Planning Workbook (pdf, 133KB) (UniKey required)
(Part B, Strategically Develop Your Track Record) - Plan for a fellowship
Trial run or wait a while?
Deadlines have a way of defying the laws of time: as they approach, time speeds up. Due to this anomaly, many funding applications are under developed when it’s time to submit them. A classic question is: do I submit it anyway and see what happens, or shall I hold off, polish it up, and submit it next round?
There are many factors that can come into play. For example: Is there a reputational risk in submitting a substandard application? Will your collaborators/partners be upset if you don’t submit it? Is there likely to be useful feedback from assessors that can help you for next time? Might you just ‘get lucky’?
There is no simple answer to these questions; every case is different. If you’re unsure what to do, seek advice by emailing the Pipeline and Pre-Award team in the Research Portfolio.