In the past few years, I have noticed an uptick in the number of grantees who pay for my grant support services out of pocket. I find this truly dismaying. Grantwriting is an essential skill for a biomedical researcher to master. Writing grant submissions to NIH is an iterative process, it takes time and multiple submissions to titrate your approach to a given IC and study section before you are successful. That means these grantees may be paying for grantsmanship support on multiple submissions from their own pocket, which is thousands of dollars.
In order to provide cost-effective support to the largest group possible, I developed a short course for grantees writing an NIH submission. I named the course ‘NIH Launch’, because I hope it will help people launch their funding relationship with NIH.
To develop the course, I thought carefully about the kinds of services my clients seem to find most helpful. I then translated that information into four 90-minute webinars.
The first will be offered in early Feb to help you take key steps before you write, such as mocking up different specific aims and shopping them around to different program officers at NIH to gauge enthusiasm. The second course, given later in Feb, will assist you in writing the most important page of your submission: The Specific Aims. In March, a webinar will discuss ways to “sell” the Significance of your submission, and concisely convey your competitive advantages in the Innovation section. Another will walk you through writing the Approach, the section whose score most closely correlates with your overall impact score.
I offer the courses live in February and March so that you will have a quality draft by early April, which gives you plenty of time to obtain feedback from trusted colleagues and mentors before the June-July deadlines.
Don’t worry if you have a schedule conflict—you can take the courses on demand at your convenience.
I have given versions of these talks for years in my in-person trainings; I am excited to be able to expand the number of grantees I can teach by offering these courses in a webinar format.
Another exciting new offering—we offer unlimited access to ALL our webinars for one year for a flat fee. Many of our clients have already signed up for the Annual Subscription-Individual for $1,000. We are also excited to offer Annual Subscription to Institutions for $30,000; this would enable hundreds of grantees to access our full complement of webinars throughout the year. This may be our most cost-effective strategy yet for training a large group of grantees in order to increase an institution’s NIH funding portfolio.
We hope you will take advantage of our new offerings and welcome your feedback!
