Needs of specialists and generalists
The first step is to determine who your audiences will be. In grant writing, it is common to have the same proposal evaluated by specialists in your field (‘reviewers’ or ‘referees’) as well as a broader group of researchers (‘the committee’) making the final decision based on more general evaluation criteria. Complicating matters even more, the specialist reviewers might have different expertise, each pertaining to some aspects of your research proposal. This is especially true if your proposal is interdisciplinary.
As a rule of thumb, in-depth experts are more likely to look for details in e.g. your chosen methodology and work plan. Since they are aware of potential pitfalls of the work, they will also look critically at your risk assessment and feasibility. These reviewers are usually more easily convinced of the relevance of the topic. On the other hand, people from outside your field will require some more explanation, for example regarding the (key elements of) the mechanism you’re studying. As these generalists will need to fulfill the impossible task of comparing apples to oranges, they will need information on why the topic or the specific research angle you chose is so relevant for the funding scheme and its evaluation criteria.
Some tricks to tailor to both audiences
While you’re catering the necessary details to one of your target audiences, you do not want to lose the attention of or even irritate the other. Some key tricks to avoid this:
- Provide background information in text boxes. This allows generalists to find back the basic concepts relevant for your research proposal, while the specialists can easily skip them.
- Provide the details that experts need to understand e.g. the methodology and innovation. But make sure to end your in-depth paragraphs with concluding, easy to understand sentences. Relating the details to the bigger picture will help generalists to still follow your storyline.
- Use text editing to guide the generalist reader. Highlight the key terms, phrases and sentences so that parts that are heavy on details can be skipped.
- Be explicit about the potential benefit of the work to your research field as well as to other fields.
Need help?
We’re happy to review your draft proposal to see whether your message comes across for all relevant audiences. In our full support trajectories, this is one of the key items we pay attention to from start to finish. Contact us if you want to know more!
