The Research Funding Toolkit: How to Plan and Write Successful Grant Applications

Making high-quality grant applications is easier when you know how research funding agencies work and how your proposal is used in the decision-making process. The Research Funding Toolkit provides this knowledge and offers a range of practical techniques to help you succeed in tough research funding competitions.

A complex set of factors determine whether research projects win grants. This Handbook helps you navigate these issues and identify your personal challenges to research grant success. The guidance also extends to the real-world challenges of grant-writing such as:

• Obtaining the right feedback
• Dealing effectively with your employer and partner institutions
• Making multiple applications as efficiently as possible

There are many sources that will tell you what a fundable research grant application looks like. Very few offer a step-by-step guide to writing one. The Toolkit fills this gap with detailed advice on creating applications that are easy to read, easy to understand and convincing.

Jacqueline Aldridge is a research administrator who has extensive experience in helping academic colleagues develop fundable research grant applications.

Andrew Derrington is Executive Pro Vice Chancellor of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Liverpool and has lectured and researched in Psychology at the Universities of Sussex, Newcastle, Nottingham and Kent. His research studies how the brain processes visual information.