3 Crucial Tweaks to Get Your NIH R01 Across the Pay Line
Did you think that addressing all of your reviewer critiques was enough to resubmit and get your grant across the pay line?
If it were that simple, that’s exactly what would happen to everyone who resubmits their grants, right?
But we both know that’s not the case. In fact, some PIs end up with worse scores on resubmission.
So, what’s the secret to getting your grant into a much better position to get a fundable score?
There are three tweaks that we use over and over again for our clients during strategic grant reviews that have led to a resubmission success rate of more than 80%!
Here’s how we make that happen:
The Right Way To Analyze Critiques
This first tweak is to understand the difference between responding to reviewer critiques and really making sure you are justifying, anticipating, and addressing any additional objections that might come up.
In preparing to resubmit, you’re responding, point-by-point, to what the reviewers critiqued in your summary statement. Much of that rebuttal is going to show up in your introduction to the resubmission as well as your application.
But what’s missing from that is any sort of additional explanation around why you’re doing what you’re doing and why you’ve designed things in the way that you have.
One of the best ways to get at this justification—and what we do with our clients—is to go through your summary statement critiques and ask yourself if you agree or disagree with the critique. It’s when you disagree that you’ll get the best information about why you’ve made the choices you have.
This increased justification is your opportunity to imagine what’s underneath those critiques and make sure you have all of your bases covered. It’s your opportunity to explain the bigger picture of what you want your reviewers to get excited about.
Strengthen Your Argument
The second tweak that helps level up your grantsmanship is strengthening your argument for why your research ought to be funded, why you have the right team in place, and why your project is feasible.
This is all tied to what I consider the implicit scoring criteria. This big-picture overview answers the questions reviewers have while reading your proposal and brings the
necessary clarity into the equation to allow them to know why they should fund your project.
Being able to answer those three questions at the big picture level while also addressing the explicit scoring criteria you received from your first proposal is a huge step in the right direction that leads to getting funded.
When you’re thinking about how to embolden your argument, part of what you’re doing is looking at how you’ve structured your application.
Have you arranged your argument in a way that is clear, concise, and exciting?
Checking off these three crucial boxes has a really meaningful difference to your scoring the next time around.
Why?
It creates context so reviewers understand not only the approach you're using to fill in the research gap but that they understand that gap itself and how it’s going to move the field forward.
If you can connect all of these pieces together and paint a clear big picture, that can be the difference between a middle-of-the-road score on your resubmission and something good enough to get your project funded.
Connecting The Dots of Your R01
The last tweak that has helped our clients have a successful resubmission shouldn’t come as a surprise if you’ve been following our company for a while.
Your Specific Aims Page.
I can not overemphasize the importance of going back to refine your aims page. Yes, you’ve done this a dozen times already, but it never hurts to revisit this all-important page of your NIH R01 and make sure everything is clear, concise, and as exciting as possible.
One of the smartest things you can do on your aims pages is to take a step back and figure out where you can really connect those dots for your reviewers and make it even clearer. In doing so, it’s your chance to up the engagement and excitement for your reviewers.
A big thing to consider that can help take you over the pay line is to keep it simple. Even if you are talking to experts, nobody is going to be mad that you’re covering things that they already know that are relevant to the project. So avoid getting in the weeds of the details and keep it at a 30,000-foot snapshot of your entire project.
It Ends with Clarity
These three tweaks will make a huge difference in the overall competitiveness of your application, especially if you’re in that position where you’re close but not quite close enough.
If you want to do better than getting close enough and get across that pay line, try out a method that has helped over 80% of our client resubmissions get funded. Apply for a Strategic Grant Review and get personalized help in getting your proposal scored and funded.