If Your R01 Was Scored but not Fundable - Do This
If your last R01 was scored, but not enough to get you across the pay line, it means your reviewers liked your grant. But to get funded, you need reviewers to do more than just like what you presented in your proposal.
You need them to get excited about your R01. Even if the first go around didn’t make the sparks fly, you have an opportunity with your resubmission to help your reviewers fall head over heels for you, your team, and your research idea.
More Than Comments & Critiques
To elevate the enthusiasm with your resubmission, the first thing PIs address is reviewer comments and critiques in the summary statement. This is an obvious first step when doing your investigation as to what went wrong the first time. But the truth is, you have to go deeper than the words of the reviewers.
There’s an intangible piece to your grant writing that’s often overlooked, but can help you create emotional buy-in from your reviewers. That intangible piece is selling the story of the research.
Now, I’m not a fan of the sales analogy, but it sticks here because it speaks to the need for your grant to connect with your audience (your reviewers) and get them excited about and emotionally invested in your research and its potential.
Since you’re a scientist, not a novelist or marketer, how do you go about telling a story and grabbing the attention of your reviewers?
Start with Clarity
One of the first things we do for PIs during our Strategic Grant Review process is to ensure their resubmission is crystal clear on the Big Three elements of the R01: why your research is worth doing, why you have the right team in place to do it, and why your project is feasible.
These big three questions are at the core of what we look at to enhance the storytelling of R01s so that reviewers have fewer questions and a clearer understanding of what they are reviewing. This combination of clarity, simplicity, and persuasiveness is key because it eliminates all barriers of confusion that traditionally prevent reviewers from getting enthusiastic about your proposal.
Before we move on to the next step in building clarity, I want you to remember this.
Clear writing is not going to salvage a bad research idea, but unclear writing will tank a great research idea.
Connecting The Dots of Your R01
When you’re working on bringing clarity into your R01, your next best step is to make a clear connection between the background and significance of the research with the actual nuts and bolts approach of what you are doing. Essentially this is making the connection between why you’re doing this with what you’re doing.
And the last connection you want to make is ensuring your supplementary documents support the arguments for the big three questions.
A lot of PIs neglect the supplementary documentation because they’re so focused on just getting those 13 pages out the door. If your documents, such as your biosketch, your human subjects/vertebrate animals, and even your facilities documents, are nothing more than boilerplate, they won’t be enough to show real support for your proposed project.
You want to make sure all of your supplementary documentation is tailored and customized to the project that you’re proposing so that everything is connected and tells a comprehensive and cohesive story.
It Ends with Clarity
The success of your resubmission comes down to simplicity and clarity. If you can nail that on your next R01 submission, you are in great shape to help your reviewers fall in love with your proposal and get your resubmission funded.
More R01 Tips
If you found this helpful, I invite you to sign up for our Free Resource Library, where you can find lots of great tools, tutorials, and worksheets to help you write better NIH grants.