How To Use A System To Write A Competitive R01
Here’s what NOT to do if you want to write an NIH R01 that’s actually competitive:
Wing it and figure it out as you go.
This method doesn’t put you in control of your grant writing. It puts your emotions in the driver’s seat, and as soon as you lose your motivation, your grant writing is pretty much a lost cause.
So instead of letting your emotions run the show, I recommend having a solid grant writing system in place before you start writing.
The Ideal System
The ideal system gives you efficiency, structure, and organization in the writing process while also making sure that you produce a competitive R01 at the end. You want to make sure that you’re using your time wisely and making sure that you’re getting what you need from everyone else.
But when you look around and see everyone binge-writing and submitting at the last minute, or watching your colleagues submit multiple grants in a single cycle, the ideal system can seem like a fantasy.
It’s true that sometimes these more chaotic approaches can still lead to a successfully funded grant. But when you’re comparing yourself to your colleagues, remember to consider where they (and you) are career-wise. If you’re mid-career you very likely have some documents and resources at your fingertips that make submitting a last-minute grant more realistic compared to, say, an early-career PI who’s never submitted an R01 before.
You’re still trying to figure out a system that works for you.
Developing Your Strategy
The system that I teach is structured in a way that allows you to get from conceptualization to finished project in an organized way. The process is iterative, but it moves you through the phases of grant writing in a way that will get you to the endpoint without feeling like you’re completely fried.
We start with making sure you have a solid strategy that will allow your research idea to shine. It begins with preventing you from wasting valuable time by meeting the minimum requirement of compliance for submitting your grant.
After you do this bare minimum, the next step in your strategy is aligning your research idea with the mission and priorities of your target funding agency and making sure it ends up in the right study section with people you don’t have to work too hard to convince that your idea is valuable.
This doesn’t mean you get to skip the part where you create a persuasive argument detailing how you will achieve your objectives. It’s a strategic move that gets rid of some of the friction so that the arguments you lay out will more likely be accepted by a group that is already on board and knows what’s at stake with your research idea.
The best way to accomplish this part of your game plan is to focus on creating a stellar Specific Aims page which will serve as the foundation of your grant, allowing you to move to the project planning stage.
Developing Your Project Plan
Once you are sure your research idea has some legs, and you have the strategy in place, it’s time to map out your process for writing this massive R01. This starts with having a project management system in place.
This part of your process ensures you protect the time blocks you set aside for writing and have assigned tasks to that protected time.
Again: you don't want to wing it. You want to know when you’re going to write and what you’re going to write during those sessions.
Developing Your Argument
After the planning phase, you’re ready to build your argument. That's when you begin to solidify the rhetorical strategies you’re going to use to persuade your reviewers that your idea is worthwhile, your team is solid, and your project is feasible.
You take these rhetorical strategies and learn how you can use them in each and every section of your R01. You discern what is the purpose of each section, then use frameworks to weave in your rhetorical arguments so you can be as persuasive as possible.
Getting Feedback
Once your arguments are ironclad, you can shift your focus to feedback. This is the stage where you devise a plan to attain useful feedback on your application that will actually improve it well before you submit it to NIH.
You want to know who to ask, how to ask, and what to ask for.
Fine-Tuning Your Grant Proposal
Once you have your strategy mapped out and your project management plan is built, the last phase I take my clients through is finetuning your grant for submission.
This is your opportunity to take a detailed look at how you are going to make sure that all of the pieces are in place and that every single piece of your application is representative of your absolute best as a researcher, project manager, and grant writer.
Try These Five Phases
These five phases have proven to be helpful for early career researchers develop a solid plan for writing an NIH R01 efficiently. Once you have a foundational understanding of what works for every grant, then you can begin to create your own process that follows these principles and gets you across the pay line.
If you want to put these five phases into action on your road to your first big R01, we teach them in our self-paced virtual course, The Grant Funding Formula. This course will walk you through each phase so you can come out on the other side with a competitive and compelling R01 grant. It’s open for registration now, so sign up today.