Like a lot of my work, I take inspiration from many places. This post is going to reflexively unpack some of the process I used when taking the book Getting Research Funded: Five essential rules for early career researchers (by Tseen Khoo, Phil Ward, and Jonathan O’Donnell) and turning it into a series of grant-writing workshops.

Firstly, a quick mention of ethics and appreciation. I reached out to Tseen Khoo when we were in a webinar together and told her my idea, and she graciously agreed that I could take their intellectual property and shape it into something of my own. So, thanks Tseen for saying yes, and Juliet and Susan for hosting the Doctoral Writing Discussions where we met (virtually), and Rachael Cayley for coming to talk at that webinar about her book Thriving as a graduate writer: Principles, strategies, and habits for effective academic writing. And thanks also to Jonathan O’Donnell (and Tseen again) for then meeting with me to help brainstorm how to turn their book into a workshop series.

Of course, I didn’t come to this project without any knowledge. Thanks to the Director of my research centre, I had already translated two books into workshop series – Wendy Laura Belcher’s Writing your journal article in 12 weeks, and Laura Portwood-Stacer’s Book proposal book. And, thanks to a generous Associate Dean of Research, at that point I’d had two years of helping academics in my faculty with their grant applications – Australian Research Council Discoveries, Linkages, and DECRAs; Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowships, and more.

In my experience, grant applications – like other forms of research writing – have at their core the need to tell a good story. Luckily, I’ve been a storyteller since primary school (about 50 years!), so I’ve got plenty of practice in weaving a narrative. And, as a trainer, there’s nothing I love more than a good worksheet to get participants thinking out loud on paper. But that’s getting ahead of the process as it happened.

The first thing I did was read the whole book (an easy task, because it’s beautifully written, and laid out in easily-digestible chunks of chapters). I had initially thought that each chapter might become a week of the workshop series (as had happened with the other two books-into-workshop series that I had developed), as my original pitch was for a six-week grant writing series. However, the Executive Dean of the Faculty said that they would prefer a twelve-week series, so I had to adjust the plan. And, as I worked my way through the book, I realised that some chapters fitted better together, while other chapters had sections that could feed into multiple topics. So I went a bit rogue, and developed my own plan for facilitating the development of a research grant proposal.

In the book, there are five chapters:

1. Learn how to ask for money.
2. Be the funding body.
3. Get the team right.
4. Get the project right.
5. Have time on your side.

And a coda: Five rules of grant club.

For my series, there were twelve workshops, each with its own title and topic (and, yes, all alliterative). I’ve also listed the worksheets for each week, to give you a better sense of the work that the participants are doing.

1. Practices and passion – unpacking grant guidelines, and sharing the project and why it matters.
2. People and partner(s) – thinking about the project team and industry partners.
   • Team skills audit.
   • Industry partner summary.
3. Problem and process – problems, research questions, and methods.
   • Locating your problem.
   • Your methods.
4. Planning – creating the “big list” of everything and Gantt chart for your project.
   • Big list of everything.
   • Your Gannt chart.
5. Paying – developing the budget for your project.
6. People (2) – the Research Opportunity and Performance Evidence (ROPE) section.
   • Research Opportunity and Performance Evidence preparation.
7. Pitching – crystallising your question, strategy, methods, and importance.
   • Why this?
   • Responding to the selection criteria.
   • What’s your pitch?
8. Practicing – develop and practice your elevator pitch.
9. Polishing – rework your abstract and elevator pitch in light of feedback.
   • Your abstract.
   • Mapping your research questions, your aims and your objectives.
   • The benefits of this project, and the impact it will have.
10. Panel – pitch your project to a panel of Australian Research Council College of Experts members for feedback.
11. Perfecting – think about how someone else might approach doing your project.
    • What is unique about this project?
    • What is new about this approach?
    • What is your communication plan?
12. Projecting – other funding sources for your project in case you don’t get this one.
    • What is your dissemination plan?
    • What will be different when you are done?

Once I had the structure right, it was then a case of working out the details of what should be covered in each week. For that, I turned first back to the book (and my copious notes in yellow highlighter) as well as other things I was reading about grant writing. I turned those highlighted parts of the texts into my own commentary, or resources to be shared, or (most frequently) into a table-style worksheet for participants to complete – because I don’t see the point in a two-hour workshop series where all you get is the facilitator talking all the time. I run workshops where people actually do the work, and come away with thoughts and resources to help their project keep progressing. And, with the writing of this blog post in mind as I created them, all of the worksheets are available via open access.

So, in the end, this is how the book translated into the workshop:

Book chapter	Workshop topic
Researchers and the funding landscape.	People and Partners
	Practicalities and Passion
Learn how to ask for money.	Practicalities and Passion
	People and Partners
	Problem and Process
	Planning
	Projecting
Be the funding body.	Practicalities and Passion
	Pitching
Get the team right.	People and Partners
	Problem and Process
	Planning
	Paying
	People (2)
	Panel
Get the project right.	Practicalities and Passion
	People and Partners
	Paying
	People (2)
	Pitching
	Polishing
Have time on your side.	Practicalities and Passion
	Planning
	Projecting

I ran the program a couple of times, and got great feedback (and outcomes) from participants, including at least four funded projects, with funding from the Australian Research Council and private industry worth over AUD$4 million (I should have kept better records so I could be more specific here – lesson for future researchers and researcher developers there!). But, like everything we do in higher education, people move on, so now I get to provide individual help one-on-one to applicants for grants, rather than running this particular workshop series for those who are applying, and those who are funding-curious. So, I’m going to transform it again later this year, back into a shorter series, which I’ll bring back into my research centre.

Do get in touch if you want to know how it goes, or if you would like copies of my weekly lesson plans for the program I built from Tseen, Phil, and Jonathan’s book!

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Dr Abbe Winter SFHEA is an independent researcher and member of the higher education precariat. She currently works at Queensland University of Technology as a Writing Coach, primarily in the Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice.

You can read her research publications through QUT ePrints or via ORCiD at 0000-0003-2095-0989.