The joy of specificity

 “The project will deliver significant impact, which will be ensured through effective dissemination.”

We all love some good impact, and we know that the funders love it too. And they’re terribly keen on dissemination, so hopefully there are some more brownie points to be had there. But when I see phrases like the one above in a research-funding proposal, unencumbered by any additional information – and believe me, I frequently do see them – my heart sinks. The total lack of detail suggests that the applicant either doesn’t really care about impact or dissemination, or hasn’t actually given them any thought. Quite possibly both. A good reviewer will always pick up on such a lack of specificity, and their response to it will not be positive. The same goes for any other areas in which the reviewers are expecting some substantive information, but are instead just given bland assurances with little or no detail to back them up.

When I review research proposals, two words that seem to crop up time and time again in the comments I write are ‘specific’ and ‘specificity’. Always in the context of encouraging more of them. The Oxford English Dictionary gives us the following helpful definition:

 

Specific

adjective

clearly defined or identified

 

If you’re serious about doing something, and committed to doing it properly, then what better way to convince someone of that than to identify and describe clearly the details of exactly what you will do – and perhaps how and when you’ll do it?

I know that space in the proposal document is always limited, and that there’s always so much to cover. But, assuming for a moment that you have thought through all of the various diverse proposal details, cutting out the specifics of stuff that the funder really cares about is really not a good strategy for success.

Below are some areas where I commonly find specifics to be lacking, but where at least some degree of specificity is pretty much essential.

Impact

‘Impact’ means things that change, usually (or at least hopefully) for the better, as a result of a research project or programme. It can happen over different timescales, and in different domains – in the academic world and in ‘real-world’ domains such as the economy, society, health and wellbeing. Whole books have been written about research impact, and it isn’t even the main focus of this blog post, so what follows will necessarily just be a brief overview. But when it comes to writing about the impact that you hope and anticipate your project will have, be sure to give some details about the following where they apply.

So, for academic impact:

• Who will benefit – researchers and scientists working in which particular disciplines and fields, and on what particular topics? If possible, name some of the nationally- and internationally-prominent institutions, centres, groups and perhaps even individuals in these disciplines and research areas – these will be among your key academic beneficiaries.

• How will they benefit? How, specifically, will the new knowledge, results, data, methods, models, approaches or whatever it is you hope to produce in your project help and advance them in their work? What will they be able to do (or do better), that they cannot already do now?

Perhaps you envisage that your project results will have specific benefits for other scientists working in areas where there will be downstream real-world impact in the future – if so, then spell this out.

For health, economic and societal impact:

• Once again, who will benefit – which specific groups of people (for example patients with a particular medical condition and their families; and/or professionals working in a particular field)? What about industry sectors, possibly even individual companies? And other organisations, such as the third sector – perhaps including some specific charities? Government is often a beneficiary of research, particularly where the research is likely to influence policy, regulatory matters and/or public-sector practice. Which specific sections of national or local government will benefit?

• Also once again, how will the benefits be felt? It’s not enough simply to list beneficiaries, and hope that it’ll be obvious to the reviewer how they will benefit from your research. Spell out exactly what you anticipate will change as a result of the research, and over what timescales, in the context of a problem that you have identified. No one expects a three-year project to completely solve a major problem, but reviewers will expect some specifics in terms of changes (or precursors to change) that are realistically achievable.

When it comes to the ‘who?’ of your beneficiaries, avoid using broad, unqualified terms like ‘stakeholders’ without explaining exactly what you mean by them. You should leave the reviewers in no doubt as to who your project stakeholders are and why they hold a stake in your research and its outputs. Words like ‘practitioners’ and even ‘policymakers’ can be similarly vague if you don’t make clear the particular area/s in which they’re practising or making policy.

Remember, a description of specific impact (whether academic or real-world) is a powerful answer to the question “what’s the point of doing this research?” If you’re unable or unwilling to address this question clearly by giving some specific details of your project’s anticipated impact, then you definitely can’t expect your reviewers to do it for you. They’ll be asking that question, not answering it.

Dissemination and impact-maximising activities

Dissemination is not impact. But making sure that the people, groups and organisations who will use, act on and benefit from your research and its findings actually get the information they need is normally a vital step towards achieving and maximising impact.

As with impact itself, specificity – or at least some specific examples – is vital for demonstrating that you’re serious about communication and dissemination, and have given them some proper thought. Having identified who, specifically, will benefit from your research, funders will expect you to have planned some targeted communication and dissemination activities, designed to ensure that the potential beneficiaries are given everything they need to realise those benefits. If your research is focused on informing policy in a particular area, for example, then you’ll need to make sure that the findings reach the relevant policymakers; if your vision for impact is to change practice, then likewise it’s vital to ensure that key decision makers and probably also practitioners in the area of focus are kept informed. When it comes to academic impact, you’ll want to ensure that all the right academics and scientists get to hear about your findings.

Conferences and publications are the bread and butter of dissemination to fellow academics and sometimes to professionals and practitioners in the area of focus. So which conferences will you be attending, and why have you selected them? When it comes to publications, which journals will you be targeting, and once again why? From a dissemination standpoint, the answer to the ‘why?’ question here will relate to each conference’s or journal’s potential to reach your target audience/s. So you’ll probably have picked the conferences and journals that are best attended, most widely read and most influential among the people and groups you want to reach.

Be specific about other aspects of your plans for dissemination and engagement. Don’t just allude vaguely to ‘impact activities’ – spell out what these will be. And don’t hide behind vague and generic terms like ‘stakeholder impact event’ – describe what form it will take, and which stakeholders you will be targeting. Similarly, when it comes to project outputs aimed at informing beneficiaries, try to give a flavour of what they will be. ‘Detailed summary of findings for practitioners in older-adult social care’ is helpfully more descriptive than just ‘Stakeholder report’.

Research objectives

It’s often said that research objectives should be SMART, where the ‘S’ stands for ‘specific’. (The remainder of the ‘SMART’ acronym is accounted for by ‘measurable’, ‘achievable’, ‘relevant/realistic’ and ‘time-bound’.) But what does this actually mean in practice?

A reviewer will scrutinise the list of objectives with the aim of determining whether they’re do-able, whether it will be clear and apparent when each objective has been completed, and whether completing each objective represents a sensible and appropriate step towards achieving the overarching project goal. They can only evaluate the research objectives on this basis if they are all properly specific.

For example, to borrow from my oft-used (if rather simplistic) housebuilding analogy, ‘to complete kitchen floor’ really doesn’t cut the mustard as a specific objective. How will people know when the kitchen floor has definitively been completed? Indeed, will everyone agree that it has been completed? What was the original specification, against which everyone can compare the supposedly-complete floor?

If on the other hand the objective had been ‘to tile entire kitchen floor area with large-format tiles as supplied, laid direct to cement screed and grouted, with all work completed to BS 5385’, then there’s little room for ambiguity. Everyone can agree whether or not the work is complete. The completeness or otherwise of the work is measureable, and completing this particular (and very specific) objective is demonstrably a relevant key step towards the project’s overall goal of refurbishing the kitchen.

A project aim is not the same as a research objective, but specificity matters here too. ‘Improve outcomes for leukaemia patients’ is a laudable goal, but it lacks specificity. On the other hand, ‘reduce diagnosis delays in leukaemia by developing a new streamlined rapid-diagnosis pathway’ is much more specific, and gives the reader a real essence of the project in just a handful of words. Sometimes a two-part aim statement can work well, with a more general part followed by a specific part. For example: ‘To improve outcomes for leukaemia patients presenting with non-specific symptoms, by reducing diagnosis delays through development of a new rapid-diagnosis pathway’.

Very similar principles apply to project titles, where it’s really important to give a clear and concise ‘nutshell’ indication of what the project is about.

Explaining budget costs

When it comes to justifying your requested resources, which many funders will require you to do, specificity is once again to the fore if you’re going to satisfy the inquisitive reviewer and convince them that the costs you’re claiming for are real and necessary. Avoid lumping various diverse costs under a single sub-heading, such as ‘consumables’, without any further breakdown or explanation. Instead, set out for the reviewer what the various different types of consumable will be, giving quantities and a proper cost breakdown for each category. If you’re claiming for travel, explain how many people will be travelling, and give details of where, how and why. The same goes for things like conference fees.

Much of your budget is likely to relate to staff time – your own, that of your co-investigators, and the cost of employing postdoctoral researchers and technicians – and here again the key to justifying these costs is to be specific. What will people be doing in the project, and how much of their time will it take? What salary scales and grades will researchers and technicians be on, and why are these justified? Specificity. Specificity. Specificity.

Project and risk management

With apologies for starting to repeat myself, this is another area where some specificity is needed but is often lacking. In terms of managing the project and ensuring that milestones and deliverables are accomplished in a timely manner, who, specifically, will do what – and (if applicable) how and when (or how often) will they do it? Give details of responsibilities and task ownership, and the management structures that will be in place to steer the project. When it comes to identifying project risks, specificity is vital. What are the particular research and project risks that you have identified, how likely and serious are they, who will ‘own’ them, and what can be put in place to mitigate them?

Data management

Few enjoy writing about managing the data used and produced by their proposed research project, but it’s not uncommon for funders to ask for a data management plan. Lack of interest in (and perhaps knowledge of) the subject of data management may result in the temptation to write something anodyne about ‘storage on secure servers’ and leave it more or less at that, but a proper data management plan will require a fair amount of specific detail. What types of data, for example, will the project handle and produce? What formats will the data be in? What will the volume of data be? How will you ensure that data-quality standards are met? How and where, specifically, will data be stored, backed up and curated? What metadata standards will be used for the data, and what documentation will be in place? How will data be archived, preserved and shared? And so on, addressing some very specific points that may need to be covered in some detail.

Specificity – everywhere!

I’ve covered here a handful of the areas in which at least a degree of specificity is required, but where grant applicants frequently resort to rather bland, generalised statements that are free from any specific details. But as a rule, it’s wise to include some specifics wherever possible, since doing so will always reduce ambiguity, demonstrate your commitment and attention to detail, indicate thoroughness of planning, and generally strengthen your research proposal. Increasing, of course, its chances of success.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and are in no way endorsed by my employer. Factual information and guidance are provided on a 'best-endeavour' basis and may become out of date over time. No responsibility can be taken for any action or inaction taken or not in respect of the content of this blog. 

Ten possible outcomes but just one of them positive: Navigating the evaluator's internal flowchart

Perhaps unsurprisingly given that I’m a bid writer, I spend quite a lot of time trying to get inside the mind of a ‘typical’ proposal evaluator (reviewer or panel member). How does she really think? What is the decision-making process that concludes in him liking or not liking a proposal? And how can we influence that process?

Is there even such a thing as a typical evaluator? In my more ideological moments, I like to think of them as super-humans with almost mythical levels of intelligence, able to scan through large piles of proposals with astonishing speed and assimilate their respective merits and demerits without favour or bias before ranking them perfectly according to a complex matrix of criteria. Such is their accuracy and consistency, any two of my super-human evaluators would rank that pile of proposals in exactly the same order.

Evaluators are human too...

I’ve never sat in on a grants panel, nor reviewed proposals for a funder, but rumour has it that the above characterisation may not be entirely representative. Certainly, we’ve all seen instances when two reviewers’ opinions on the same proposal appear to be diametrically opposed. And while the panel itself may subsequently impose a measure of sanity in such situations – the wisdom of crowds in action, perhaps – some of those individual panel members may not be quite as ‘on-it’ as we’d like to think they are. I’ve seen it suggested – admittedly with tongue at least partly in cheek – that there are often three identifiable types present on a grants panel:

1. The one who knows everything: Has a robust opinion on all the proposals, dominates proceedings and seems to know a great deal about many things
2. The perpetually-baffled one: Seems to struggle with many aspects of all the grants under review, leading to lots of questions and difficulty forming a definitive opinion
3. The slightly scatty one: Appears to be at least four grants behind the panel as a whole, and may not be as familiar with each of the proposals as perhaps they might be

Of course, if you’re a panel member yourself then I’m sure you don’t fall into any of these categories. But perhaps you’ve encountered them? How then to write a proposal that accommodates all the different types of evaluator who might review it?

Flowcharting the evaluation process

My suggestion would be to pitch the proposal at the ‘super-human evaluator’ who is rigorous, informed, methodical and objective in their appraisal. Make sure your proposal covers all of the important criteria that they’ll be looking out for and using as the basis for their evaluation. To this end, I have had a go at flowcharting their decision-making process, and I think it should probably look something like this:

You are, in essence, telling a story, and it’s vital that the story you tell in your proposal weaves in all of the essential points that will guide the evaluator to the decision you want them to make.

So what about catering for those less-than-perfect evaluators, like the three caricatures we met above? My advice would be to ensure that your proposal is presented as clearly and as nicely as possible. By which I mean well-ordered thoughts and a logical narrative flow; clear and straightforward language that is no more complex than it needs to be; and presentational niceties such as hierarchical headings, white space, figures, and so on. The sorts of things, in fact, that I consider in some of my previous blog posts.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and are in no way endorsed by my employer. Factual information and guidance are provided on a 'best-endeavour' basis and may become out of date over time. No responsibility can be taken for any action or inaction taken or not in respect of the content of this blog.