Proposal development

Grant proposals at UAF are required to be prepared and submitted through a specific internal process. Please see the information below for guidelines on identifying and responding to funding opportunities. 

Identifying Opportunities:

1. For help identifying a funding opportunity, try the academia.edu website, which provides a nice search engine for finding solicitations, especially for the arts and humanities: https://www.academia.edu/grants/onboarding. To use the full search engine function, feel free to login with Username: uaf-cla@alaska.edu and Password: "CLAgrants2020". 

   • Opportunities can also be found on www.grants.gov (including arctic specific opportunities available through the National Science Foundation), as well as the Pivot search engine provided by UAF's Office of Grants and Contracts Administration (OGCA): https://uaf.edu/ogca/era/index.php 

2. When you have identified a funding opportunity, first verify that UAF (as a non-profit higher education institution) is eligible. Most requests for proposals will provide a basic statement of eligibility.

3. Identify who is eligible to be the Principal Investigator; you may find opportunities that require a senior faculty member to be included in the research plan (even if there is no salary paid) when there is a junior investigator applying. You can also review UAF's internal Principal Investigator Policy here. 

4. Verify the maximum award amounts and look for any prohibitions to budget items that may conflict with your research; expenses such as foreign travel, participant payments and tuition may be listed as disallowed budget categories. Also check for any cost-sharing or match requirements, as those instances will require additional forms and approvals.  

5. Determine whether or not the sponsor will accept indirect costs, this will be important for your budget development, especially in instances where unrecovered indirect costs can be used as match commitments. 

6. Once a particular opportunity has been identified, and you intend to move forward with proposal, you will need to contact the Office of Proposal Development (OPD) through their new Intake Form to be assigned to a Proposal Coordinator. The Coordinators at OPD will help to read through the announcement to determine the answers to the things listed above. OPD will be able to help you develop the pieces of the proposal in the format required by the sponsor, and they will help you to develop the project budget and budget justification. OPD will also make sure that the proposal is routed through the appropriate approval and signature process that is required by UAF. 

Please ensure that you are comfortable with your research plan before proceeding to work with OPD. The Coordinators there are able to help with ensuring that the proposal is complaint with the sponsor and UAF's procedures, but they won't be able to provide as much assistance with the development of your actual research plan. 

General Proposal Development Considerations:  

1.  All proposals for grant funding must be prepared and submitted through UAF's internal review and signature process; that internal process requires both the proposer's unit and the Office of Grants and Contracts Administration (OGCA) to review and approve all portions of the proposal. Proposals must be approved by UAF's Authorized Organizational Representative before submission to any sponsor. OGCA asks that proposals be submitted for institutional review no less than five days prior to  the submission of the proposal, to ensure proper review. 

2. UAF also has an internal policy that project PIs are to be faculty members; however, if a graduate student is to be the project PI, note that there is an exemption memo that can be prepared during the proposal process. 

3. When you are ready to develop a research plan and/or the budget, note that the costs will generally be based on the following categories: salaries & benefits for UAF employees, travel (domestic vs. foreign), contractual services (which includes things like consulting services, research participant payments and honoraria), project supplies, student services (which include scholarships, tuition payment and fellowships), and indirect costs; if a sponsor allows indirect costs to be applied to the requested budget, the OPD Proposal Coordinator will determine the appropriate rate that is to be applied. 

4. When planning for travel, make sure to consider the full cost of the trip. That means including airfare expenses, ground transportation (taxis, trains, Uber), per diem, and lodging costs. In my experience, investigators who travel in rural AK also often need to provide funds for gasoline for the locals providing transportation with their personal snow machines and/or boats, so additional funds are included for transportation; the trick is to take some cash and a receipt book for those types of instances, to ensure proper reimbursement. 

5. Consider whether you will be offering participant payments to participants, or if they will really be research subject payments: participant payments are to be used for studies that are not classified as research involving human subjects, and research subject payments can only be made when the IRB has human subject protocols on file for the project. This differentiation will affect budgets whenever indirect costs are allowed. 

6. If student support is being included in the budget, consider the following: will the student be receiving compensation as an employee (as either an Undergraduate student or Graduate Research Assistant)? Will they be receiving direct tuition support, or even a scholarship a fellowship? This PowerPoint  defines and outlines how to choose the type of support a student should receive based on the requirements of the project, and the Questionnaire required by OFA provides a specific decision tree for processing those types actions. These distinctions matter greatly when it comes to developing the line items in the project budget. 

7. The website for UAF's Office of Grants and Contracts Administration also provides very helpful general information regarding the lifecycle of a grant, boilerplate information for UAF as an institution, and other helpful hints for preparing proposals: https://www.uaf.edu/ogca.