Obtaining funding

(from former NCA Associate Director Bill Eadie's Spectra column)

This month marks the start of my sixth year as Associate Director of NCA. During the past five years I have tried to celebrate our scholarship in my two monthly Spectra columns (“In Our Journals” and “Scholars and Scholarship”), and offer tips from those who have obtained funding for their research. Through CRTNET News, NCA’s daily electronic newsletter, I have been attempting to keep the membership informed about potential grant opportunities. And now, those opportunities are being archived on the NCA web site. Visit the grant archive to see the variety of opportunities available to communication scholars.

A five-year mark seemed a good time for a summing up. So, let me present some of the lessons I’ve learned about doing scholarship that will be noticed and, in turn, funded.

1. Develop a research area that works on a problem of national significance. Or, be able to show how your research area addresses a problem of national significance. No doubt about it, funding is easier if your work and the funder’s interests coincide. Lewis Donohue, Philip Palmgreen, and associates at the University of Kentucky have been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on five separate occasions, because their work on developing media campaigns to prevent drug abuse has produced solid results. And, you don’t need to be an established researcher, especially in the health field. NIH has a “first” program designed especially to help beginning researchers get started. Roxanne Parrott, University of Georgia, and Stephen Haas, Ohio State University, have been among the young communication researchers who have been able to launch their research programs with NIH funding. Many of the other federal granting agencies also have programs for encouraging minority scholars to do funded research.

2. Develop a strong theoretical base for your research. In a column about Beth Le Poire, University of California, Santa Barbara, and her work on co-dependent communication, I reported that one of the things Beth had to do before her funding proposals were approved was to publish the theoretical basis of her work. Funders like to see acceptance of one’s work by peers, so subjecting your theory to peer review will strengthen your case. Kim Witte, Michigan State University, whose work was profiled in one of my columns, is an example of a researcher who has been able to build theory in the context of pursuing health communication research.

3. Develop relationships with funding agency officers. Funded research is not like peer-reviewed journals. The process does not start by sending in an unsolicited proposal. In most cases, a conversation with the program officer will help potential applicants know whether their ideas have any chance of being funded. Some agencies will even pre-review proposals. In such a case, the program officer will offer comments before the proposal is sent to the review panels. In the case of private foundations, preliminary contact is essential. Jody Nyquist, Don Wulff, University of Washington, and Jo Sprague, San José State University, worked hard to develop a relationship with the program officer at the Pew Charitable Trusts and held several preliminary discussions before submitting a letter of inquiry. Attending specialized conferences in your area of study will help you to meet program officers, as they are much more likely to attend scholarly events that are focused on their areas of interest than they are to attend general conferences such as NCA’s annual meeting.

4. Develop relationships with colleagues in other disciplines. Vicki Freimuth, on leave from the University of Maryland, College Park, to serve as associate director for communication of the Centers for Disease Control, made this point strongly in one of my earliest interviews. For pioneers such as Freimuth, developing such relationships was essential to being funded, as communication was not a known or understood field of study at that time. With the development of additional publishing opportunities, the funding success of more and more communication scholars, and the admission of NCA into the American Council of Learned Societies, communication should become a more commonly known and understood discipline. Nevertheless, many funding agencies are convinced that interdisciplinary approaches produce better results, and some requests for proposals specify that an interdisciplinary approach must be used. Faculty members at the University of Cincinnati have used this approach successfully by starting an interdisciplinary center for environmental communication studies. The theme of this center also allowed for a wide variety of work, ranging from rhetorical to interpersonal, to organizational, to mediated, to be done under one funded project.

5. Offer to serve on review panels. Program officers often have difficulty filling peer review panels. It is difficult and not terribly rewarding work. Nevertheless, some communication researchers, such as Marshall Scott Poole, Texas A&M University, were able to get themselves known at agencies such as the National Science Foundation by serving on these panels.

6. Develop your proposal with care, and be willing to revise until you get it right. If you have worked with a program officer and know that you have a potentially fundable piece of research, then what will stand in the way of funding will be approval by a review panel. Reviewers typically read a large number of proposals in a short period of time, so meeting their expectations for a good proposal will go a long way toward having that proposal rise to the surface. Care in constructing the proposal according to the instructions, clarity in stating the background of the problem and the method to be used in addressing it, and using language that will catch the reviewer’s attention are all elements of writing winning proposals. Phil Salem, Southwest Texas State University, in a guest column, suggested a valuable online resource for proposal writing at the Social Science Research Council’s web site. Visit http:// www.ssrc.org/artprop.htm for the details.

7. Be persistent. Clearly it is easier for some research topics and some research methodologies to be funded. Working at a research university, as opposed to a comprehensive or liberal arts institution, also brings an advantage. Even so, there is funding for out-of-mainstream projects, if they can be made to fit a funder’s interests. Smaller foundations and state funding agencies (such as state humanities councils) don’t receive as much attention as do the national funders, and so one might find a fit more easily with those. Projects that focus on a particular location might be funded by a community foundation or by the foundation of a corporation that does business in that area. I once did a profile of how Wayne Beach, San Diego State University, was having trouble getting his work on legal discourse funded. He had run afoul of the National Science Foundation’s law program because the type of discourse analysis he was using didn’t fit with the review panel’s expectations. Well, Wayne persisted, and eventually he found a small foundation who was willing to fund a related project.

All in all, my impression is that communication scholars are becoming increasingly better known to funding agencies and that, in turn, these agencies are supporting our work to an increasing degree. As a discipline that has a foot in each of the humanities and social sciences (and maybe one hand touching the arts), we are always going to have trouble defining ourselves and in competing for scarce resources. It seems clear, however, that good ideas, competently and persistently pursued, will lead to the desired results. And then, of course, you actually have to do the research!