Topic: Research Funding | Next Generation Science

One of the most time-consuming, tedious, stressful parts of life in these days of austerity for those in the health sciences is the process of finding research funding. As those who follow what I write about Science 2.0 and Medicine 2.0 (thank you for your patience, tiny audience!) know all too well I tend to mine examples from my work on the free grants and scholarship listing service ScanGrants when discussing such matters. I do this both calculatedly because I want people to use ScanGrants, but also because I think that I can draw fruitfully upon what I encounter as I look for funding opportunities in the sciences to illustrate some points of general interest to those ever on the hunt for money for science and medical research. Today we are going to consider the matter of what I have learned from the ScanGrants category, Scientific Importance/Achievement.

When we first created ScanGrants in late 2007, our goal was simply to list grants and scholarships and to highlights sources of money for proposed projects. I was new to the whole field of research funding so was simply surfing for anything that would endow researchers and health sciences with some money (as opposed to simply kudos in the form of a plaque or certificate or photo and kudos on a Web site for a job well done).

I soon began to notice that there were often sizable monetary awards for what had already been accomplished and so created the category, “Scientific Importance/Achievement.” I have just checked ScanGrants and as of early this morning (which is when I write these articles — such is the 24/7 world of trying to keep up with Science 2.0) I saw the wording, “89 funding opportunities are listed in this category.” Not bad considering that those have to be surfed for and entered by hand lovingly into ScanGrants by yours truly.

Jocularity and smug satisfaction on my part aside, what does an examination of this category tell us and who might use it to leverage their efforts to further research at their institutions and their own research careers?

Let us look at some of the listings and ponder those questions.
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I admit it. I am a shameless marketer of the free health sciences grants and scholarship listing I work on, ScanGrants. But that is because I care deeply about doing what I can to advance medical science. Most of us, after all, know and love someone with some sort of devastating disease and want work to proceed on a cure for it. And alerting researchers to funding opportunities they might not have otherwise heard about is one way to further that cause.

In this column, I would like to share some of the problems I have discovered via the hours I put in on ScanGrants with the ways various funders of medical research disseminate the news of the funding they so generously offer. Some of these involve issues matters of Web design, link rot and just plain neglect of their Web sites. All of these problems are preventable and easily remedied.

I will give some real-world examples from my attempts this morning to discover some grants and scholarships to list on ScanGrants.

I search for grants in various fashions. Oftentimes, I simply type into Google certain key phrases such as “Call for nominations” or “Request for proposals.” At other times, I work my way through lists of medical organizations. To illustrate some of the problems I find at the sites of disease organizations, scientific societies, foundations, medical and nursing associations I will use the list of health-related organizations at MedlinePlus.

I started at A and choose the Academic Pediatric Association as an organization that almost certainly offers some kind of grant or scholarship that young medical faculty or medical residents would like to know about.

Some of the most common problems I run into are illustrated at this site.

One is the use of the present tense for programs no longer active. We read:

The program has a career development-mentoring component as well as support for research. The awards are for up to $15,000 of funding, and there is also a budget for a yearly meeting of the awardees, the leadership of the program, and their mentors.

But the PDF one clicks on is dated August 1, 2008 and there doesn’t seem be anything on offer for 2009 – 2010. This is a common problem at Web sites – dated information. This is really unfortunate, as it conveys the sense that an organization is moribund and not even aware of the material it is hosting on its own site.

A related problem on sites like this one is that although the wording on the Web page lists an up-to-date application deadline, when one clicks on the PDF of flyer about the program or the PDF of the application the date for a previous year (or a date of even several years earlier) is given. This kind of thing, again, hurts the reputation of the funder for competence. And that is most definitely not in the funder’s interest given that they are themselves usually dependent on the largesse of even bigger funders, deep-pocketed individual philanthropists, the general public or their own association’s members. It takes just a few clicks to outdated info to turn such people off and I urge the nonprofit sector to do monthly checks on the currency of the material they are posting to ensure that the material listed thereon is up to date. That is basic Web site housekeeping. Keeping such material up to date is a service to the researchers and health scientists scouring the Web desperately looking for research or future scientists looking for funds to finance their educations.

Another problem that is illustrated on the Web site of the Academic Pediatric Association (and I don’t mean to single them out for opprobrium here – it is a very worthwhile organization and these kinds of issues affect many equally worthy groups) is incomplete information about possible sources of funding or cash awards for distinguished service. That is the case with the page about the APA Teaching Award.

We are given no idea if there is a monetary award for it. Let’s face it: cash is inherently attractive to most human beings and it is a time saver for everyone and a courtesy to those in medical research and medical education whose time is precious to make clear in as few clicks as possible whether an award consists of $5,000 or merely a plaque, a certificate or an honorary membership.

On the page for the APA Teaching Award we are also given no information as to application deadline or details about the process of nomination. We read, “Programs must demonstrate excellence…” To whom? No specific person is given. True, there is a clear link to a Contact Us page that has an email address (and an email address is sooooo much nicer to have than being presented with a form alone). But it would be so much more convenient for everyone involved to have the need for having to write for details on the teaching award obviated by having the details smack dab on the page itself.

Okay, I have picked on the Academic Pediatric Association long enough. Let’s us pop over to the Web site of the Academy of General Dentistry. Let us look at the Awards Page.

When looking for awards to list on ScanGrants I often look for awards. Often these consist of $5,000 or $10,000 and it is very rewarding to be able to list such awards and think that some hard-working, caring, dedicated medical educator, nurse, professor of chemistry or pharmaceutical science, etc. might be nominated by students he or she has selflessly mentored over the years.

But on this page (again, this is a pervasive problem in the health sciences grantor world), we are not told of what the award consists. Probably no cash, but sometimes a cash award can be mined from among the shower of certificates – I spend hours nosing around for the cash ones for researchers I have never met but whom I fondly hope have come into an unexpected, cool ten grand via an act of love by former students who used ScanGrants to get their beloved professors some dough – which, given the character of selfless mentors, that person would probably spend on laboratory equipment anyway.

Anyway, another common defect of funder Web sites illustrated on the awards page of the Academy of General Dentistry, again, is that the only date we see is 2008 and here we are halfway through 2009.

And there is link rot. I tried clicking on the link, “nominate a colleague for 2009 today!” and got, “Page cannot be found.” Now, I have worked on two Web sites and know how time-consuming it is as a single individual to check links frequently and believe me such things prey on my mind. But the sites I am discussing in this column are run by fairly substantial organizations and surely interns could be dragooned into link checking and simple site maintenance. Again, it ill behooves a professional medical association or scientific society to look like it doesn’t know what year this is or to suggest that visitors to its site do something that they then cannot do, due to link rot and the fact that no one has bothered to update a page for several years. An example of the latter occurs on the site of Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing funding page where we read:

AG Bell encourages you to apply for the following funding opportunities.

Cochlear Implant Fellowships

Helen Hulick Beebe Auditory-Verbal Scholarships

So the excited visitors (in this case people who are afflicted with poor hearing and those who want to dedicate their lives to helping such people) click through only to discover that the application deadline for the first was way back in January 12, 2009 and that for the second was even longer ago: March 1, 2007.

It is just not good PR and a real discourtesy to people in need (to whom the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing does in fact provide such generous aid) to maintain such dated material and to refer site visitors to it only to leave them disappointed and frustrated. Again, this kind of thing does not help the bottom line vis-a-vis fundraising. Web sites are crucial marketing tools in the current punishing economic climate for nonprofits. I hope everyone who works in the nonprofit sector, grantors or not, will sit down tonight and look for link rot. You could even hold an office contest – find rot, win a prize! People won’t their checkbooks as donors if your site looks like amateur night at the opera.

I had hoped to get into further into Web design no-nos for grantor sites. But that will have to wait for another day. I have scolded enough for now.

I really don’t mean to be a nag. I spend hours looking for grants and I never fail to be touched by the reservoirs of skills of and public service grantors do. I offer these suggestions so that they can better serve the equally admirable researchers they hope to assist and via them, the ill and otherwise unfortunate.

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