Tips for writing a successful philosophy grant proposal

If you are a professional philosopher, it is likely that at some point you will have to write a grant proposal. There are many types of grants: small intra-university grants, large grants funded by the government, grants by philanthropic organizations. In some countries, like Belgium or the Netherlands, grants are the chief means of academic survival for young academics, as it takes at least 5 years or more before (if at all) one manages to obtain a permanent position. Earlier I wrote about how frustrating grants are and how they pose the problem of the red queen effect and tragedy of the commons.

I stand by this: collectively, grants have significant costs for the profession. But for an individual philosopher who wants to break into a new research area, and doesn't have loads of institutional funding already, projects are a great way to get in the game, to do the research you have always dreamed about doing, and to get the funding and time to actually do it!

How do you write a grant proposal? I've attended workshops on how to write them, talked to research facilitators, consulted colleagues who have been in boards. I have also been an external referee for two granting agencies, so I get a sense of what makes a project look good. And I have also received several grants. The following tips (below the fold) are distilled from these experiences:

1. Fluency is of utmost importance. Assessors typically get a large pile of projects, and can't spend more than a limited amount of time for each one. External referees spend a bit more time, but even so, you can't expect them to try to decipher things that are unclear, or to read your project twice. So your project has to read very fluently - not a single sentence can be obscure or ambiguous. A research facilitator put it like this "While it's uncommon for a bad project that is excellently phrased to get funding, an excellent project that is badly phrased will most likely not get funded."  
2. Related to this, you should have your project read by colleagues and friends before submitting. Often, one is so immersed in the topic one cannot have the proper distance from the project anymore. Given the low success rate, one may feel a bit squeamish in doing this, but external readers, especially those not in your field, can help you find things that are unclear, ambiguous, identify where you should be more explicit, etc. 
3. Although templates vary, many project templates have sections like 'background', 'aims', 'methodology', 'projected results' and 'impact'. Aim for a narrative structure, where one thing naturally leads to another. For instance, the background clearly shows some hiatus in an interesting and worthwhile philosophical project. The aims then go on to state how you/your team will remedy it, the methodology shows how you will do it, the results show the immediate output in terms of papers, monographs etc, and finally, you give a sense of the larger impact you will cause, through new directions of research, societal relevance (difficult but obligatory for some granting agencies), new research ties etc.  
4. If you need to provide a project summary, pay special attention to it. Ostensibly, this is only a short summary for laypeople to put on the funding agency's website. However, horribly, I've heard some assessors admit this is the *only* thing they read of the whole grant proposal. Others only read further when the summary sounds interesting. I don't know how common this is.  
5. Resist the urge to display how much you know, so leave out things that are unimportant. Even when reviewing the literature, you should be strategic and think about the project first and foremost (e.g., your review of the literature shows how there is something clearly missing there, that you will address). 
6. Communicate excitement about why your project is worth doing. This is not always easy, as e.g., you work on some very specialized topic in a topic that doesn't seem to be of general interest, but still, it's good to go back to the roots. Why should anyone, especially outside of your field of specialists, care whether this project gets funded? Try to answer that question. It seems that especially for interdisciplinary panels, philosophers aren't particularly good at this, or so I have heard of people who are in such panels. 
7. You have no idea how your timetable will be, but you must nevertheless be specific on what will happen when and how, and also try to be as concrete as possible about the possible outputs you envisage (paper 1 on topic x, etc). Concreteness is an important virtue as it protects one against being overambitious and unrealistic (a common problem for projects).