 Moving right along, we have a lot to cover today. I'm Kay Cizer from the Research Office, and thank you for having us today. I'm going to talk about getting started, getting started as far as resources, how to learn how to write a grant proposal, how to find grants. And then I'm going to take a little bit of time quickly to demo pivot, CUS pivot, in case you've never seen a demonstration of that. It's a very nice system that can help you do customized grant searches. Set them up so that you get email alerts through your email. And so, yes, we'll take a little time to do that. Okay, just in case there is some confusion about this, we sometimes refer to ourselves as RCAT. And what that is is research, creative activities, and technology transfer office. It's a multiple. But basically, we are the central administrative office on campus for all research activities. So we are a service office, we're here to help you. Sponsored programs is a subunit of RCAT. And we sometimes refer to that as SPA, S-B-A, that's the acronym for Sponsored Programs Administration. We're located up in the Research and Technology Park, just west of the parking lot, the Fargo Dome parking lot. That's our facilities, and this is what the entrance to our building looks like. What can RCAT do for you? Well, here is our website. And I would like to encourage you to get familiar with our website because you can get a lot of information there. You can get forms, you can get guidance about the process, what we're going to talk about today. And you can find out about staff, which is the right contact person, you know, regarding whatever question you might have. You know, I'm going to back up just a minute before I go further. There is a handout coming around today that has the main components of a proposal, and I just want to address that for a minute. We're not going to talk about how to write the narrative of a grant proposal today. That's a whole other workshop, or maybe even several other workshops. Marie and Ona are going to talk about the budget aspects a little later on. But I just want to say one thing about writing grant proposals. You'll see in the handout the main components of a grant proposal, and of course that varies a bit depending upon what program you're applying to, the nature of your project, and so on. But I want to encourage you to learn how to write good objectives. The project description is the real heart of your grant proposal. And as the handout says, there's five sections to that project description. Okay, two of them are objectives and methods. And sometimes your grant guidelines use different terminology to refer to these things. But essentially that's what it is. And it's important that you learn how to write good objectives. Objectives are different than goals. A goal is a higher level, loftier thing. See, I don't have the handout in front of me. But if you read what it says there about, objectives are measurable. And that's a very important thing. They're very specific and they're measurable. Because by the end of your grant project, both you and the grant agency need a way to determine whether you've met what you promised to do in your project. And that's what good objectives will do for you. They will be specific, they will be measurable, and they will be a way for the grant agency and for you yourself to know whether you've accomplished what you said you were going to do. So that's the single thing I wanted to say about writing grant proposals. Now on the back of that handout, there are some excellent online websites for learning how to write grant proposals. And in fact, what I was just talking about, the objectives, writing good objectives, is addressed very nicely in that first one. The Foundation Center's proposal writing short course. So take a look at that site. It's excellent and really eye-opening as far as what a good grant proposal should contain. So just wanted to make that point about writing proposal narrative. Now we'll get back to our resources. I talked about the website for forms, guidance, and staff. We have an email newsletter that is produced monthly during the academic year. It goes to the faculty and staff listserv. So hopefully you're already receiving it and I'll show you what it looks like in a few minutes. Just in case you're not getting it, let us know. We have geared for grant seminars that cover a range of topics. Some of the topics are about writing grants. Some are really more focused on research, conducting the research. Different aspects of the whole grants process. And certainly watch for those and take advantage of them. We have an informal group called grant coordinators that anyone is welcome to join if you're involved with grantsmanship. And this group meets occasionally, not on a real regular schedule. But it's basically a support group and a place to ask questions and in a way for our office to get important information out to the campus community. We also have a pilot project right now called grant proposal assistance awards. It's our office working with the Center for Writers and providing assistance writing the narrative of a grant proposal. Now this is just about content. It's not about coordinating the proposal. It's not about entering it into the online electronic system or anything. But if you have trouble with the actual writing organization, this might be an option. And then the last point I want to make is feel free to call or email our office with questions. Because we are a service office and we want to be of help to you. How can you learn to write a grant proposal? There are lots of online resources. That's really where to go these days. You can take a training course. There's a handout that came around that has the upcoming schedule for the grantsmanship center courses. Now those are excellent. They are a little spendy and they are a week long. So it's a real commitment. But I know that Deb has taken the course and said that it was great and worth the time. My two cents worth is that they also now have a short course like a three day version as well as a week version. The week one you actually write it and they will critique it while you're there. The short course, it's less of that. But the same core principles both are outstanding. So if you're interested in really digging in, those are the... I think there is one coming up in St. Paul. That's probably the closest that it's going to get in the next six months or so. The Minnesota Council on Foundations also offers a nice course on writing grant proposals. Again, you might have to go to St. Paul or the Twin Cities to get to that too. And we can find information on that on our website. Talk to colleagues. You probably already know this. If you have grant coordinator in your department, certainly take advantage of that. Find people within your discipline that can discuss content with you. Find people who have experience with grants that can talk to you about the process. And of course our office. And then I would just encourage you to jump in. It's intimidating if you've never done it before. When you find a grant program that looks really intriguing to you and you really would like to pursue it, the first thing you need to do is to get the application kit. And that will include detailed guidelines, instructions on how to put together the proposal. It may include forms and any other information you need. And it's very important that you get your hands on that and that you study it closely. The number one reason why proposals fail is that people don't follow instructions. Now some programs are very detailed. If we're talking about a federal grant program, they give you instructions right down to how large the font can be, how large the margins. Very detailed. But in a way that's kind of nice because you just need to do it, right? Step by step and there you've got your proposal. Private sources are a lot more ambiguous sometimes about what a grant proposal looks like. But certainly use whatever instructions you can find. Now how do we find out about grants? Again, pay attention to where your colleagues and others are getting funding until you're actually in the business of needing to look for a grant. We don't pay a lot of attention to those things. Online searches, you will even have luck using Google to find a grant program. You know, it's amazing how that actually works pretty well and it's free. But certainly grants.gov is another great free source. It's just that it is restricted to federal grant programs. So any federal grant program you can get to on grants.gov. And you can sign up for email alerts and I would certainly encourage you to do that. If you find an agency that you know is a good one for you, investigate whether they have an email list, an alert list that you can sign up for so that you're automatically getting these alerts in your email. You don't have to always be actively going out and searching for it. And of course, last is Pivot. And I'm going to take just a few minutes to demo that for you. Pivot is subscription based so NDSU is paying for this for you. It's a customized grant search system. Very nice. It takes, you know, a little bit to sort of get oriented to it. But once you get set up, once you're registered and set up, you really only need to go in maybe once a semester. Okay. Tweak your information, maybe update your profile, add a search, delete a search, whatever. You can have as many grant searches as you want. Now Pivot is for any discipline, any scholarly activity, and it's not just government, okay, like Grants.gov. It's government as well as private sources. So private foundations and other miscellaneous things like American Heart Association and so on. They're all there. Okay, so we're going to go out to Pivot. Let's see, I promised. Okay, I should show you how to get to Pivot from... Okay, here's NDSU's webpage. I promised to show you a few of these things on the web. To get to the ARCAD or the Research Office, the easiest way is up here on the white menu bar if you click on Researchers. And this is our website. You can see there are some menu options here for finding funding opportunities, forms and so on. Over here on the left, the one I want to point to is Sponsored Programs Administration. That's our group here today that's talking about how to get through the Grants process. And this is that website. Now, when you click on Sponsored Programs Administration, you get a pull-down list of some other options here. Forms is one of them, funding opportunities. Institutional information, this is a great page for finding out about fringe benefit rates and indirect cost rates and so on. Proposal preparation, if you click on that link, you can get to the proposal writing resources, some of which are on your handout. Staff lists, you know, the people that are here today in addition to some others. If you need contact information and, of course, training, lists the Grantsmanship Center, the Minnesota Council on Foundations seminars that are coming up. But to find Pivot, to get back to Pivot, click on Funding Opportunities. You can either here on your Sponsored Programs Admin or over here. Okay, and you see Pivot right at the top. That's a link. Now, you also have a handout that has the actual direct URL on it, so you're welcome to get to it that way. This is what the home screen looks like. Now, in the upper right corner is where you log in. And some of you may already have login or registration information. If you're logging your password, that's great. If you don't, I'll help you later. We don't want to take time with that today. But I'm going to log in. Okay, and once I log in, I'll see my name in the upper right corner. That's how you know you're logged in. Now, really, you can use Pivot from any desktop at any issue without logging in. But if you are off campus, you have to log in in order to use all the screens. You'll get partway, but you'll run into some road box that it won't let you through, because, like I said, it's subscription-based. So you do probably want to be registered and have a login, because once you create a grant search that you like, you want to be able to save it, right? And have those email alerts coming to you. So you have to be registered in order to do that. Okay, you'll see here some tabs. There are two main components to Pivot. One is grant searches. That's the funding tab. The other is called profiles, and that's the expertise profiles. Now, some of you probably have profiles in the system, even though you don't even know it, because Pivot draws from a scholar universe, which is a product that's out there, and it goes out and bleeds information about scholars. If you are publishing, if you are presenting at conferences, if you've ever had research grants, it knows about you. Another thing here is you'll have an account in the system, but you want to also link it to your profile if you have a profile. Some of you won't have profiles. We may just have an account, and that's fine. We're going to concentrate on funding today, because that, of course, is what your reason for getting into this is. And let me just try a search. You'll see there's a search box right at the top here. You can search by text or keyword that has to do with your project, or you can search by sponsor. So let's try text, and I'm going to just try diabetes as an example. Click on the Search Pivot button, and you'll see we have 280 grant programs. Just like that, right? Okay. Now, 280 is really too many, isn't it? So I'm going to show you how to refine that search a bit. Click on Refine Search at the top, and one frustration that people find is that this is a worldwide system. So you might be pulling up grant programs that are for Europe and Australia and so on, and that's, you know, obviously you want to weed that out. So if you click on Activity Location here, I click first on Refine Search, then Activity Location. Click here on More Locations. It pulls up a pull-down list. You see United States with a little plus sign. Click on the plus because that will pull down the subunits of the United States, and we're looking for North Dakota. Click on that. Close the window. Now we see North Dakota listed here beside Activity Location. Click on Search again, and we went from 280 to 156. So weeded out all that extra stuff that won't work for a project in North Dakota. Okay, so we still have 156 grant programs. Now over on the left here, we have what are called faceted searches. These are sub-searches. So if you're doing research, there are 113 grant programs that might work. If you're doing program or curriculum development, there are 18. Well, that's really a pretty manageable list. Okay, so you see you go step by step to refine your search. Then when you get something that's usable, we want to save that search. So up to top, and these are links by the way. I haven't even showed you. I'm going so fast. If we click in on one of these, you have great detailed information about that grant program, including the URL that will take you directly to that agency. So out of pivot and directly to the agency. So it's really excellent preliminary information. But back to our search. I just want to show you how to save it. Click on save search at the top. Name it whatever you'd like, whatever is meaningful to you, because it's only you that's going to see that. And then it asks you, would you like to receive a weekly email containing newer, updated opportunities from this query? And you will want to check that box and click save. And then you will begin receiving emails. If each week the system will run this search over again, and it will send you any new information, any new grant programs that it finds. Okay, there's a lot more I could be showing you. But I think we better stop. We're going to run out of time. I am available to answer any questions. Please email me. If you're frustrated with the system. If you've registered already and you're getting these weekly emails and they're actually more of a frustration than anything, it's because you need to tweak your searches a bit or maybe update your profile. Because the system actually uses your profile to find automatic grant opportunities for you as well. So I need to stop to give some of these others a chance to speak. But please get in touch with me and I'll help you register, conduct a search, whatever is helpful to you. And while we transition, I want to know how many of you have used Pivot? Okay, so not anywhere near the majority in here. And for those of you who are seeking grants, pay as the person if you struggle getting signed up. Call or direct. She'll walk you through it. But get signed up. I signed up for several things and I just find it interesting to see what's out there, even though I don't do tons of grant writing. And then occasionally I'll see something that I'll funnel to somebody because it looks interesting. So it's a nice little newsletter almost, just a constant little reminder of things out there. And we really do need to use it because if we don't, we'll lose it. Because there is a high, I have to price take for it. And every couple of years this inscription comes due and they'll want to assess whether people are using it, if it's been helpful. And I'll be looking for some testimony for people that have had success using it and actually maybe got a grant because of that information.