New open calls for funding opportunities: time to develop your impact story! - Research Stories
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Impact chapter

New open calls for funding opportunities: time to develop your impact story!

Lonneke Opsteegh

Written by: Lonneke Opsteegh

Horizon Europe is the EU’s key funding programme for research and innovation. With a budget of €95.5 billion, the initiative tackles climate change, helps to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and boosts the EU’s competitiveness and growth. The programme facilitates collaboration and strengthens the impact of research and innovation.

A couple of ingredients are key to design a successful grant application: excellent research, a balanced consortium and a sound description of  how  the research creates impact. What we experience is that most of the application writing time is spent on the research and the consortium paragraphs, however the impact paragraph accounts for 33,3% of the total score for reviewers…! We can help you get inspired and write this impact paragraph.

Write that impact paragraph!

When writing your funding application, it is important to keep the situation in mind in which the reviewers are reading and assessing your work. Probably this is done in the evening, maybe with bad lighting, some bored teenagers that are begging for attention, and with lots of time pressure. In other words: a sub-optimal situation to focus on complex matters.

You need to grab their attention, clearly explain your undoubtedly complex and innovative scientific ideas, and most of all; communicate the urgency of your work so they decide to fund you. Good visuals can help you. We understand complex processes much easier when they are presented in schemas and diagrams.

But how?

As we’ve described in earlier articles, the impact paragraph of funding applications is getting more and more important in the total assessment. Being a scientist, you might feel a bit uncomfortable, or even stressed, when writing this chapter. We are used at writing for other scientists when explaining how we strive to expand our academic knowledge. Explaining how to apply this new knowledge in society is quite a different story… A story that needs another structure, another writing style. And most of all, you need to come up with ideas to create this societal impact! Another ‘workshop’ or ‘exposition’? Or do you already have some other ideas?

Inspiration sessions

We at ResearchStories, can help you with writing (and visualizing) your impact chapter. During a ResearchStories inspiration session we’ll get you started. What are your options? What do your stakeholders, or even society, want and need from you? And when you have come up with some novel ideas, how do you bring them alive in your funding application? There will be plenty of room for these questions and even when you have specific questions about the Horizon Europe calls you can ask them. The team of ResearchStories wrote successful applications under Horizon 2020, e.g. the societal impact project Accomplissh. Experience we would like to share with you in order for you to  convince those bored, annoyed reviewers… 😉

We can offer these inspiration sessions for groups of researchers or individually, whatever best meets your needs. Reach out if you want to give it a try!



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