The secret to writing a great NASA proposal
By: Dr. Chelle Gentemann
Tags: Remote Sensing, Open Science, Science, NASA

Use a real NASA proposal as a roadmap and follow these tips for clearly presenting your research ideas. A link to our proposal is here.

I’m a 100% soft money-funded research scientist primarily funded by NASA research grants. I teamed with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to lead a $190M NASA proposal. JPL’s mission formulation group provided a lot of help and guidance to our team. What I learned applies to most proposals, whether they are for $100K or $100M.

First, NASA provides a lot of helpful resources here and here. 2021 proposal opportunities are here. The guide for proposal content is here. Remember to review the checklist before you start writing and again before you submit your proposal. Volunteering to sit on a review panel can really help you understand the process. NASA provides a launchpad to help write proposals along with a workbook that helps you refine your science. Understanding and following the guidelines for submission is important. What are the allowed font size, margins, number of pages? Make note of these items early so you don’t have to adjust at the last second. You can do this! Let’s go! or as NASA would say, 10–9–8-…

Use a successful proposal as a roadmap to build your proposal. Having an overview of the structure and content is a big advantage. It can make writing the proposal less intimidating, just pick an easy section, and get something down. (Figure credit:farakos istockphoto.com)

A secret weapon — use a roadmap.

For the $190M proposal, JPL gave me access to three previously submitted proposals (redacted to various degrees). These were my roadmaps. They helped me understand the structure, content and expected writing style. JPL also gave me guidance documents based on their own lessons learned, describing best practices, words to avoid, and other proposal writing advice. Access to these resources gave me an advantage. While this help was more organized and professional, I realized I’d been getting help like this since I started writing proposals. My first boss had me work from a previously successful proposal. My PhD advisor shared their successful proposals. This made me start wondering:

“How does access to successful proposals affect who gets funding? Does this resource give an advantage to certain institutions/groups? How does that knowledge narrow who participates in science?”

Can we share writing advice so that the best science ideas get funded? If having an old proposal makes it easier to write a new proposal and this will help new people participate, I’m all in.

A roadmap for you: I’m going to share the science sections for my 190M proposal here and a google doc template, with more details, that anyone can use to get started here. Let’s get the best science ideas funded!

All ideas start somewhere. Talk about your science with everyone, listen to their ideas and feedback, and when you find something you think is special, write a proposal to do it! Most science you read or hear about started with a research proposal, which is the first step to funding. Image credit: NASA

Your Team

Most proposals are a team effort. Who is your team? Teaming up with people who have complementary skills can extend the impact of your idea and make your proposal stronger. This decision is important — make sure this person has the time, interest, and expertise to contribute substantially. As the principal investigator, you are ultimately responsible for the success of the project, so think carefully and objectively about what unique contribution they will add to the project and how you will work productively together. Talk about how you will work together and come up with a plan so that everyone has the same expectations.

Writing Basics

There is a lot of specific advice online for how to write, so I’m going to keep this high level. You are writing to both (1) tell a compelling science story and (2) not annoy or otherwise antagonize reviewers. A compelling science story is often best started with an outline of your story. The best stories have a simple outline and follow a clear progression. Once you have that structure outlined, start writing. Get the story on paper.

Build your proposal around your science. Convey your science through text, visuals, and attention-grabbing boxes. Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash

Tell your science story 3 times

Tell your story through text, figures, and theme statements. Many readers will start by looking at the figures and reading their captions. Then they will notice the theme statements. Then they will read the text for more details. All three of these components should work together to present your science clearly. This will make your proposal easy and enjoyable to read.

1. Tell me about your science — the text

Your audience is the NASA review panel. Proposals that review well tell a story that is compelling to a wide audience. Overuse of jargon and technical terms can disrupt that story. We all fill in the gaps in our story because they are obvious to us, but the more you can tell the complete story, that a non-expert can understand, the better you will review. Start with an outline, a logical flow, moving from introducing the larger science picture and where you have identified gaps in current knowledge, your science objectives (that will address those gaps), how you will use NASA data to achieve those objectives, your analysis methodology (clearly state any potential risks you think you might encounter), and how you will communicate your findings (publication, research notebooks, etc.). A good place to start is to ask yourself (1) Why? (2) Why Now?, and (3) Why us? Tell your story to different people, ideally outside your area, and see what questions they ask. Refine. Tell different people. Refine. Repeat.

Write from your outline. Each paragraph should start with a strong sentence that tells the reader what will come next. If your outline is good, the progression from one paragraph to another should feel natural. If you struggle to connect them, revisit your outline, is something missing?

2. Show me your science — Figures

Using your basic outline, try and tell your story in 5 slides, each with 1 sentence and 1 image. Identify compelling figures to include that tell your story. If a reviewer just looked at just the figures and captions, what would they know about your proposed science? Do your figures tell your story?

Compelling captions can entice reviewers to read more of the proposal details. Instead of making captions with strict descriptions (e.g. this is a table of numbers) try to tell your proposal story and interpret the figure for reviewers, link features of your proposed science to benefits. Here is the first figure in our proposal and examples of bad/good captions:

Figure D-1. Bad example: There is a turbulent exchange of heat and moisture at the ocean surface. Good example: Butterfly measures <25 km heat and moisture exchanges between the ocean and atmosphere that impact global weather and climate. The ocean supplies heat and moisture to the atmosphere and absorbs >90% of the energy trapped by global warming. 86% of global evaporation occurs over the ocean, constituting the single largest flux in Earth’s water cycle.

In our caption, we decided not to repeat the information that was already in the figure but to interpret the figure for the reviewer by pointing out a feature of our proposed mission and highlighting why it is important for climate and weather science.

3. Give me your take-home message — Theme Boxes

At the beginning of each section, where relevant, advocate for your story by providing a sentence that identifies an important feature of your story and helps both draw the reviewer’s attention to a key point and orient them within the proposal.

Theme statement boxes draw attention and provide a compelling point or interpretation of the following section that you want to get across. What is your take-home message for this section? Tell it here. This shows an example at the top of a section. The background is a different color, the text is a bit spaced out and bolder, and there are lines at the top and bottom to delineate it from other text.

Include all required information

You want to make it easy to review your proposal and not annoy reviewers. That means you want to understand how you will be reviewed and provide that information clearly to reviewers. Section 4.2 of the NASA proposal guidebook gives you the review criteria. The easiest way to ensure that you provide all the necessary information is to use the proposal checklist for your outline, then augment it with opportunity-specific requests. The layout, figures, highlighting sections/text are important during the review. If the proposal guidance tells you to describe how your research relates to the current state-of-the-art, don’t make the reviewer hunt for this information or interpret it from the references, state it clearly and concisely, and make it easy for reviewers to find by using a theme statement box, section heading, or different colored text.

Make your proposal easy to read. Present it so that the take-home message and review criteria are all easy to find. Make it easy to read and easy to navigate. Photo by Jamie Templeton on Unsplash

Presentation — yes it matters.

Reviewers will likely be given 8–12 proposals to review and be the lead reviewer on 2–4. That is a lot of information to process. A proposal that is easy to read and engaging will be easier to review. How you present your story is one way to engage reviewers. Even the most fantastic, revolutionary, amazing science idea in the world needs to be explained clearly. How you present your idea matters.

Orientation: Landscape or Portrait? Portrait mode is more traditional, but many people are comfortable reading on a screen and have stopped printing out proposals. Since screens are often wider than they are high, consider writing your proposal in landscape mode with 2-columns. On a screen, it is easier to read. Make this decision early because it will affect how you layout figures and tables.

Color. Pick a color theme for your proposal. Color has power and can convey your message as well. Using color carefully makes your document easier to read, dynamic, and engaging. For our $190M proposal, we chose shades of pale blue, using bold and changing text to blue to highlight important points, a pale pink for one table we wanted to stand out, and a darker blue for the rest of the tables. We wanted to communicate a different, more inclusive, approach to our science by using lighter color choices (and a gender-neutral font). We were also focused on the ocean, so blue seemed like a natural choice.

References. For some opportunities, NASA requires that you use numbers for references, but for most, it is up to you what sort of reference style you want. Using numbers for references saves space and is easier to read. Using a reference manager (e.g. EndNote, Zotero, Mendeley, etc.) will make whatever style you choose very easy and most of these work with a variety of word processors, including Google Docs. If you don’t like numbers because you can’t see the actual references, technology has a solution for that: internal linking.

Internal Linking. Most people are familiar with hyperlinks, where text is highlighted in blue to indicate that clicking on it will link you to an external webpage. You can also create internal links to connect text in your documents to other sections of the same document. Doing this whenever you reference a figure, table, or reference is a very nice way to improve the readability of a proposal. Here is a tutorial on how to create links in the PDF for the Figures and Tables. References can be automatically linked using EndNote with hyperlinks turned on. Zotero has a workaround to link references. It is also possible in Latex, using the hyperref package.

Ready to submit!

Don’t leave all the other non-science bits until the last minute. The science story isn’t the whole proposal. You usually need to provide resumes, budget justifications, lists of your current and pending grant applications, close collaborators, and other items. Winning a grant is hard, there are many good ideas being proposed and sometimes it comes down to small details, like how complete and detailed your data management section is written. Don’t shortchange the details. These all take time to gather together. Start early, be organized, and then give yourself enough time to put all these documents into the application system.

Open Science

Several federal agencies require open source software and open data. Learning some of the technology tools that help scientists ‘do’ open science can make your proposal stand out and advance science at the same time. Start using GitHub to share software, Zenodo to make releases of your code with a digital object identifier (DOI) for publications, publish in open access journals, share presentations online, write coding tutorials, and cite open-source software libraries in your publications. Openscapes is one organization providing help for scientists to move towards more openness. The Turing Way is a great website with guides to doing open, reproducible, collaborative science. Document your ‘open’ activities so that when you write a proposal, if there is an open science requirement, you can point to all your previous efforts.

Good Luck!

The only proposal I ever finished ahead of time was a proposal due just after a personal due date (for twin boys). That was some powerful motivation. More often, there is a rush to meet the proposal deadline and this shows in proposals through poor formatting, missing information, or other problems. Start early and give yourself time to iterate! It is rare to get a proposal funded on your first try, but normally you are given feedback. If you feel that the rejection wasn’t about the proposed topic but because of how it was presented, address the issues and try again. If they just didn’t like your idea, pivot, and try something new. And remember, it isn’t a rejection of you, it is likely just in how you presented your science. That is fixable.

Share your grant!

My proposal is also posted on the Open Grants website.