Grant Proposal and Management Q&A

(Last updated: Jul 23, 2024)

This document is created by Yen-Chia Hsu when preparing several grant proposals in Dutch academia. This is a live document that will periodically be updated.

Important: this document is created in the context of the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam. The situation may be different if you are in another faculty.

Table of Content

How to get the budget approved by UvA?

One important step in preparing the proposal is to get the budget approved by the project office (search “projecten-science” in UvA’s Microsoft Outlook App for the email). The project office can help you calculate the budget for hiring a person. If you need the office to do so, make sure to tell the project office about what kind of person you are looking for, such as “a student assistant who is currently studying in our institute’s master’s program.”

Be careful to allocate a good chunk of time (e.g., 2-4 weeks) to iterate the budget form. For NWO calls, their website for the grant call will typically include a template (which is an Excel file). Use the template to prepare the budget. Once it is ready, email the budget form to the project office to ask if there are problems.

Where to find grant calls?

You can check NWO’s website for funding calls. Others can involve grant calls from companies (e.g., Google, Amazon) or the European Commission. Below are some calls that can be a good starting point to check:

  • NWO Veni/Vidi and ERC Starting Grant. These are personal grants for developing your own research line. Notice that to be eligible to apply for these grants, you need to be within a certain number of years of experience since the completion of PhD. Check their website for details.
  • NWO Open Competition Domain Science M. You can submit the propoal alone (M1, for requesting 1 PhD) or with another person (M2, for requesting 2 PhDs). This is a rolling grant that does not have specific deadlines.
  • NWO Open Technology Programme. This is for research lines that are more application-oriented. You can have stakeholders that are listed explicitly in the proposal as users. This is a rolling grant that does not have specific deadlines.
  • NWO Dutch Research Agenda (NWA). This is for forming a consortium to tackle critical Dutch society issues (such as involving various stakeholders in research). Here is a document to the list of agenda.
  • Google Research Scholar Program and Amazon Research Awards. These offer unrestricted gifts (i.e., the most flexible type of budget). The funding is not sufficient to hire a PhD, but they can be used to conduct pilot research for preparing a follow-up larger grant proposal.

How to prepare the budget for NWO calls?

For NWO calls, use the budget form along with the call to prepare a budget. Be careful to check the call for proposal document for the grant to understand what kind of budget can be requested. For company calls, tell the project office that it is a company call, and the office will create a budget form for you.

For larger grant proposals, typically, people aim to hire PhD students or Postdocs. The salary rate for these two types of positions can be calculated using the budget form provided by NWO. If you want to do other types of hiring, consult the project office (search “projecten-science” in UvA’s Microsoft Outlook App for the email). Typically, the budget form is in the list of the materials that you need to prepare.

One thing to keep in mind is that, in the Netherlands, you need a full 4-year budget to hire a PhD. It is not allowed to first have partial budgets (e.g., starting with only two years of money) for hiring a PhD.

What does co-funding mean in NWO calls?

Some grant proposals may require co-funding, which means the contributions of money from other partners other than NWO. For example, government agencies and companies may be eligible to provide co-funding. Check the call for proposal document for the grant for details about who can co-fund a project carefully. The eligibility can be different for different grant calls.

There are two types of co-funding: in-cash (i.e., direct money) and in-kind (i.e., something that can be indirectly converted to money). In-cash co-funding means straightforward money contributions. In-kind co-funding can be personnel hours (e.g., for working with the research team), equipment, access to resources, etc. For determining the size of in-kind co-funding regarding personnel hours, you will need to provide an estimate of the hourly rate. Be aware that there is a lower and upper bound about the hourly rate that you can claim. Check the call for proposal document for the grant for specific details.

Where to find resources for data management and computing?

Sometimes, you may need to find places to store the data that will be produced in the project. Or you may need to find a place to deploy web-based applications. In this case, UvA provides services for data storage, virtural machines, and physical servers. They come with costs, so you will need to allocate a budget in the grant proposal for them. Depending on the situation, the ICT service may need to assess privacy and security, and you may be asked to provide a data management plan.

For computing resources, our institute has a cluster with many nodes where researchers can request a certain number of CPUs, GPUs, memory, and disk spaces. You can also make use of the DAS clusters and the Dutch National Supercomputer Snellius cluster. Or you can request virtual machines from the Dutch HPC Cloud.

How to subcontract a third-party organization?

Sometimes, you may need to subcontract a third-party organization to perform some tasks in the grant proposal. Different grant calls have different rules about who can request funding, and sometimes, your research partners may not be on that list. For example, the NWO Open Technology Programme cannot allocate funding to non-profit organizations or government agencies. In this case, one solution is to subcontract the research partner to perform tasks.

It is very important to keep in mind that, in most cases, a research partner cannot receive funding and co-fund the proposal at the same time. For example, if a government research partner has agreed to co-fund the project by putting in some personnel hours to provide guidance to the UvA research team, the partner cannot be subcontracted. Conversely, if a non-profit organization is subcontracted to perform community outreach tasks, the organization cannot contribute personnel hours to the in-kind co-funding.

Also, it is important to pay attention to the justification and the money part of subcontracting. Usually, subcontracting can only be done when there is no such knowledge in our institute. For example, it can be problematic to subcontract a partner to pay for their hours in writing research papers, as such expertise exists in our institute. Another thing is that a large amount of subcontracting (e.g., 100K Euro) may raise NWO’s attention, and thus, you will need to provide justifications in the grant proposal.

One very important thing is that subcontracting needs to pay 21% VAT because subcontracting is treated as a business. So this means that the organization that is subcontracted will receive less money than your planned budget, which needs to be considered in advance during planning the activities. To make subcontracting happen on the UvA side, first ask the organization that you want to subcontract to provide a quote (with detailed costs, such as personnel hours and the hourly rate), and then contact the IXA legal team to create the contract. You need to provide the WBS number and the quote to the legal team. Also, you need to tell the legal team if a data processing agreement is needed by asking the privacy contact person in your institution. Generally speaking, if the subcontracting involves processing personal data, you will need a data processing agreement with the third-party organization.

Below are the checklists of steps for subcontracting:

  • Ask the IXA legal team to see who can help in subcontracting.
  • Ask the third-party organization for a detailed quote with costs.
  • Ask the privacy contact person in your institution to check if you need a data processing agreement.
  • Email the following information to the IXA legal team person:
    • The quote from the third-party organization
    • The WBS number that will be used for the subcontracting cost
    • Whether you need a data processing agreement or not
    • Contact information (e.g., email of a contact person) of the third-party organization
  • Check the subcontracting agreement that is created and returned to you.

After that, the legal team will then ask the third-party organization to check the agreement and also missing information. Once the third-party organization approves the agreement, the legal team will ask UvA (typically the institution manager) to sign the agreement. After UvA signs the agreement, the legal team will ask the third-party organization to sign the agreement.

IMPORTANT: Make sure to allocate a large chunk of time to your project for subcontracting. For example, in my case, in 2024, the purchasing department (inkoop-fs) took care of the subcontracting process. The entire process took 126 days (more than 4 months) to complete, from initial contact until the signing of the contract by all parties. Within this chunk of time, about 64% of the time is used to wait for the purchasing department’s response, and 20% is used to wait for the third-party organization.

What if I am not in a permanent position?

When writing grant proposals, paying attention to the extra needs is important if you are not in a permanent position (e.g., the 18-month contract or tenure-track position). The background is that in the Netherlands, there is the tenure-track contract and the 18-month contract. For the tenure-track contact, the permanency (i.e., tenure) is usually evaluated together with promotion. For the 18-month contract, it is considered as a temporary contract and not tenure-track. In both cases, many NWO grant proposals require statements from the institute, and you will need to allocate extra time for this matter. Some proposals even have stricter rules that people in temporary positions cannot apply, mainly affecting people in the 18-month contract type. When in doubt, contact the NWO program officers to double-check.