Opportunity Grants

The Opportunity Grant supports research, scholarly, and creative activities with the potential to attract future external funding. Submissions may propose investing in the success of an established program, as well as supporting new projects through funding for a pilot project, establishing or enhancing partnerships, or other activities that significantly advance the University's scholarly enterprise. Because Opportunity Grants intend to seed future externally funded activity, applicants should clearly demonstrate the potential of their project to lead to external funding.

Opportunity Grant Guidelines

Please follow the instructions below in developing proposal documents. Be sure to review the Research and Artistry general guidelines, eligibility criteria, FAQs, submission deadline, program contact information, and a link to the online application portal on the main page.

To ensure uniformity across the university, the submitted proposal should adhere to the content requirements detailed below. Proposals that do not provide the content requested below will not be evaluated.

We strongly advise applicants to attend to general grantsmanship and readability when writing the narrative sections of your proposal. While grammar, spelling, and readability are not explicit review criteria, it is difficult to judge the merit of proposals that are poorly written or contain grammatical or spelling errors. Such proposals do not fare well during the review.

Applicants should also write their proposals in language understandable to non-experts. We strongly advise avoiding the overuse of jargon and highly technical language in narrative documents. Reviewers are selected from a broad array of disciplines and may not be experts in the applicant’s domain. A successful proposal must be accessible to all reviewers. Proposals containing language that is not accessible to non-experts fare poorly during review.

Glossary of Abbreviations

Please include a glossary of abbreviations used in your proposal, if any. The InfoReady application portal provides two options for providing a glossary: a text field (type the glossary in directly or paste text developed outside the system), or a document upload field.

Project Summary

Provide a summary of the project not exceeding 1,600 characters. This character limit is built into the InfoReady application form and will be enforced. You may develop your summary outside of the portal and paste it into the text field.

The summary should be a self-contained description of the activities that will be completed if the proposal is funded. The summary should include a statement of objectives, a description of the methods that will be employed and/or activities that will take place, and an explanation of how the project will impact the applicant, the University, the discipline, and society. 

Proposal Narrative

The proposal narrative should communicate all aspects of the applicant's plan. You will develop your proposal narrative outside of InfoReady and upload it to your application as an attachment. The proposal narrative (excluding references cited and glossary) is limited to five single-spaced pages with one-inch margins in all directions and font size no smaller than 11 points. Please work within this limit to determine the appropriate length for each section below based on the content required for your specific proposal. Proposals that exceed this overall page limit will not fare well during review at best, and at worst may be returned without review.

The required sections of the proposal narrative are as follows:

• Opportunity grant justification: describe how the project qualifies as an Opportunity Grant. This section may include:
  • How specifically the Research and Artistry grant-funded project will strengthen an extramural proposal. What activities will the project fund that are necessary to secure external funding (e.g., proof of concept, securing pilot data, establishing collaborative relationships, project planning, etc.).?
  • Information on previous attempts to secure external funding, including whether reviews of previously submitted external proposals justify the need for the proposed activities and/or internal funding in support of a stronger application.
  • Information on specific plans to apply for external funding in the future, including sponsors that may fund the work, a timeline for pursuing extramural funding, and other details.
• Project goals:
  • This section should clearly state the project goals and objectives (hypotheses to be tested, questions to be answered, concepts to be explored, and/or products that will result from the project) and how those relate to prior work in the field by the applicant and others.
  • A description of how the project proposed, if successful, will be continued and lead to future projects.
• Project methods:
  • Define the methods that will be used and activities that will be conducted to achieve the project goals and to evaluate project impacts, irrespective of whether the field is artistic, scientific, or humanistic.
  • Please include a justification and explanation of sample sizes, where applicable.
• PI and co-PI qualifications and career enhancement:
  • Provide a short description of the contribution of this project to the applicant’s(s’) program(s) of research, scholarship, or artistry.
  • The description should clarify how the proposed work builds on successful work already carried out by the applicant(s). If the proposed work is in a new area, the proposal should explain the motivation for the change in direction and plans to ensure success.
  • The description should also explain how the proposed work will further the applicant’s(s’) scholarship.
• Student involvement:
  • Provide a brief but clear description of how you will involve NIU students in the project or why you will not do so.
  • Clarify the anticipated number of graduate and/or undergraduate students that will be involved.
  • Describe how student involvement will be meaningful and allow students to gain direct experience in the relevant field of study.
  • Lack of student involvement should be justified in the context of the work. This is essential to ensure the proposal is not unduly penalized.
• Dissemination:
  • A plan for the dissemination of project results should be presented. The vehicles employed for sharing the work product will depend on the nature of the project and may include but are not limited to exhibitions, performances, presentations, journal articles, books, websites, or podcasts.

Please direct questions regarding the content of the narrative to resart@niu.edu.

References Cited

Provide a list of references cited in the proposal narrative or elsewhere in the application documents. Applicants may use the citation method most appropriate for their field, as long as the citation method is consistent throughout the application.

Budget and Justification

Provide an itemized budget request and detailed justification. You will download an Excel budget form from InfoReady, complete it offline, and upload the completed form to your application. You will have access to download the form once you start your application in InfoReady.

The total budget requested may not exceed $15,000 – including summer salary. Funds may not be spent before the award start date. Funds may not be used for activities that occur before the award start date. Funding is limited to the following categories:

• Faculty summer salary of up to $4,500. Faculty may only request summer salary on one proposal up to this limit, even if they participate in more than one proposal.
• Graduate assistant salary.
• Undergraduate assistant salary.
• Supplies (including consumables and minor equipment).
• Travel required to conduct the research, scholarly, or creative activities proposed in the application (travel related to the project methodology, e.g., for data collection, collaborative activities, field research, etc.). Note that conference travel/registration is not allowed.
• Publication costs.
• Fees for use of established NIU service centers (i.e., MAC lab, stable isotope lab, RMS). More information is available on these service centers.
• Contractual services (e.g., transcription, lab analysis, access to research facilities, etc.). Note that payment for contractual services to an external organization may only be requested if the service is not available via NIU.
• Participant payments.

Budget items other than those listed above are not allowed. Specifically, the following requests are unallowable:

• Costs incurred for activities taking place before the award start date.
• Faculty summer salary exceeding $4,500 per faculty member, and/or requested in multiple proposals.
• Any costs (travel, lodging, meals, registration, or any other cost) in support of conference attendance, including for presentation of project results.
• Costs of collaboration with external entities: Funding to external entities is limited to contractual payments to another organization for services not available at NIU (e.g., transcription, lab analyses that cannot be conducted at NIU, access to facilities required but not available at NIU, etc.). Direct payments to individuals are not allowed, nor are consortium arrangements with another organization to conduct a portion of the work (i.e., a sub-award).

If the budget of a proposal selected for the award includes unallowable items, those unallowable costs will be removed from the awarded budget and the total award amount reduced accordingly. Awardees will not have the opportunity to negotiate or revise their budgets.

Including fringe benefit costs, student tuition, or facilities and administrative costs in the Research and Artistry budget is unnecessary. These costs are requested in budgets of externally funded grants and contracts to recover institutional costs associated with those projects. Because Research and Artistry is an intramurally funded program, recovery of these institutional costs is not applicable.

You must provide a detailed budget justification within the budget form. Each budget line has a “description” column; please use that space to justify each item requested. Additional space is available at the end of the budget to provide further justification if needed. The justification should directly tie the budget request to the work plan of the proposed project, and must include the following information:

• Why each item requested in the budget is required to complete the project
• How each item requested will support the proposed project
• The cost basis for and total cost of each item requested, in dollars (e.g., “X widgets x $Y per widget = $Z total”; “X amount of time x $Y per time unit = $Z total salary/wage request”)

Budgets that are not adequately justified will not be awarded.

Award funds must be expended between May 16, 2024, and June 30, 2025. Funds may not be spent before or for activities occurring before the award start date. Extensions of the award end date must be approved by the VP-RIPS or their designee. Such approval must be requested well before the award end date. If approved, extensions will be awarded as “no cost”, meaning no additional funding will be provided and the applicant must have funds remaining to complete the project during the extended award period. Additional details regarding no-cost extensions are provided in the Research and Artistry award letter.

Part 5: Other Supporting Documentation (required for the lead PI and any co-PIs, where applicable)

Required Additional Documentation

• History of prior support from the Research and Artistry program: Provide a list of projects, amounts, and dates of support of previous Research and Artistry awards. For each item, indicate how the results of the supported research, scholarly, and creative activities were disseminated. This document is required. If you have no history with the Research and Artistry program, you must upload a document stating as much to meet the requirement.
• Extramural funding (past three years): Provide a list of all extramural proposals submitted during the last three years (funded, unfunded and pending). Please retrieve the list from the InfoEd database by accessing the standard reports. This document is required. If you have never applied for external funding, you must upload a document stating as much to meet the requirement. Do not include intramural funding activity in this list. Describe any additional efforts you have made to develop such proposal(s) or to identify appropriate external funding sources, if applicable.
• Abbreviated CV of no more than five pages. The emphasis should be on publications and professional activities (e.g., books, book chapters, proceedings, refereed articles, monographs, presentations, exhibits, performances, inventions, etc.) during the last five years. This document is required.

Optional Additional Documentation

• Internal Funding History: A list or description of internal funding other than Research and Artistry support you have requested or been awarded to support the proposed project. You may submit this as a standalone document or append it to your history of prior Research and Artistry support document.
• Description of additional efforts to obtain support for the proposed project: A description of any additional efforts you have made to obtain resources in support of the proposed project. You may submit this as a standalone document or append it to your extramural funding report.
• Letters of Collaboration: If external collaborators are involved, you may provide letters of collaboration confirming their intention to participate. Such letters should be brief and to the point and should document the commitment to collaborate rather than describing qualitative support for the project. Basic letters of support (letters that praise the project idea or PI(s)) are not allowed and will not be reviewed or considered.