This week’s blog post highlights one of OPD’s signature services: Funding Strategy Sessions. OPD facilitates and hosts strategy sessions where faculty with similar research interests come together and discuss how they might collaborate with a specific focus on what kind of funding opportunities they could pursue.

OPD handles the entire event planning, including scheduling and meeting space, and also facilitates and guides the discussion. The goal of a strategy session is to discover common research themes and identify possible sources of funding. These sessions then lead to long-term “working groups” which better enable faculty (and by extension FSU) to position their teams to be proactive in pursuing large, multi-disciplinary, and center-level funding opportunities.

In addition to being a facilitator of these conversations, and assisting faculty to develop their strategies, OPD gathers information on the kind of support that will be necessary from us and the Office of Research.

Some of the key questions we ask at strategy sessions include:

• What are our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges as it pertains to (the selected research topic) funding?
• Who is our competition for (selected topic) funding?
  • What are our strengths and weaknesses compared to them?
• What are our goals for the next 1, 5, 10 years?
  • How do we achieve them?
  • What can OPD/Office of Research do to help?
• What resources currently exist, and what resources are still needed?
• What recurring funding opportunities for (selected topic) exist?
• What are the future trends in federal/foundational/state funding?

If you are interested in holding a strategy session for your team, contact Mike Mitchell or Kate Herron in the Office of Proposal Development.

See you next week!