explore the different aspects of grant writing, and presenting findings to various audiences
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NARRATOR: Public health agencies often seek grant funding to implement programs and interventions. To support this request, public health practitioners need to demonstrate an understanding of the current body of research. In this program, Dr. Peter Bielenson and Dr. Deanna Mills explore the different aspects of grant writing, and presenting findings to various audiences when attempting to secure funding.
DR. PETER BIELENSON: Grant writing, where we’re applying for grants, oftentimes from the state or the federal government or a foundation, that is something that we, as a local health department, do. And frankly, I’ve been very proud of our grant writing folks, have done quite well.
Obviously, to do that you need basic statistics on what the problems are, what your demographics are, what intervention you want to use, how you’re going to be studying that. And that’s where you might bring in some experts from your academic institutions to help you write that part. But most of the grant writing, we do ourselves.
As a local public health official, I spend a lot of time presenting findings, not so much at conferences, but rather getting to the point that we spend public dollars, and are held accountable for spending public dollars. Most of my presentations on research or research findings, in terms of our public health programs, are to legislative bodies– city councils, county councils, state legislature. I’ve testified before Congress several times, as well.
So in that regard, you have to frame how you present the research. And so it can’t be scientific gobbledygook, and you can’t talk in science language. You’ve got to really make it pithy. If you can, bring in a story of an actual patient that’s been helped, or a participant that’s been helped.
But give more generalities on why this has been good use of public dollars, with the basic elements of the research. Not so much talking about a p value of 0.03 versus 0.05, because no legislator in the world’s going to know, or almost no legislators will know what that means. Or this is statistically significant or not.
Obviously, you want to present things that are statistically significant. But you don’t need to add those kinds of comments that you might at a research presentation to a conference of epidemiologists. You want to give the basic evidence that this program is working.
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Presenting Research Results
Similarly, I do a ton of media. I think I’ve done a couple thousand media interviews over the last 10 to 15 years. And that’s where you’re actually talking about research. It may be called evaluation, or accountability again, for the general public, because it’s their dollars that are being spent to do whatever programs you’re doing.
In addition to presenting research findings or evaluation findings to legislative bodies, a lot of what I do also is presenting to the public via the media, which is crucial. Because in addition to being publicly funded, you want to get public support for whatever you’re doing in terms of public health. And the presentation in that case is even more brief and concise than what you’re doing to legislative bodies. It’s usually in the 10 to 20-second soundbites. And so you really just getting across the basic information and the basic results of whatever program you’re doing.
Now, all this is not to say that you don’t do any presentations at academic conferences or American Public Health Association conferences. Obviously, we present a lot of our outcomes at those things, as well. But day in and day out, much more of our time, in terms of presenting research findings, is to the general public or to legislative bodies.
The most important thing, I think, in terms of presenting research and evaluation of public health programs is to know the audience, and know what you want to get from that audience. So in terms of presenting at conferences, academic conferences, or conferences of public health professionals, that’s more getting across the scientific results that you’ve gotten.
When you’re talking to the public or legislative bodies, you want to basically present the evidence that what you’re doing has made sense, and has been a good expenditure of public dollars, and that it’s a reason to get support from the public for this public health intervention. So it depends on the audience. But you want to talk to the audience, and you want to keep in mind what you want to get from that audience.
DR. DEANNA MILLS: Whenever you’re going to ask somebody for money, you need to be able to show, one, that you are familiar with what are best practices in the field. And you need to go to the research data to find out what are the best practices. And the second thing you need to do is design a program that’s going to probably help with the intervention that would– and you would have to do an evaluation in order to prove that your intervention worked. So research for us really does a primary thing, which is present a business case, so that somebody sees that giving you money is a good investment.