By Minessa
Do you have an institutional fact sheet? If not, you could be adding a lot of unnecessary frustration and work to your plate. With this one small step, you can save yourself time during the grant submission and award process, in correspondence with colleagues, and so much more. (I feel like I’m selling Shamwow – except I’m not selling anything, and yet…..)
But here’s the thing—there’s information that RAs constantly access. Our organizational UEI, the cognizant agency, etc. and each time we need to use this information, it’s a series of steps to go find it and collect it. While each step may only take a few seconds, shavings make a pile, and before you know it, you’ve lost over an hour simply finding information and typing it into a form.
Enter the Institutional Fact Sheet
An institutional fact sheet can mitigate this by providing a single location where ALL of your most frequently accessed information is easy to reference and share with collaborators. You can now copy and paste important information, reducing the chance of human error and speeding up your processes.
Having an institutional fact sheet (IFS) helps you by:
- Providing PIs and their staff with a trusted source of information for most administrative questions asked on grants, empowering them to manage their own data entry for these areas.
- Creating a quick reference information you’ll need to reference often.
- Saving time by giving you a quick response to commonly asked questions rather than looking it up each time.
One of the first things I do with my clients is find out where their IFS is, and if they don’t have one, I get started on putting one together. Once it’s created, I recommend publishing this on your website so that it’s easily accessible for collaborators. I typically include it on grant correspondence as a link in my signature.
For Investigators
Suggested language to insert in your emails to PIs: “I’ve attached a copy of our Institutional Fact Sheet for you to reference when filling out the administrative portions of your application.”
It’s important to note that if you currently work at an organization where PIs are not filling out this information because they didn’t have access to it, or it was simply easier to do it yourself, I would suggest sending out a couple of emails to prepare your investigators for this change and creating a rollout process to acclimate them.
Example Institutional Fact Sheets
- Boston Medical Center
- UMASS Boston (They went fancy with theirs!)
- University of Arkansas
- Harvard University
- Kent State University