Multi-Agency Funding Opportunities

To be successful, a proposal needs to reflect the priorities, culture, and values of the funding agency. This advice leads many investigators to specialize in one primary funding agency such as NSF, NIH, or USDA. However, more funding agencies are now taking advantage of mission overlap to issue joint funding announcements.  This presents a dilemma to researchers – do you try to target the missions of every participating agency or do you try to speak to just one of the agencies? 

The most important source of information to answer this question is the funding opportunity announcement (FOA). Look to see if there are guidelines that require you to indicate which funding agency you are targeting. The FOA will let you know how broad or tailored your approach should be. For example, in the recent multi-agency call for the National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Institutes, the guidelines indicated that for an application to be considered by the USDA it would need to follow unique budget guidelines and specifically indicate that it was responding to a specific theme; otherwise, the application would be available for consideration by all of the agencies involved in the announcement – NSF, DOT, VA, or DHS. 

One specific area of the FOA to pay attention to is the section on Review Criteria. In most joint funding opportunities, although several agencies will fund the awards, one agency will typically be the designated center for review and the other agencies will defer to those review processes. Even if a proposal intends to target one of the non-lead agencies, it may need to be written in a style that is tailored to the lead agency. For example, look at the following two collaborations between NIH and NSF. For the Smart and Connected Health program, NSF led the review process, so applicants were expected to address the NSF criteria of Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts. In contrast, for the Centers for Oceans and Human Health program, NIH led the review process, so applicants were expected to address the NIH criteria of Significance, Innovation, Approach, Environment, and Investigator. Flexing a proposal’s writing style to address the culture of the reviewing agency will help the application appear more competitive overall, and hopefully draw the attention of the agency whose mission (and funding) is leading the process. 

Finally, look for opportunities to learn more information directly from the funding agencies. For large, complex opportunities, funding agencies often offer technical assistance webinars. While taking advantage of technical assistance is always a good strategy, it is even more so for multi-agency announcements. They will often address their expectations for whether proposals need to address all participating agencies’ missions or target a specific agency. 

With multi-agency funding opportunities becoming more common, it is a good idea to become familiar with these types of opportunities because they allow teams to expose their research questions to multiple agencies and expand their funding portfolio. However, since every collaboration is structured a little differently, it is important to learn as much as possible about that specific program before submitting an application.