Budget development

Key points from the data:

• Applicants can find constructing a budget to be a real challenge.
• Budgets can take a significant amount of time to construct.
• Assistance to develop a budget was particularly welcomed by applicants.
• Even though a faculty or a school may offer budget development assistance, they may not necessarily be familiar with OLT grants and related budget requirements.

Assistance to develop a budget was particularly welcomed by applicants. Sally (C-size institution) commented, 'Most people struggle with budgets. There's no resource available in our School, even for ARC grants, that says to you 'This is what you should allow for air fares, per diem, taxi fares …''.

Sam (D) greatly appreciated the administrative assistance at his institution. He said they 'also helped with the budget as well and seriously what we found with some of the others is that the budgeting takes 50% of the time … so to have that scaffolded was really good, kind of took the sting out of putting in the proposals'. Trevor (D), too, reflected on the assistance he had received to construct the budget for his application:

Going through the process of getting a PhD and working at universities you learn nothing at all about budgeting and this was really a great process to learn about writing budgets … Really good help about writing the budget, making the budget look good, attractive. You know where we are asking for money for things that they want to spend money on.  That was really, really crucial. Without the help around the budgeting we wouldn't have got it.

Chris’s (C) experience was a little different. Although his institution had a central unit that provided assistance to OLT grant applicants, he also sought support at both the School and Faculty level where dedicated groups of people helped staff develop applications, or parts of applications (e.g. budgets), for non-OLT funding opportunities (e.g. ARC grants). He said, 'A central team in the School … research support … does triage on applications, assigns jobs, e.g. budgets, to people. The Faculty also has a budget team. That team doesn’t appear to be familiar with OLT. I was surprised by this'.