Initial Publication Date: October 8, 2024

Synthesis

This synthesis reflects participants' small group discussions during the Summer 2024 CLASP GRANTED convening.

Participants in this paired summer convening discussed barriers around outreach to funders, stakeholders, and collaborators such as learning about grant opportunities and making the case for research at predominantly undergraduate institutions (PUIs) and worked toward synthesizing advocacy strategies that empower members to make a case for their positions and offices, both by sharing internal advocacy strategies for individual campuses and externally, by building connections to professional organizations that represent CLASP stakeholders.

Internal advocacy:

Challenges:

  1. Office structures and reporting lines may not serve our current needs. Financial constraints and inefficiencies between various groups (e.g. business office, academics, advancement, faculty, etc.) due to inter-office silos can present challenges. Academic Affairs and Advancement have very different mindsets and methods of operating. Some participants housed in advancement reported that their work was not well understood, while some whose offices include corporate relations questioned whether this function is better aligned with community engagement or career services and whether the combined corporate and foundation relations position is antiquated. Having documents and models with guidance on best practices for building efficiency (and demonstrating mutual benefits to all stakeholders) would be helpful.

Ideas:

  1. Benchmarking (including office structure, size, reporting lines, responsibilities, and even policy framework) within CLASP (keeping the data specific to PUIs) as well as guidance from senior leadership on institutional metrics for grants would be valuable. Documenting how others' offices are set up could help both to advocate for similar models at places that need a different structure, and also to demonstrate how to retain and build efficiency even as the volume of work increases.
  2. People discussed articulating the value of grants to strategic plans, institutional reputations, the student experience, and the bottom line (e.g. through indirects). A repository of case-building documents and case studies from institutions that have done effective self-advocacy that could be used as a model for others would be helpful.
  3. Create a networking mechanism for people to talk with each other and know to whom they can reach out with questions and scenarios as they come up.
  4. CLASP could be used as a primary resource for small school SPOs to house tools and resources that can be used by the membership.

​External advocacy:

Challenges:

  1. Because of our limited staffing, keeping up with rapidly evolving funding programs, including new opportunities for PUIs/ERIs, is really challenging; are there ways in which funders can help us overcome this barrier? 

Ideas:

  1. Collective advocacy work to improve opportunities and support for our institutions—and for a deeper understanding and appreciation of our institutional context. ​​Some of this could be pretty granular (e.g. making it easier to include course releases in grants for PUI faculty members, NSF two-month cap), but other aspects could be more fundamental/broader-reaching. 
  2. How can PUI/ERI expertise be taken into account when developing (and evaluating) programs targeted at our institutions? Improving reviewer training and increasing the number of rotators from PUIs/ERIs and, ideally, developing an NSF advisory committee on PUI concerns would be helpful.
  3. Work with agencies representing other stakeholders at our institutions (e.g. NACUBO, EDUCAUSE, CUPA-HR) to produce white papers making the case for supporting sponsored programs offices within the context of those stakeholders.