Genres for Funding Research
SUMMARY: EVOLVING CROWDFUNDING STRATEGIES Emerging as a typified form of online science communication, the
crowd-funding proposal takes on a different rhetorical life than its conventional aca-demic counterparts, inhabiting a space alongside traditional scientific genres.
Take, for instance, the average annualized research grant award at the NSF:
US$167,800 in 2014 and US$174,900 in 2015 (National Science Foundation, 2016). Typically, this level of funding exceeds the size of the average success-ful crowdfunding campaigns on Experiment. Although an important distinc-tion, this does not suggest that crowdfunding is simply a poor substitution for such large-scale funding (although it is a poor substitution for robust, publicly funded support for scientific research). Instead, the function of crowdfund-ing seems to be to provide small-scale support for projects that cannot secure funding elsewhere. There are numerous reasons that funding may be unavail-able to some researchers, and this is especially true for our citizen and oth-erwise independent or grassroots scientists, as well as for less experienced or junior researchers.
Understanding the role of one’s own network and the funding platform’s network is crucial to successful campaigns. Requests for support through crowdfunding platforms change the response asked of the audience. For con-ventional grant proposals, a successful bid would be paid through federal, state, or corporate funds. Crowdfunding proposals request that personal funds be used in the support of research—and, it should be noted, this has critical
implications for the kinds of research that are funded, or indeed the researcher who is funded, as I will discuss below. Thus, budget justifications are essential and should be carefully considered and explained with a good deal of trans-parency: Will equipment, travel, or salary be covered? What other monetary expenses will be incurred? But there is also a clear requirement of trust on behalf of those providing support. Presumably this is where endorsements assist in establishing the credibility—and trustworthiness—of the researcher.
Matters of trust are likely at play when we consider that one’s own network is often a source of financial support. On the matter of social networks, the amplifying function they serve is likewise meaningful. Put simply, sharing the page with one’s own social network amplifies the number of views, and with some luck the number of supporters, that a proposal might obtain. This also means an inequitable distribution of research dollars may be perpetuated based on the socioeconomic status of one’s already established peer network.
The audience provided by platforms such as Experiment.com may, in part, alleviate such disparity, but further study in the economics of these networks is crucial to better understanding these implications.
Crowdfunding also contributes in economically different ways to its fed-eral funding counterparts (for example, from the NSF or National Institutes of Health in the United States or NSERC in Canada). Indirect costs or overhead payments taken from an awarded grant by the university to pay for facilities, equipment, and administrative costs are not permitted to be collected by the crowdfunding platforms and companies that we have examined here. This means that the financial incentives for a university are much lower in the case of crowdfunding, which typically awards the funds to a PI as a gift, and subsequently the incentives for a researcher are lower. In fact, the stakes for this seemingly obscure academic practice are so high they have even garnered some attention in the mainstream press when President Obama sought to place restrictions on how much overhead universities could claim from fed-eral funding. Boston Globe reporter Tracy Jan wrote in a March 2013 article that “Harvard, MIT, and a coalition of other powerhouse research institu-tions have thwarted a reform proposal by the Obama administration to slash the amount of government research money each school receives for overhead costs,” noting that Harvard received 69 percent, with the national average sit-ting at 52 percent. Put simply, crowdfunds do not represent the same fiscal benefit to universities that federal grants do because the overhead (indirect costs) that would typically be included in the grant amount for these pur-poses no longer exists. This being so, the institutional prestige of securing such funding must be understood as not only qualitatively, but quantitatively, different from federal grants. With less institutional prestige and fewer
finan-cial benefits to an institution, researchers are less likely to benefit directly in terms of tenure and promotion for their work on a crowdfunding proposal than on a major national grant.
Crowdfunding is also a one-time—that is, nonrenewable—grant. Many granting agencies allow researchers to renew grants, which makes the fund-ing of labs more stable and predictable. Naturally the cost of runnfund-ing many labs is also far outside the capacities we would expect of crowdfunding. Thus, crowdfunding becomes a supplemental form of funding, perhaps more central to new investigators or un(der)funded investigators. This last point should not be underestimated. The implications for novice researchers or researchers fol-lowing what might be otherwise unfunded research are complex.13 We have at once a new way to supplement and support research that federal agencies, for one reason or another, will not fund. However, because crowdfunding has less prestige associated with it, some might ask: Is it worth spending the time writ-ing and managwrit-ing crowdfundwrit-ing proposals? This will depend on the research it allows one to conduct and the associated institutionally valued products that one will be able to produce because of the research.
Although crowdfunding proposals may not exhibit all of the strategies common to a proposal for a government-sponsored competition, this is not for a lack of rhetorical sophistication. Rather, rhetorical sophistication allows successful crowdfunding proposals to reach a broad enough audience to secure funding. For crowdfunding proposals, an appeal to a large audience requires accommodating one’s rhetorical efforts to this audience of experts, amateurs, engaged publics, and others. The complex audience for crowdfund-ing proposals requires a shift in the rhetor’s position; thus, a change in rhetori-cal strategies and style is warranted (for example, stating implications in such a way that they are obvious to a nonexpert, while also retaining precision of language and appropriately restricting claims about significance or implica-tions). Indeed, it is not simply a “public” audience reading these proposals.
While a proposal does not undergo the same process of review, it is likely that
13. Despite these concerns, crowdfunding currently offers a helpful supplemental tool for research funding. This is especially true for novice and otherwise un(der)funded researchers in the sciences. That is to say nothing about the importance that crowdfunding might play in the humanities and social science disciplines, which sometimes require funding for travel to archives or other kinds of field work, but which have become largely undervalued. Indeed, it is not simply our contemporary STEM focus that undervalues the work of the humanities and social sciences. Rather, there is a deeper contempt for modes of intellectual inquiry that threaten to operate outside of product-based research and discourses of innovation and prog-ress, focusing instead on critical democratic issues. To illustrate this point, we need only look to the NSF’s criterion for political science research (it must advance national security or economic interests) or to the cancellation of the political science grant cycle in 2013 (Mole, 2013).
writers will be acutely aware that their peers may be reviewing (that is, reading critically) their proposals. Crowdfunding proposals, then, inhabit a delibera-tive space comprised of an audience of peers and publics, placing these pro-posals in the sphere of trans-scientific genres.
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