An Impact that Increases Funding

Potential grantors demand meaningful broader impacts. Collaborating with IDEA can expand your project’s impact in the online and mobile space. Whether your project is already funded or you are at the grant-writing stage, IDEA can help you leverage online and mobile technologies to deliver broader impacts.

Whether you’ve received or are seeking funding from the National Science Foundation or the National Endowment for the Humanities, reviewers are looking for ways in which your proposed project will promote teaching, training, and learning; your results will be widely disseminated; and your project will benefit larger society.

When it comes to addressing the broader impacts of your project, IDEA can help you think outside of the box. Perhaps your project can reach a wider audience through a virtual exhibit. Maybe your results can be developed into an iPhone app that will educate the public. Perhaps you need to develop and maintain a project blog for your advisors and stakeholders. It could be that you need to find your target audience through social media.

Beyond creating tailored solutions to your “broader impacts” dilemma, IDEA can partner with you every step of the way. We can write the relevant sections of your grant proposal, develop social media vehicles that are easy to use and maintain, and work with your institution’s press office to disseminate information to the public using New Media strategies.

Moreover, our involvement can seamlessly transition to implementation. Your field staff can provide us with raw footage from their mobile phones, submit data from the field, and write occasional blog posts. Our team can keep the project blog running, maintain social media conduits for the public to interact with researchers, and edit and post video. We can even create a mobile app that delivers live research data to the students and the public, all the while keeping your Facebook and Twitter feeds buzzing. The result? Your project will both satisfy reviewers’ concerns and truly make a lasting impact.

Interested in professional development using social media? — Go beyond conferences, journals, and training workshops. Build relationships between professionals and share practical knowledge and lessons learned via a virtual community. We have concrete ideas for grant proposals about how to plan, build, seed (jumpstart the community with members and posts), evaluate, and continue to promote and grow the community over time.

Interested in outreach to the public? — Web and mobile users increasingly expect projects to have a social media component. Whether that means connecting to the public via a blog or drawing knowledge and opinions form the public in the form of comments, videos, data, or other “crowdsourced” content, we can help you think about how to plan and implement such outreach. You can develop content in-house, build a “blog network” to inexpensively draw multiple points of view and content from members or experts in your community, or collaborate with IDEA and let our writing team write your social media content.

If you need broader impacts and want to collaborate on outreach, please contact us.