Requests for Proposals
The Ohio State University has a university‐wide subscription to SPIN, a search tool that enables you to establish specific criteria to identify both public and private funding opportunities that may be relevant to your work. Access to SPIN is managed by Jeff Agnoli in the Office of Research; please reach out to Jeff should you wish to get started with a search in the system.
Foundation Relations is happy to consult around any private foundation opportunities of interest that may pull into your SPIN search. Additionally, you may find funding through the Office of Research Finding Funding. Our team actively promotes limited submission and targeted calls to academic and medical center units and looks forward to sharing a list of upcoming deadlines on this page in the future.
Early and Mid-Career Opportunities
Foundation Relations has curated a list of highly competitive early and mid‐career opportunities. If you are interested in exploring any of these opportunities further, please reach out to our office for a pre‐consultation meeting. As a first step, help us to better understand your research and previous experience with private funders by completing our online contact form.
Request Prospect Research
The Foundation Relations team invests in additional search tools to aid us in refining prospect lists and helping identify funders that are a “match” for research and projects that have been deemed institutional priorities. We are a team of major gift fundraisers and typically work at the minimum request level of $100,000, with exceptions made for strategic engagement of high‐value prospects.
Searches are involved and therefore we limit our support of targeted funding searches for single investigator projects to those that are deemed by academic leadership to be a priority and where the investigator is “funder ready."
In order to gauge readiness, please provide detailed responses to the following questions:
- Is your research basic, clinical or translational? Is this a community outreach program?
- What are the desired outcomes of your work? Articulate your goals and anticipated measurable performance objectives.
- What need or gap is your research/work addressing? What population(s) will be impacted?
- Is it distinctive, novel and innovative for your field? Who are your most high-profile competitors?
- Foundation grants often come without, or with limited, indirect cost recovery. Do you have the full support of your department chair, research dean and/or college to pursue private foundation funding for research? Do you have any collaborators in other departments or other sites? If so, are their institution(s) supportive of their participation on the project?
- What would be a useful amount of money to accomplish your goals?
- Do you have existing relationships with any private foundations?
- Please provide a lay summary of your proposed work and a list of keywords that may be used for an active search for prospects.
If you are able to provide complete answers to the questions above, please contact a member of the Foundation Relations team to schedule a pre-consultation meeting.
