Drafting the budget for your first SSHRC grant application

This coming February, I’ll be submitting my first-ever SSHRC Insight Development Grant application, and I’ve never written a budget before. What am I allowed to ask for? How much of my budget should be dedicated to student salaries? Is there flexibility as to how I spend the funds?

– Anonymous, French language and literatures 

Dr. Editor’s answer: I think budgets are a great way to quickly get at the heart of a grant application’s purpose. By looking at a budget, I can see the kind of research involved in a proposed project – archival (in travel expenses), land-based (in gifts for Elders and catering for feasts), qualitative (in honoraria), quantitative (in gift card prizes or data feeds), artistic or creative (in CARFAC fees), and so on. I can see what kinds of knowledge mobilization and dissemination are being prioritized; how many researchers are on the team; even whether there’s an advisory committee for a community-based or industry-engaged project.  

In my experience editing research grant applications, I see a lot of errors in budgets. The more complex a grant, the more errors creep in – it’s pretty much inevitable. In this month’s piece, instead of focusing on the weaknesses I regularly see in grant applications – because, like it or not, errors are going to show up – let’s instead focus on strengths. So, in answering your questions, I also want to answer one of my own: what makes a budget look great?  

What am I allowed to ask for?  

The most accurate answer to the question “what can I ask for?” is “anything you need to do the work successfully” – but that answer isn’t very helpful when you’re trying to write your first budget.  

The Tri-Agency Guide on Financial Administration has lots of information about who and what is eligible, and it’s a good idea to be familiar with that document so that your reviewers don’t view your budget (and thus your application) as uninformed or lacking in credibility. But most institutions have a research office that will review your draft budget before you apply to ensure that you’re adhering to those eligibility criteria – so I don’t usually recommend spending a great deal of time reading that guide.  

Instead, I think it’s important that you learn the differences between costs that are permitted by SSHRC and costs that peer reviewers will think are appropriate. For example, when I’ve interviewed former SSHRC peer reviewers about their perceptions of budget expenses, I’ve learned that peer reviewers in the humanities are more sceptical of the article processing fees levied by journals than their colleagues in the social sciences. These article processing fees can be in excess of US$3,000, and so, for a humanities researcher like yourself, dear letter-writer, I’d suggest asking your favourite university librarian for details about any institutional agreements regarding open access before you include any OA costs in your budget; ideally, you’ll get open access covered through your institution, even though article processing fees are an eligible expense.  

Fortunately, reviewers told me that they’re willing to be persuaded that all kinds of costs are appropriate for an individual project. Some reviewers might frown at high-cost hardware, high-cost APCs, and multiple international conferences, but even those reviewers seem open to being told that such expenses are necessary for a specific project, if given a sufficiently strong rationale.  

To help you to brainstorm potential budget expenses, from student salaries to travel and knowledge mobilization costs, I created a budget spreadsheet template that you can use to experiment with a range of expenses and see how they translate into SSHRC’s budget categories.  

The budget categories included in that template are all line items that I’d consider normal in SSHRC grant applications. It’s normal to hire one or more students; it’s normal to attend one or more conferences; it’s normal to bring your trainees to one or more of those conferences, to co-present alongside you.  

But just because an expense is normal doesn’t mean your reviewers will necessarily believe it’s appropriate for your specific proposed project. So, in the 500 characters you have to justify each requested expense, I suggest you provide a three-part justification:  
 

1. Justify why the expense is necessary  
   You need a doctoral-level RA to work 10 hours a week to support data collection and analysis and knowledge mobilization; you need a laptop with X specifications for that RA to keep research data secure and to ensure that students from low socioeconomic backgrounds have access to this opportunity; you need to attend this specific conference in this specific year to reach the academics whose future work your results will influence.  
    

2. Justify where the numbers came from  
   The RA’s salary aligns with your institution’s agreement with your grad student union, or with the living wage in your city; the price of the laptop comes from “Big Box Store”; the location for the conference you’ll attend in Year 2 hasn’t yet been set, so you’ve used Halifax as a proxy to estimate costs.  
    

3. Justify how the expense was calculated  
   Show the series of additions and multiplications that you used to come up with a particular figure. My budget template shows the numbers I usually want to see in this calculation. You might write something like, for a student’s salary, “Year 1: $30/hr x 10hrs/wk x 48 wks + 12% benefits (CPP, EI, WCB) = $16,128; Year 2: Year 1 + 3% cost-of-living increase = $16,611.84” (132 characters) or, for a conference trip, “Flight Cityname–Halifax ($600 x 2 people = $1,200) + hotel ($220/night x 3 nights x 2 = $1,320) + registration ($200/person x 2 = $400) + per diem ($60/day x 4 days x 2 = $480); taxi to/from airport ($50 each way x 2 trips = $100) = $3,500 Total” (242 characters). 

Using this three-part strategy to justify each line item will ensure that your peer reviewers have the information they need to determine whether your estimated expenses are appropriate for the work you’d like to do.  

In short: ask for what you need, justify why it is needed, then check with your institution to ensure each cost is eligible.  

How much of my budget should be dedicated to student salaries? 

Again, the most accurate answer here is an unhelpful one: whatever percentage you need. If your grant necessarily includes a lot of travel, you might only be able to put a third of your proposed budget toward one student’s salary.  

For the overwhelming majority of IDGs that I read, though, more than half of the budget will be dedicated to the combined costs of students’ salaries and travel expenses.  

Consider, for example, the math that I provided above for a single research assistant earning $30/hr for 10 hours a week, 48 weeks per year, over two years. That single RA’s expenses come to $32,739.84. If you need two RAs, then, for student salaries alone, you’re looking at $65,479.68 of your $75,000 maximum – and that’s not even accounting for any hardware or software they might need, or any conferences they might attend.  

Do those numbers intimidate you? You’re not alone. I spoke with David Bruce, director of research grants at St. Francis Xavier University, and he told me that he finds that early-career researchers can be too cautious in requesting RA support: “Some researchers can be hesitant because they are worried that their RAs look too expensive. But trainee hiring is expensive – that’s expected. In fact, it’s an equity issue: if you underpay your RAs, then you make RAships accessible only to those who can afford to take low-wage work. So budget for a living wage and a meaningful number of hours.” I agree with David: don’t balk at paying your trainees well, or at increasing their salaries year-on-year to account for inflation.  

If you know you want to attend one domestic conference in Year 1 and one international conference in Year 2, then enter those costs in the budget template, see what they total, and then manipulate the individual cells for your RAs to see whether you can afford to hire two RAs for 10 hours per week each, or if you need to scale that back to seven or eight.  

Is there flexibility as to how I spend the funds? 

Oh yes. I’m not a post-award person – I don’t get to see into that world too often – but my understanding is that you have a large degree of flexibility with how you spend your grant funds once your proposal is successful. Again, check with your office of research services to get the official answer here, but my outsider’s understanding is that, if the expenses are eligible, you’ll probably be fine, even if you need to deviate from your plan.  

It’s because of this flexibility that I ask the researchers I support to name the specific conferences they want to attend, rather than just indicating a lump sum for any ol’ conference in Year 2. Your reviewers need to be confident that the funding they allocate will substantially advance knowledge and, if relevant, policy, practice, or public discourse. Without a clear sense of how you’re going to get your results out into the world, your reviewers won’t feel reassured that funding in your project would be a wise use of scarce SSHRC funds.  

So tell your reviewers what Plan A looks like. Keep it reasonable, given your track record, and given the audiences you want to reach.  

But since you can use your grant funds to go to whichever conference you decide is going to be best, there’s no reason not to tell your reviewers what you currently think the best option is going to be. The same is true of the journals in which you want to publish, the venues for which you’ll write op-eds, even the YouTube channels, newspapers, and podcasts on which you’ll be interviewed. Your plans are allowed to change. So start with a clear plan, and budget accordingly.  

Get a copy of Letitia’s budget spreadsheet template for your next SSHRC IDG or IG application.