Research Grant Strategy Toolkit

This toolkit is a self-guided collection of research strategy tools, templates, visual maps, planning worksheets, and AI prompts designed to help researchers and research teams clarify ideas, structure projects, plan next steps, and prepare for funder or partner conversations. The tools in this folder come from frameworks I developed over 20 years working with research teams across many disciplines and institutions. They have been honed through many iterations of delivering grant-writing and research strategy workshops and coaching sessions to make complex research ideas easier to explain, evaluate, develop, and move forward.

These tools are designed to be useful across many disciplines, project types, and career stages. They are meant to be adapted. Some language, categories, or examples may fit your work directly; others may need to be renamed, simplified, expanded, or ignored. Make your own copy of each tool, save it to your own folder, and adjust the template for your specific project, field, funder, or career context.

This toolkit will not write a proposal for you, but it will help you think through the pieces that make a proposal, collaboration, project plan, or research trajectory easier to draft, understand, and discuss. Additionally, each section is paired with AI prompts to help you use the completed tools more effectively: testing your logic, clarifying weak spots, translating ideas for different audiences, and identifying useful next steps.

These tools are copyrighted materials created by Elisabeth Andrews / Hearts & Sciences.

Your purchase gives you individual access to use these materials for your own research planning, proposal development, teaching preparation, or professional work.

You may not share, forward, or repost the tools, upload them to a shared departmental or institutional drive, resell them, or distribute them to a class, cohort, lab, center, workshop, or department without written permission.

For team, lab, classroom, cohort, workshop, or departmental use, contact me for group access.

NOTE: This is a self-guided toolkit. It does not include live support on matching the tools to your individual use case. If you are having technical problems accessing the documents, contact me within 7 days of purchase at elisabeth.andrews@gmail.com. 

Use these tools when you need to:

• Clarify a research idea
• Draft a stronger project summary
• Identify the logic connecting activities, outputs, outcomes, and impact
• Visually map the structure of an applied, interdisciplinary, or team-based project
• Plan proposal production or funded-project milestones
• Chart out a tenure path or larger research pipeline
• Prepare for funder, program officer, partner, or collaborator conversations
• Use AI more effectively by giving it structured project information

You do not need to use every tool. Start with the folder that matches the question you are trying to answer right now.

This toolkit is organized around core research development areas. The numbers are there to keep the materials in a useful sequence, but you do not have to work through them in order:

• 01 Clarify Your Project Story
• 02 Build the Logic and Impact Pathway
• 03 Visually Map the Project Architecture
• 04 Plan the Work and Research Pipeline
• 05 Prepare for Funder and Partner Conversations
• 06 Use AI Prompts with These Tools

Contents under each heading follow the same basic pattern:

How to Use This Folder — a short guide to what the folder is for and when to use each tool.

Specific tools and templates — the actual worksheets, visual maps, checklists, or templates.

AI Prompts — prompts designed to help you use, test, clarify, summarize, or strengthen the work you just did in that folder.

You can move through the folders in sequence, or you can go directly to the folder that matches your current need. For example, if you already have a proposal deadline, start with the planning folder. If you are preparing to contact a program officer, start with the funder and partner conversations folder. If your idea is still blurry, start with the project story folder.

Clarify Your Project Story 

Start here if your project idea is still hard to explain, or if you need a clearer project summary for reviewers, funders, collaborators, or institutional leaders.

This folder helps you clarify the basic story of the project: what problem it addresses, what knowledge gap it fills, how the work will proceed, why the approach matters, and who or what may benefit.

Use these tools when you need to move from a rough idea to a clearer research narrative.

Build the Logic and Impact Pathway

Start here if you need to show how your project is supposed to create change.

This folder helps you work through the relationship between the starting situation, project inputs, activities, outputs, assumptions, outcomes, and long-term impact. It is especially useful when the broader impact claim, theory of change, or causal logic needs to be clearer.

Use these tools when you need to make the project’s reasoning visible enough to test, revise, and explain.

Visually Map the Project Architecture

Start here if your project has multiple components, partners, methods, outputs, teams, or implementation pathways.

This folder includes visual mapping templates for applied, interdisciplinary, translational, implementation-oriented, and team-based research projects. If you are working on a smaller or more traditional scholarly project, you can still adapt these maps by treating components as studies, chapters, methods, data sources, work packages, or strands of inquiry.

Use these tools when you need to see at a glance how the pieces of the project fit together.

Plan the Work and Research Pipeline

Start here if you need to move from project idea to sequence, schedule, or next action.

This folder includes tools for working backward from a proposal deadline, mapping four-year project milestones, and viewing your broader research pipeline. It is especially useful when you need to understand what has already been completed, what is under review, what is in progress, what is still being scoped, and what needs to happen next.

Use these tools when you need to make the work visible enough to prioritize, schedule, or say no to commitments that do not advance your goals.

Prepare for Funder and Partner Conversations

Start here if you are ready to move outward.

This folder helps you think through potential collaborators, partner contributions, funder fit, program officer outreach, and external conversations. It works best after you have at least a rough project summary.

Use these tools when you need to prepare more focused and useful conversations with people or organizations that may shape, strengthen, fund, or use the work.

Use AI Prompts with These Tools

Use this folder when you want general guidance for using AI across the toolkit, plus universal prompts that can work with almost any completed worksheet, map, schedule, draft email, or project document.

Each folder also includes AI prompts specific to that stage of the project. These prompts are designed to help you clarify, test, summarize, strengthen, or translate the work you have already done in the templates.

Use AI as a thinking partner, not as a substitute for your own judgment.

Some materials in this toolkit are Google Docs, Google Sheets, or Google Drawings.

To use an editable template, make your own copy first and make sure it is set to save in your own folder. You may need to create a Google account if you don’t have one. In most Google files, you can save your own editable copy by choosing: File → Make a copy

Then save the copy to your own Google Drive and edit your version.

For Google Drawing templates, you can edit text boxes, move shapes, delete elements that do not apply, and add, remove, or redirect arrows or notes as needed. You can also download your completed drawing as an image or PDF by choosing: File → Download.

The AI prompts in this toolkit work best after you have completed or sketched one of the tools.

To use a prompt, copy and paste it into the prompt window of the AI tool you are using (such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or another AI writing/research assistant). 

Replace any bracketed text with your own project information and paste or upload any materials the prompt refers to, such as a completed worksheet, project summary, concept map, logic model, timeline, or draft email.

The more specific your input, the more useful the response will be.

Do not paste or upload confidential, proprietary, sensitive, or unpublished material into an AI tool unless you understand your institution’s policies and the tool’s privacy settings.

AI can help you organize, test, and strengthen your thinking. Use caution: it should not invent missing details, replace your judgment, or make claims you cannot support.

My personal AI use policy is as follows:

• AI is an assistant, NOT a guide
• Use AI to help brainstorm and organize
• Maintain the role of lead author
• All information requires verification
• No sensitive data goes in
• Stay alert and keep learning

Start with the heading that best matches your current need. Read the How to Use This Folder document inside that folder. Then choose one tool and work with it.

You do not have to complete the whole toolkit. Use the tools as needed. 

The goal is to make your project – and your entire research trajectory – easier to describe, develop, and move forward.

Welcome to your running start.