Leadership Foundation

SDP Call for Proposals 2018

Key facts and figures

Submission deadline: Wednesday 31 January 2018
Notification of outcomes: by Wednesday 28 February 2018
Anticipated start date: by Monday 19 March 2018
Anticipated completion date: Tuesday 31 July 2018
Available funding: £500 - £4,000
Eligibility: for Leadership Foundation member institutions only
Submissions to: innovation@advance-he.ac.uk

What’s this about?

Every year the Leadership Foundation invests in the sector through our Small Development Projects (SDP) scheme. We have funded around 200 projects since 2005 which have produced research reports, case studies, toolkits, training materials, videos, guides and other resources to support leadership, governor and management (LGM) and organisational development in higher education.

We know that our member institutions are continuously developing new interventions and resources to support LGM and organisational development, or enhancing implementation. We also know that adoption of such interventions and resources by others can be limited, as evidence and knowledge of successful practice can be hard to find.

As part of our innovation work, SDPs provide an opportunity for Leadership Foundation members to develop, demonstrate and share innovative practice with us and the wider sector, activity which might not otherwise attract full funding support within an institution.

What are we looking for?

Areas of focus

For 2018 we are particularly keen to fund innovative ways of sharing practice and evidence of ‘what works’ in relation to an over-arching theme of positive cultural and behavioural change. This approach has been identified through our parallel exploration of impact and ‘what works’ to support decision-making in higher education (see What Works: The Concept).

We are especially keen to identify impact and encourage take-up of practice in member institutions that can answer the following questions:

• What interventions are effective in changing culture and organisational practice in support of women’s careers?
• What interventions are effective in engaging staff in major organisational development (for example, mergers, alliances, changing spaces, restructures, curriculum change etc)

Evidence and facilitation of take-up

Our initial explorations of mobilising knowledge of ‘what works’ suggests that face-to-face networking and communities of practice can strongly encourage take-up of interventions and provide evidence of impact. Innovative approaches such as film, infographics and animations (eg RSA Animate) and, to some extent case studies, are also effective.

We are therefore looking for proposals that:

• Provide evidence of impact of intervention(s) in the above areas of focus (interventions may be at a single institution, across a region or a number of institutions)
• Produce outputs in one of the following forms:

o Film (suitable for YouTube, up to 15 minutes’ duration)

o Animation (up to 3 minutes’ duration)

o Infographic (based on A4 size or multiple A4 pages)

o Other innovative medium as suggested by the project team

With a supporting 1-2 page executive summary and/or

• Develop a community of practice (existing or new) to test, adopt and develop practice in the above areas of focus and report on implementation and impact

Funding up to £4000 is available for proposals that provide evidence and outputs as above.

Case studies

As in last year’s SDP scheme, we are also interested in receiving proposals for short case studies that describe interventions in the above areas of focus (women’s careers, major organisational change), and share metrics of impact and lessons learned.

We are also interested in case studies describing the impact of institutions’ adoption and use of the Leadership Foundation’s Research Leader’s Impact Toolkit, a membership benefit launched in 2017.

Funding up to £500 is available for case studies.

Proposals

• Proposals are welcome from all staff groups from individual member HEIs and from consortia of members.
• All individual HEIs or consortium members must be members of the Leadership Foundation at the time of the proposal and for the duration of the grant.
• Proposals will be subject to peer review as part of the selection process
• Proposals should be presented under standard headings as indicated below, and within an overall word limit of 800 words. Please also consider the selection criteria and ensure that you provide sufficient evidence to enable the reviewers to make an informed decision:

Title (Please keep this short but meaningful)

Name(s) of the project leaders (with contact details)

Lead institution (for consortia, please also identify partner institutions. NOTE: all HEIs involved must be members of the Leadership Foundation; if you are not sure if your institution is a member, check here

Area of focus: Delete as appropriate: [Effective interventions in support of women’s careers] [Effective interventions for staff engagement in major organisational development] [How the Research Leader’s Impact Toolkit has been used]

Intended output(s): Delete as appropriate: [Film] [Animation] [Infographic] [Community of Practice] [Simple case study] [Other] (note that a 1-2 page executive summary is also required)

Description: (What intervention(s) will you include? What evidence do you have of their impact? How will you produce your chosen output(s) – including available facilities and resources?)

Benefits: (How will this benefit the work of the Leadership Foundation? Of the wider sector? How will you facilitate take-up?)

Plan: (include planned actions and timescales, any interim milestones and key delivery dates)

Experience: (who will be involved? What relevant experience do they bring?)

Budget: (Breakdown of allocation of requested funding, and total funding requested. Budget should reflect the planned activities, inputs, resources and outputs). Note that proposals that include matched or other institutional funding are welcome).

In addition to the proposal, each submission should be accompanied by a 200 word overview for inclusion on our website and use in any social media promotion.

A letter of support from an in-house champion (typically a senior member of staff in the relevant area of work in the lead institution) should be provided, and should confirm that outputs can be shared and that any resources or facilities needed to produce the planned outputs will be available in line with the plan and budget.

Proposals should be submitted to innovation@advance-he.ac.uk by noon on Wednesday 31 January 2018 in MS-Word, plain text or PDF format. An automatically generated response will acknowledge receipt.

If you would like to have a conversation about a potential proposal is welcome to contact Dr Giles Brown, E: giles.brown@advance-he.ac.uk

Selection criteria

This is a very competitive process. Only 25% of the proposals received for the 2017 SDP scheme were funded. Proposals will be subject to peer review as part of the selection process, drawing on Leadership Foundation staff, associates and partners, and specific external expertise where needed.

Proposals will be assessed against the following criteria:

• Does the proposal clearly fit one or more of the identified areas of focus?
• Is the intervention(s) covered of sufficiently wide interest to be adopted by the Leadership Foundation and/or wider sector?
• Is there sufficient evidence of impact to facilitate take-up?
• Are the outputs accessible and generalised so that they can be used by the LF in support of our programmes or member benefits, and/or the wider sector?
• Has the project team provided evidence that they have agreement to use suitable institutional facilities or resources to develop outputs to high quality?
• Can the outputs be easily hosted on the Leadership Foundation website or YouTube (ie do not need any special infrastructure)?
• Does the experience of those involved give confidence of successful delivery?
• Does the budget appropriately reflect the description of planned activity?
• Does it represent good value for money?
• Are all HEIs involved members of the Leadership Foundation?

Notification, contracting and implementation

The Leadership Foundation will notify outcomes of the selection process by Wednesday 28 February 2018 via email to the named project lead. Detailed feedback on unsuccessful proposals will not be provided. We aim to issue contracts in order for projects to start by Monday 19 March 2018 at the latest. We expect all projects to have completed and produced agreed outputs by Tuesday 31 July 2018.

We encourage projects to use social media to promote their work and anticipated outputs on a regular basis. We can provide guidance on the use of social media hashtags and our own channels as appropriate.

Templates, SDP and Leadership Foundation branding and related style guides will be provided and must be applied to all outputs to acknowledge Leadership Foundation funding (joint branding with the host institution is acceptable, to an agreed style).

Outputs may be restricted to our members only for an initial period. Outputs will be subject to peer review led by the Leadership Foundation; project leads will be expected to respond to feedback and prepare at least one further iteration of the output(s) where necessary, and should factor this into project timing and resourcing.