A tiresome request for boring information William Campbell 17 Nov 1998 10:11 EST

Dear RESADM-L colleagues--

My university (University of Wisconsin-River Falls) has just instituted an
assessment procedure for all non-academic units, including the grants office.
That means that I have to find some comparable institutions to which we can be
compared for benchmarking.

My request is, if yours is a primarily undergraduate institution of
3,000-10,000 FTE, would you fill in the form below and email/fax it back to me?
 I will be happy to share whatever data I gather with the list, unless you
instruct me otherwise.

I know, I know, we all have differing lists of responsibilities, we all count
things differently, we all report different kinds of data in different ways.
I've made those same arguments to the folks imposing this assessment and will
do so again in my report.  Still, when we've done this in the past I have
always learned something from the results; I hope you have as well.  And this
requirement won't go away, for me or other offices.  If I can identify a few
comparable institutions and we can share data every year, perhaps we will be
able to draw some conclusions from trends, despite our differences.

My analysis will focus on the four measures which appear below.  Since the UWRF
grants office writes and co-writes proposals, I've asked for information from
any other grants offices which do that as well.  If your office does not,
please leave that part of the questionnaire blank.  Use the most recent year
for which your data is complete, if you would.  I don't care if you use
academic or calendar years.

UWRF Grants Office Questionnaire

Name of institution:
Contact person and email address
 (in case I need clarification):
FTE enrollment:
Year of report:

For the institution as a whole.

Number of grant proposals submitted:
Total dollar amount requested:
Number of grants awarded:
Total dollar amount awarded:

Do these figures include grants made to your faculty/staff by your own
institutional foundation?

For proposals written or co-written by the grants office (if you do that sort
of thing at all; if not, leave this part blank).

Number of grant proposals submitted:
Total dollar amount requested:
Number of grants awarded:
Total dollar amount awarded:

Thanks, and please return your completed questionnaire to:
Bill Campbell
Director, Grants & Research
UW-River Falls
715/425-3195 (phone)  715/425-3185 (FAX)
xxxxxx@uwrf.edu

Note: please don't use the reply feature on your email system lest you
inadvertently send these data to the entire list.