• Have you ever had a question but didn’t know who to turn to?
• Have you ever felt a bit unsure about charging a certain expense on a grant?
• Have you ever wondered if you were giving the right advice to a PI?
• Have you ever been disappointed in the results of your google search, still not knowing the correct answer to your question?
• Have you ever hesitated to ask your “go-to” person again for something for fear of being a bother?
We have all been there. In fact, we are all there currently. And, more than ever, as grant volume increases throughout the University, we need one another to help navigate our way through the twists and turns of pre- and post-award grant management.
Through its large and diverse membership, NURAP members hold an incredible repository of knowledge of all things related to research administration and post-award management of grants. We tend to ask people we know and then stop asking after awhile, but there are many people in our membership pool, potential experts who have your answers and are willing to help a colleague.
And, that is where NURAP’s new offering comes to into play.
NURAP is launching a new “product” designed to be a community-sourced information portal, where you can turn to your community and ask questions and follow-up questions, called LinkUp.
LinkUp will start out as a question-and-answer and discussion forum in Teams, much like focused Facebook groups, loosely aligning with CRA training topics. You can ask anything related to pre- and post-award management, and membership will jump in to opine or provide reference links or vignettes of how they handled that exact same situation. Anyone who knows of someone who is an expert on a question or topic can be tagged, and they will further assist. And, people can suggest that someone reach out via PM for a more in-depth discussion outside LinkUp. No question is too small, or one should never have to apologize for not knowing something. The NURAP community has your back.
LinkUp will be housed on Teams.
We envision there will be a lot of chatter going on in our LinkUp channel on Teams. Within 6 months, we will roll out Phase 2 of LinkUp, where we categorize like-questions into meaningful groupings, and high-volume repeat questions into its own sub-grouping for ease of being part of a thread By then, we will have identified experts willing to moderate the groupings and directing conversation, but no one is excluded from offering up an answer or becoming a co-moderator.
Broadly, these categories are likely to be:
• Allowability
• Sub-contracts
• Grant close-out
• NCEs
• Effort
• NU Travel Policies
• NU Best Practices
o Spending Plans
o Effort
o Award Tracking
• How to write a budget
• International
• Miscellaneous
How do you get in on this?
To join LinkUp, please sign up here.
You will receive an invitation to join the group on Teams and can participate as often or as little as you like. We encourage you to hop on as often as you can, as you undoubtedly will learn a lot or have a lot to offer.
This product offering will be iteratively developed and improved upon. We look forward to your feedback and will adjust LinkUP accordingly, so that it really becomes your community, a space to share information and receive assistance.