Guidelines for Project Reporting
Reporting requirements of the National Sea Grant College Program and NOAA make it essential for us to have accurate and current information for all projects supported through the Alaska Sea Grant College Program. The National Sea Grant Office will not allow us to fund any new project by an investigator who has not submitted a progress or completion report for currently funded projects.
Annual progress reports
Progress reports must be submitted each year a project is active. Such reports are typically requested during the summer or early fall, depending on the project and national reporting requirements. Doug Schneider will contact each project's Principal Investigator several weeks prior to the report due date. PIs will be given a personal link to a secure website to update their project information. Please read Guidelines for Updating Your Project below for more information. For questions about this process, please contact Doug Schneider.
Completion reports
At the completion of each project, a report must be submitted describing that project's progress toward achieving stated objectives and identifying notable accomplishments, outcomes, products, and impacts over the entire period of the grant.
We realize that impacts and publications resulting from projects often appear after a completion report has been submitted. Please update your project with new impacts, and each time you have a new publication or when the student supported by the project graduates, has a new address, or has a new place of employment. Your updated project summary will continue to be available in our research project online database after your completion report has been submitted.
How to submit reports
To make it as easy as possible for you to give us updated information, we have created an online update form for progress and completion reports. Each PI will be given a unique link for accessing the project update form for each individual project. If you misplace or do not receive the link, please contact Doug Schneider.
The update form displays the information that is currently in our database for your project. The form includes instructions on how to enter or update accomplishments and impacts, add information on products or media coverage that have resulted from the project, and provide other information about your progress. The Alaska Sea Grant research project online database lists all of our projects, and includes detailed summaries for many projects funded in the past 10 years.
Please fill in or correct only the fields that need to be changed. When you have completed updating your project, click the "Submit" button. The report will be transmitted to Alaska Sea Grant's database. This will not immediately change the project as it appears on the Web. We will update the database after reviewing your submission. It may take several days for your updates to be reflected in your project's online summary.
Guidelines for updating your project
Please provide information on those topics relevant to your project. We have not provided update fields for Objectives, Rationale, Benefits, or Methodology in our update form because we assume they have not changed. If you need to update any of those fields, please use the box provided for other changes at the end of the form.
Each block on the form has a brief description of the kind of information we are looking for; below are further details for selected blocks.
Our project summaries are public documents. Please keep in mind that the information you provide will be readily available to the public.
- Impacts: Sea Grant, as is true of many federal funding agencies, is required to provide justification for the public funds we spend. Why a project merits funding—what changes it has effected, what benefits it has yielded—is a critical component of our reporting process. If you would like help in articulating the impacts of your project, please contact Doug Schneider, our public information officer.
If your project resulted in a new management tool or model, did it improve an existing management practice? If so, how? Did your project lead to a new resource policy, or improve an existing policy? If so, what was the effect of this new or improved policy? Did your project improve the economy or lifestyle? If so, what was the effect of that improvement? Consider whether your project changed people's behavior in ways that have benefited the wise use and conservation of marine resources.
An impact may include assistance provided to businesses that resulted in new business start-ups, new successful products or improved methods, or added new jobs. Seminal contributions to basic scientific understanding are impacts, especially if the research findings lead to major progress in a particular field, implementation of new technologies, or have a substantive bearing on an economic or societal issue. For further guidance on possible impacts, see Considerations for Impact Reporting.
- Accomplishments: These should clearly address the stated objectives for your project. This section is not the place to detail research activities, but to summarize actual accomplishments in each of the objectives. Please cite any specific benefits, applications, and uses stemming from this project. Include benefits expected in the future; where possible, quantify. Include who outside the research community you anticipate will be applying these research results and uses.
- Publications and presentations: Provide full citations for all published materials, and include available information for those manuscripts that have been submitted but not yet published. For presentations, include name of presenter(s), title of talk, date, location, and name of professional meeting or conference. If a PDF of your publication or presentation has been made available to the public, please include the URL or send the file to us as an email attachment.
- Extras and follow-up: Aside from the objectives of this project, what is the most "special" thing that resulted because you undertook this work? What sort of follow-up activity should take place to ensure that the results of this project are applied to the fullest extent possible?
- Other changes and comments: Notes, comments, changes to objectives or methods, and other miscellaneous information can be entered here.
Please don't forget to acknowledge Sea Grant in any published work resulting from this support. See Publishing Alaska Sea Grant–Sponsored Work for more information. You may also contact us for grant and project number. Our logo can be downloaded for use in posters and PowerPoint presentations when appropriate.
Questions?
If you have any questions or concerns about updating your project information, please ask us! Contact Doug Schneider by email or by phone, (907) 474-7449.
