Association of American Medical Colleges

The AAMC leads and serves the academic medicine community to improve the health of people everywhere. Founded in 1876 and based in Washington, D.C., the AAMC is a not-for-profit association dedicated to transforming health through medical education, health care, medical research, and community collaborations.

Their member institutions represent the full spectrum of medical education, including 171 accredited U.S. & Canadian medical schools, 400+ teaching hospitals & health systems, Veterans Affairs medical centers, and 70+ academic societies.

Challenge

While the AAMC is a large organization with large federal and foundation grants supporting several key initiatives, they comprise only a small percentage of the overall organization budget. The grants office consists of just two staff members. Beginning in 2013, the AAMC first contracted with RBW Strategy to provide supplemental grant writing support during an especially busy time to increase staff capacity.

Since then, the AAMC has begun to work to center its efforts into a prioritized mission-critical, mission-focused, and mission-supportive framework. Through this process, the AAMC has expanded its engagement with RBW Strategy to provide consultative services to an expanded grant-active team of AAMC colleagues to operationalize this nuanced shift in focus while navigating a broader organizational change.

Outcome

The AAMC and RBW Strategy worked together to develop a philosophy of change, process model, operational collateral, and interactive functional supports to document the organizational changes, provide resources to socialize these changes organization-wide and deliver streamlined operational practices across the AAMC’s entire grant lifecycle including strategy, research, proposal development, management, and engagement. This includes contributions on larger federal grant applications that were awarded. 

Recognized as a leading industry educational output, this work was featured at the 2023 GPA Grant Summit in a co-led presentation, The 4M Model: Determining when Grants Should and Should Not be Used to Fund Your Program.

Services provided

Since the partnership began in 2013, RBW Strategy has expanded its support from grant writing and prospect research to include strategic coaching, collateral development, strategy and capacity building, and industry education.

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