Last week we introduced a series on preparing for short-turnaround and new funding opportunities. While you cannot predict what opportunities will arrive, you can prepare yourself so that you are not starting from zero when something relevant appears. A big part of this is having a strong professional online presence.

Generally, this refers to profiles on LinkedIn, Google Scholar, ORCID or other outlets where someone might look for information about you and your work. The good news is that once you have all your profiles in order, they are relatively easy to maintain.

However, these items should be handled differently from CVs or biosketches, which are primarily factual and retrospective. In those documents, you list positions, publications, awards, specialized education, training, grants, service and other accomplishments.

You must demonstrate more than a CV mindset when crafting your online presence.

Your online presence should be forward-looking to help audiences understand where your work is going, what questions you are pursuing, what kinds of projects excite you and what particular expertise you bring to emerging opportunities.

Its forward-thinking nature can be reflected in chosen keywords, the projects you highlight, the news you post, the photos or images you share, and the way you describe your research direction. This gives you a chance to explain not only what you have already done, but also what you are now building.

In today’s funding environment, people need to understand you quickly. This is especially true when a new opportunity appears, when timelines are compressed, or when those outside your narrow discipline are assessing fit or routing opportunities.

Those seeking information may include program officers, potential collaborators, reviewers, or those involved with internal selection for limited submissions.

We know that people look one another up, and you want the current version of your work to be visible – not just your past training, dissertation or postdoc research.

If a decision-maker has to reconstruct your story from scattered bits and pieces, you have made the process harder for them. They may see one version of your work on your institutional profile, another on LinkedIn, another on Google Scholar, and another on a lab website that has not been updated recently. Then they have to figure out how all those pieces fit together.

Profiles do not need to be identical across platforms but they should be consistent. Your institution, geographic location, current position, research interests, and a broad description of your work should not create confusion. Consistency builds trust -- and getting your research funded is all about trust.

Your online presence should also be understandable to those outside your narrow subfield. This is especially important for interdisciplinary and new funding opportunities where evaluators may not be experts in your exact area. If your description is too narrow, too jargon-heavy or too dependent on publication titles alone, readers may not grasp the broader relevance of your work.

Remember that working on your online presence is not boasting. It is about making your work clear to people who may be trying to understand, support, invite, nominate, collaborate with, or fund you. You are not doing anyone a favor by making your work harder to find or understand.

Remember, too, that many other PIs are doing this now. If you do not keep your profiles current, you may be falling behind others who are making it easier to understand what they do and why.

Online presence has been important for a long time, and it is only becoming more important now. AI tools add another layer here because your public information may shape how those tools summarize or interpret your work. We have written previously about optimizing your online presence for AI, and we link back to those newsletters below.

We also link below to a video about a recent change at a major foundation funder. It is another reminder that the way funders, institutions and other decision-makers find and interpret information about you is becoming more important, not less.

In the previous funding environment, your online presence mattered. But in this new one it matters more. Familiar pathways are changing, new opportunities may appear with less history behind them, and people may be trying to assess fit without the usual examples, training or institutional knowledge to rely on. In that situation, unclear or outdated information about your work can create unnecessary friction. A clear professional presence helps others understand you quickly, connect you to the right opportunities and see how and why your work is relevant.

The larger point for this series is that your online presence is part of your readiness for funding opportunities. When something appears on short notice, you do not want to spend valuable time updating profiles, finding old logins, rewriting your institutional bio, or trying to make your work understandable from scratch.

Check out these newsletters from last fall if you are ready to uplevel your online presence:

I recorded a short video to go with this week’s newsletter because I wanted to explain why online presence matters more in the current funding environment. Drawing on my experience inside a federal funding organization, I talk about what is changing behind the scenes, why funders and institutions may rely more heavily on the information they can find about you online, and why making your work easy to understand is now part of being ready for new funding opportunities.

If the embedded link does not work for you, try this one. If that also does not work, will you please let me know? Thanks!

Need to get your research funded, this year? Check out our 12-week program to get you there.

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