Author Archives: lkeyes70

Grantsmanship Seminar in Manchester NH

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The Grantsmanship Center’s signature Grantsmanship Training Program is coming to Manchester, New Hampshire, July 28-August 1, 2008.

The program will be hosted by Saint Anselm College.

The Grantsmanship Training Program is a comprehensive, hands-on workshop that covers the complete grant development process, from researching funding sources to writing and reviewing grant proposals. More than 110,000 nonprofit and government personnel have attended this fast-paced, five-day workshop, which is followed with a full year of membership support services.

What will you learn:

During the workshop, participants learn The Grantsmanship Center’s proposal-writing format, the most widely used in the world. In addition to practicing advanced techniques for pursuing government, foundation, and corporate grants, participants work in small teams to develop and then review real grant proposals.

Participants exit the class equipped with new skills, new professional connections, and follow-up services for one year, including professional proposal review, access to The Grantsmanship Center’s exclusive online funding databases, and an array of other benefits. Many also leave with proposals that are ready to polish and submit.

Tuition for the Grantsmanship Training Program is $895 ($845 for each additional registrant from the same organization).

To ensure personalized attention, class size is limited to 30 participants. For more information or to learn about scholarship opportunities for qualifying organizations, click here.

To register online, click here. Or call The Grantsmanship Center’s Registrar at (800) 421-9512

Nationwide Training Schedule

Register Now!

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Don’t forget to check out our nationwide training schedule for other workshops we’ll be conducting throughout the U.S. in coming months.

Best wishes,

All of us at The Grantsmanship Center

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Municipal Broadband: How it works, how it is financed

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I recently wrote an op-ed about broadband in Vermont (not). Several folks wrote back asking why I hadn’t mentioned two major municipal fiber-to-the-home projects, one up and running, Burlington Telecom, and one in the planning and funding stages, ECFiber.

The short answer was that I didn’t feel I had enough space to talk about these, the longer answer is that the projects are controversial and have become politicized with one side saying the fiber projects receive an unfair taxpayer subsidy. (They don’t.) and the other side saying that the incumbent commercial offerings from Comcast and Verizon/Fairpoint, are receiving overt subsidies as a sort of bribe to encourage them to build out their networks in rural areas. (they might be). Both the fiber systems, and the incumbent systems have been savaged in the press. I didn’t really want to go there; I was more interested in the notion of broadband as the equivalent of the interstate highway system.

Anyway, I wanted to point to what appears to be an excellent series of white papers discussing the technical, political, and financial aspects of municipal broadband by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

http://www.newrules.org/info/index.html

I do have a dog in this fight… as a research business start-up, I’m currently buying 14 internet connections using DSL, cable and one lone connection to BT. These are used to deliver our multi-point video exercise program to patients in their homes via their own TV sets and their internet connection. I’ve dealt with pretty much every horror story you can think of in ordering these connections. Think “airline travel”, and you’ve pretty much got the paradigm. The newspaper piece was really an attempt to (re)start the conversation among the people in our state about a vital piece of our economic future and to educate myself about the alternatives and realities.

Cars & Jobs in America

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With $4.00 a gallon gasoline, people are starting to think about the high cost of driving. Yet, in this report and video from the Annie E. Casey foundation, you can see how access to car makes an enormous difference in the lives of low-income workers. From the introduction:

Low-income workers who are trying to reach self-sufficiency, stabilize their finances and move up the economic ladder must be able to connect to good jobs and meet family obligations. A car is often a necessity. However, common obstacles such as overpriced and unreliable cars, sub prime (high interest rate) loans, high down payments, hidden purchase costs, and the limitations caused by poor credit histories can prevent them from improving their lives through car ownership.

VoIP Supply offers SIP trunking

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I was intrigued to see that VoIP Supply, the folks that sold me my Trixbox and my Polycom SIP phones are now offering SIP trunking and data services.

Don’t know how this stacks up against suppliers like VoicePulse. For one thing the pricing model is slightly different, with VoIP Supply looking for a minimum $25.00 per month, but with unlimited local and long-distance calling in the lower 48 states. VoicePulse, at least the version for Asterisk/Trixbox, was on a pre-paid model but charges 2 cents or so per minute.

What about the quality of these calls though? Maybe I’m just cranky, but I’ve had literally dozens of calls from vendors in the past year that clearly were low-quality VoIP calls. I would be appalled if my own calls to my clients and prospects sounded like many of these calls.

In one case, I was (supposedly) working with a sophisticated and highly-paid consultant who was using either Vonage or the Comcast VoIP. The guy couldn’t get out of his own way…I just couldn’t understand him, over multiple calls. How are we supposed to conduct business this way? And, where is the savings per month, at $25.00 or $125 or even $1025 per month that the person is supposedly saving, when as a result a client drops this person, after originally looking forward to a multi-thousand dollar contract? False economy.

Bottom Line: The landline isn’t dead yet. Use VoiP for long-distance calls to friends and family, and non-critical overseas calls. If there is any question, during a VoIP call, have a back-up landline available.

And if you have contracted out any functions to a call center (perish the thought…my local newspaper has done this to verify authorship of letters to the editor), be sure you get yourself on the receiving end of such calls to assess the quality. Nothing turns off customers and prospects more quickly then struggling with foreign-based tech support, heavily accented, with stupid calling scripts, and bad sound quality.

Use Excel Goal Seek in Indirect Calculations

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The Excel “goal seek” function allows you to to work backwards from a total. I needed to do this when I was calculating direct and indirect costs from a total, without the underlying spreadsheet. The question I wanted to answer was this: “Given a total consortium cost of $72,000, and a known indirect rate of 52%, what is the direct cost?”.

Goal Seek only deals with a single variable.

The formula for my calculation would be something like:
X + (X*.52) = 72,000

This looks like three cells in the Excel Spreadsheet

Amount

Rate

Total
47368

0.52

72000

Assuming these are cells M4, N4 ,and O4, on the spreadsheet enter the following

O4 = M4+(M4*N4)

N4 = .52

When you run the goal seeker, it asks for the “goal” value and the goal cell, (which is required to have the formula) It also asks for an “entry” cell, the cell that gets changed as you spin up toward the goal.

So, this shows, that given a total cost of $72,000, the direct costs allowable using a 52% indirect rate would be $47368.

Indirect: Figuring a Base Rate

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Ok….I’m going to explain this to myself. Below is an note taken from the NIH example Excel spreadsheet for calculating indirect costs.

1. Rate Base Determination: The base is used to allocate Indirect (Overhead/G&A) costs equitably to ALL PROJECTS (Direct, IR&D and Commercial). The base can be direct salaries and wages, direct salaries and wages plus fringe benefits, total direct costs (no exclusions), or modified total direct costs (e.g., total direct costs excluding equipment, total direct costs excluding equipment and subcontract costs in excess of $25,000 per subcontract per project period [as used in this example], etc.). The base an organization chooses to allocate Indirect (Overhead/G&A) costs should result in an EQUITABLE ALLOCATION OF INDIRECT COSTS TO ALL PROJECTS.

For example; if the organization has a mixture of commercial and NIH awards and the commercial is heavy in materials while the NIH awards are heavy in direct salaries and wages, the base should be total direct costs and not just direct salaries and wages. However, if an organization only had NIH awards which are all heavy in direct salaries and wages than the base could be direct salaries and wages.

2. IR&D: It is NIH’s/DHHS’s policy to exclude IR&D costs from the Indrect cost pool and include it in the Indirect cost base, thus, these values include element costs relating to both “Direct” and IR&D activities.

Taking Item 1 first, I’ve extracted the following points:

  • There are four methods for allocating the base. These include:
    1. Direct Salaries and Wages
    2. Direct Salaries and Wages + Fringe Benefits
    3. Total Direct Costs with no exclusions
    4. Modified Total Direct Costs

  • Modified total Direct Costs are calculated by taking the total direct costs excluding equipment, and amount of subcontracts over $25,000). MTDC comes up in F.A.R. (the Federal Aquisition Regulations, and regularly shows up in DOD calculations. The FAR subpart 42.7 discusses indirect rates but, as always, it references the canon, which includes the OMB budget documents A-21 for educational institutions, A-87 for state and local governments and Indian reservations, and A-122 for non-profits.
  • So, as near as I can figure out, you choose which of the four allocation methods by figuring out if you are “heavy” in people, or in materials.

What about the common situation of a start-up organization that has a single funded project? Jim and Gail Greenwood address this question.

We sometimes hear from start-up firms that they don’t have any indirect costs since they will only have this one SBIR project and therefore all of their costs would be direct ones. This likely is not true. Even a one-project company is probably going to be preparing other proposals, keeping time sheets (as required by the SBIR agencies), filing tax reports, doing some schmoozing to improve their chances of a Phase II award, etc—all of these costs suggest that this firm has indirect costs and needs to calculate an indirect rate to bill for them.

Journal for Grass Roots Fundraising

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Who says that direct mail doesn’t work anymore? Today I received a flyer from Grassroots Fundraising Journal. $35.00 for six issues. Topics taken from the flyer:

  • Step-by-Step Guide to Organizing a Fundraising Dinner
  • How to Raise $50,000 in six Weeks
  • 53 Ways for Board Members to Raise $1000 (I’m hoping that is each, not the full board)
  • Creating a Budget for Fundriasing
  • Contracts with Board Members: a Working Model

But there is nothing in the list about social networking, or internet fundraising. Their web site has a considerable amount of basic information. A search for ‘internet’ on the site reveals a number of articles available behind their pay wall.

Ubuntu Linux rescues Windows XP Embedded

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This being summer, we’re back on the Windows XP Embedded kick. After generating an image, the question was..how do we get this on to our target machine?

We wasted a lot of time on this one. As recommended in the docs, we installed “regular” Windows XP on the target machine to make sure that it would run Embedded. No problem there, it installed without problems from CD. We ran the Target Analyzer, to get our device.pmq. Copied device.pmq back to the development machine and generated the image.

At this point, we started fiddling with a second partition on the target machine. We created and formatted this using Acronis Disk Doctor, which comes on a bootable CD. Our plan was to install our target image on this partition, change the ARC listing in boot.ini to point to the second partition as the boot partition. We spent a day fooling with this, including changing the drive letters, hiding the partition, moving stuff around. Didn’t work.

Finally, we reformatted the hard drive on the target machine. Now you’d think that Microsoft would have something like a “LiveCD” for this purpose, which would boot a version of Windows enough to allow copying to an existing hard drive. It doesn’t, but Ubuntu, Suse, and Fedora Linux all have this, and Ubuntu had drivers that would read the USB drive where we stored the image, as well as the NTFS formatted hard drive.

A quick drag and drop, and we’re done!

Have they no shame? (Microsoft that is…) There is a Community Technology Preview out for a new version of Embedded…let’s hope this issue might be addressed with a couple of extra tools.

Introduction June 1, 2008

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Welcome to Tech for Non-Profits, the unplugged version of Microdesign Consulting. Part lab-notebook, part brain-extension, it is a repository for new and evolving ideas and projects that we stumble across as we move our former database development and network support company into startup mode for a technology-based home health-care delivery service provider. Being grant-funded ourselves, we’re very much looking over the the grant landscape.

We are located in the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies which is itself a nonprofit. Our major extracurricular activity is the Vermont Software Developer’s Alliance, a non-profit trade group which promotes economic development in our area, primarily for software development companies.