Tag Archives: Grants

Grantsmanship Center: Research Proposal Workshop

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The Grantsmanship Center is holding a Research Proposal Workshop geared for grantseekers in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. Excerpt from their notice:

If you conduct research in the sciences, social sciences, or humanities, grant awards are critical to your professional life. The ability to obtain highly competitive research grants can be essential for your career.

The Grantsmanship Center’s three-day Research Proposal Workshop is designed to train researchers to compete more effectively for grant funding. You will learn a proposal development process that begins with a well thought-out research plan. The resulting proposal will have a predictable set of components that reflect this plan and that flow logically. A proposal that is clear, logical, and convincing is more appropriate for funding, more competitive, and more likely to be favorably reviewed.

This is an intensive, highly interactive workshop. Attendance is limited to 26 participants.

The workshop will be held May 19-21 (three days) and costs $1195 or $1095 for early birds. This is an incredible deal, considering that you’ll be applying for multi-year, multi-thousand dollar support.

TGCI is also offering a five-day workshop Competing for Federal Grants in June.

Grants.Gov in danger of collapse?

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A Heads Up from the superb Medical Writing Editing and Grantsmanship Blog:

A new funding mechanism covering hundreds of scientifically diverse research topics to be scored under new scoring procedures using new review criteria by as yet unidentified reviewers untrained in this process … and now, the feds suddenly realized grants.gov might not be up to the task of receiving 1.3 million submissions at 5 p.m. ET on April 27th.

We’re preparing an application for the April 27th deadline ourselves. Fortunately, we had the unnerving experience during the conversion from paper applications to the online electronic applications (was it only two years ago?) and so we have yet to get out of the habit of submitting earlier than the last day. You have been warned.

NIH SBIR Grant Application Map

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NIH has deadlines three times each year, and we finished an application for the December 5th deadline. Below is a mind-map that shows many of the components required for the application. The section on the left, “Online Proposal Preparation” is a one-time set up sequence, however, you should figure that you need 60 days before the deadline to complete those steps. There is nothing to preclude working on other parts of the application while you are waiting to get set up in the Central Contracting Registry. Click on the image it view it full scale. 

Most of the sections on the right require creating Adobe .PDF files. We created these in Word 2007 (saving the files as .doc files), which was our working environment, not least because we used the EndNote add-in to for footnotes and literature citations.  

In Defense of Raising Money – A Manifesto for Non-Profit CEOs

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Sasha Dichter’s latest manifesto.

I’ve met too many nonprofit CEOs who say “I hate fundraising. I don’t fundraise.” If you’re being hired as a nonprofit CEO and the Board tells you that you won’t be fundraising, the’re either misguided or lying.

Tell them they’re wrong. Tell them that you job as a CEO is to be an evangelist for your idea and to convince others about the change you want to see in the world. Tell them that if this idea is worth supporting then they should jump in with both feet and support it with their time and money and by telling their friends it is worth supporting.

Spending your time talking to powerful, influential people about the change you hope to see in the world is a pretty far cry from having fundraising as a “necessary evil.”

Do you really believe that the “real work” is JUST the “programs’ you operate, the school you run, the meals you serve, the vaccines you develop, the patients you treat? Do you really believe that it ends there?

Do you really believe that in today’s world, where change can come from anyone and anywhere, that convincing people and building momentum and excitement and a movement really doesn’t matter?

His latest discussion is about a unique foundation that finally has gotten around to supporting operations in non-profits, not just “projects”. Thank heavens.

As the LA Business Journal reports, the Weingart Foundation has announced that it will “offer unusual ‘core support’ to underwrite administrative costs for social service agencies that provide necessities such as food, shelter and health care to the region’s poor, unemployed and sick.”

This is contrary to normal practice, wherein “Most philanthropic foundations traditionally give large grants that pay the costs of specific programs but do not underwrite non-profits’ operating costs, such as staff salaries and rent. Many non-profits get their operating cash typically from their own fund raisers or from direct donations.”

My point is: the fact that this is newsworthy is a reflection of how far (too far) things have swung in terms of foundation grantmaking to nonprofits. There’s a serious power imbalance here, one that has to change if we are going to increase the impact and efficiency of the nonprofit sector.

Grants.gov and the SF424

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Four weeks to go, and I’m assembling an SBIR “Competing Continuation” grant, an odd-ball National Institutes of Health grant opportunity which requires an SBIR Phase II as a prerequisite, and basically allows you to continue research and development for “complex” medical devices, drugs, etc, that still have a way to go before commercialization.

NIH converted to an online submission procedure about two years ago. By most accounts it was fairly buggy, and they are continuing to refine it; it looks as if they are going to base the next version on Adobe Forms. As described a few days ago, if you have either a Mac with Leopard, OS-X, or a machine with Windows Vista, the only option that runs the forms is to use a Citrix terminal application which looks like Windows 95, crashes regularly, and logs you off after 20 minutes in any case. After struggling with this for a session last Friday, I’m punting and I’ve regressed to a Windows XP machine.

Even using the “native” PureEdge viewer, things are fairly kludgy. PureEdge installs as viwer, sort of like Adobe Acrobat, within Internet Explorer. You then navigate to the web page that contains the xfd for the web form. After inputting data, you can save the data. Unfortunatly the saved data from my Citrix session won’t seem to run…I have to reenter everything that I put on Friday.
After downloading the form again the form opens.

A couple of extracts from the SF424 instructions.

  1. There are odd rules related to the ability to have more than a single Primary Investigator, with NIH, you can.
  2. A budget must be created for each budget period.

    A budget peried is considered to be one year or portion of a year if the grant period is less than a year. If you have a multi-year budget, then you must fill out one for each year. The figures will be consolidated on a read-only summary sheet.

  3. If you are working within a consortium, and will be awarding some of the funding to the consortium, they (or you, or somebody) have to prepare a subaward budget that mirrors the award budget. This uses the same form (just with a checkbox for “subaward”). In my case, since this is a three-year grant, there will be six (6) separate “budgets”…one for each year for both myself, and the consortium partner. Woof.
  4. For the first budget I created a “simulation” in Numbers (the Mac spreadsheet) on the Mac which has the same format as the budget form. I’m going to try going native on the subsequent budgets, but if the data entry gets too hairy, I expect to create a simulation for the other five budgets too. (Later….didn’t end up doing this…now that I’ve sort of memorized what the form does and how works, I was confident enough to go commando as it were.)
  5. There is a budget justification (budget narrative) section which applies to the main budget, and a separate justification which applies to the subaward.
  6. Critical:When editing an attached form, you have to reimport or reattach it! In other words, specifying a file name doesn’t specify a pointer to the physical file; the file actually gets imported into to the form file.

If you are working within a consortium, it is helpful to have the consortium budgets entered first. These are done with the form shown in the lower left-hand corner, the R&R subaward budget form, which works similarly to the main budget form. You can even create the file for this and email it to your consortium partner to fill out and and return.

Totals from the consortium budget needs to be entered into the main budget. This is also the time where you can be sure to enforce rules such as the requirement that the maximum amount a subaward can be is 50% of the total amount for an SBIR grant. I sent the subaward budget back twice for revisions for this and similar restrictions.

All this goes considerably better when accompanied by music of your choice. Shawn Colvin was helpful.

Grants.gov = Windows Only ?

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Grants.gov is the federal government’s portal for online submission of federal grant applications. The National Institutes of Health have required applicants to submit their material online for the past two years or so. It has been a fairly rocky transition process, and I had hoped this time around things would go really smoothly.

I’m beginning to feel like Andy Rooney, “Have you ever really thought about the eraser on your pencil?” But the arrangements for completing grant applications for anyone running something other than Windows XP or below (Windows 98 is supported!) are nothing less than bizarre. When downloading the PureEdge viewer for Mac, I got this message.

The IBM Workplace Forms Viewer 2.5.1 Macintosh OS Special Edition cannot be installed on your computer.

There may be good news, however; according to this FAQ, Grants.Gov is transitioning away from the PureEdge viewer (aka IBM Workplace Forms Viewer) and moving toward Adobe forms which are cross-platform. Unfortunately, is looks like the NIH form that I’m using, the SF424, is PureEdge only. This means that that the only option is to use a Citrix client/server arrangement which turns my Mac into a Citrix terminal.

This is not going well. Among the warnings that they give is that you should really only use the Citrix terminal “off peak”… from 10PM to 10 AM, you should save every 20 minutes, and you should log off if you expect to be away for 20 minutes so you can give other users a chance. But, I’ve frozen up three times already, requiring a forced shutdown, and I just lost almost an hour of work, that for some reason did not get saved even though I deliberately attempted to save in a timely manner. What I think may be happening is that the connection is freezing considerably before the twenty minute limit….and there is no indication that has happened.

Since Windows Vista isn’t supported with the PureEdge form software, probably something to do with user rights, and since the SF424 form required by NIH isn’t available as an Adobe PDF form, I may resurrect a Windows XP machine, just so I can work on these forms without the added anxiety of technical problems. Its not as if 277 pages of instructions and a dozen separate multipart forms aren’t already nerve-racking enough.

Odds and Sods and White Noise

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Need some book suggestions? Here is a complete listing of Pournelle’s book of the month suggestions going back to 1994.

The Ohio Farm Bureau announced that the USDA Rural Development grant awards have gone to six recipients, in the following states: Arkansas, Iowa (two awards), Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The Center for Disease Control reports that Type 2 diabetes has increased 90% in the U.S. since 1997. Data was complete for 33 states. Vermont is 28th in the list with a reported 6.6 new cases per one thousand residents. This is an increase of 43%.

Gasoline prices are in free fall; we’re paying about $2.89 a gallon. Maybe this accounts for the fact that people are idling their cars again at the post office. Now that the weather has turned colder (we’ve gotten the first snow that stuck), my old Prius’ mpg has gone down to 49-50, down from 52-56.

I’ve been experimenting with a white noise generator called Noisy as a way to mask distracting sounds. It is rather like working next to a waterfall, or under a tin roof while raining. Here’s a Wiki article, with all the math. An online flash version is located at simplynoise.com The online generator includes “red noise” which seems to increase the low frequency component. They also have audio files which can be downloaded and played through iTunes or Windows Media Player.

Statistics – Newbie Resources

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Having left the statistics to my science partners, I now find myself wanting to at least conceptually understand what they are talking about when discussing t-tests, chi squares and power. A quick google search reveals a ton of information.

John C. Pezzullo’s Statpages.org provides an index to 600+ (!) of statistics tools and online textbooks. His home page has dozens of links to other scientific information. Wonderful stuff.

Linked from Dr. Pezzullo’s page, Russ Length’s Java Applets for Power and Sample Size allow you to compute power and needed sample sizes before performing a study. Lots of useful information here to help design a study so that you’ll receive reliable data for analysis.

I’ve also picked up a couple books.

Head First Statistics by Dawn Griffiths. This is part of the Head First series from O’Reilly which attempts to take relatively advanced concepts (Object Oriented Design, for example) and reduce it into entertaining chunks.

Statistics for Dummies by Deborah Rumsey. There is also a companion workbook, and an Intermediate Statistics for Dummies. This book is more descriptive and less interactive than the Head First book above, but may be better for my purposes; to simply learn the lingo.

Statistics Hacks by Bruce Fey is part of the O’Reilly Hacks series. Subtitled “Measuring the World and Beating the Odds”, this book is the only one of the three I had on hand which discussed power analysis, the statistics tool of my immediate interest when we are designing a study.

Still on my bookshelf:
Microsoft Access Data Analysis This book, now updated for Access 2007 doesn’t have hard-core statistics, but it does have lots of ideas of how to take samples and turn these into useful information with charts and reports.

Data Analysis for Politics and Policy by Edward Tufte This is an older book quite technical, but with lots of interesting examples. I believe he wrote this book before he got started with the graphics series…but of course that his is forte now.

Visualizing Data by Ben Fry. Subtitled Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment. Processing is an open-source programming environment developed by Fry.

All of these books don’t solve my immediate problem, which is trying to learn about power calculations. Instead they deal with data after it has already been gathered.

Don’t forget that you may already have considerable statistical firepower at your fingertips if you have a copy of Microsoft Excel. On the Mac, Numbers has a few functions as well, but in comparison to Excel, Numbers is pretty light.