Tag Archives: Grants

Tech Friday: Bento database – First Look

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Well, although I’ve managed to not worry about a database for several months, it finally happened and I need to keep track of my “opportunity matrix”, that is, a list of grants, their deadlines and status, the responsible contact person, partners, and whether I’ve created all the necessary collateral: prospectus, project summary, grant application, etc.

Typically this would be done in Access on a Windows machine, and I’ve got Access 2007 installed in my copy of Parallels so that I could run this up pretty quickly.

But, since I want to stay native on the Mac, I poked around at an old favorite, Filemaker Pro. One thing I’ve always thought about FMP is that is relatively expensive, even in an academic edition, especially if you want to share the data using a server. But FileMaker now offers a “home” version called Bento for about $50.00, and this looks promising for my app.

I’ve downloaded the 30 day trial, and installed without fuss. Installation consists of dragging the the file to the applications folder. I started playing with one of the templates, and after ten minutes or so, I’ve ended up with the following data entry screen:

Points of Interest:

  • Bento integrates with iCal, Mail and the Address book. You can eMail from a field which is designated an email field.
  • One to many relationships are supported. For example, you can have a task list for a project, with multiple tasks displayed for a single project. Some relations are already connected; for example the tasks list from iCal can be embedded into a Bento form
  • What one would consider to be a “database” in Access, or, loosely, a “group of tables” in another database program is called a “library” in Bento.
  • What might be called a “recordset” in Access, or a “cursor” in an SQL database is called a “collection” in Bento. Collections are much like playlists in iTunes, they are a subset of records from the entire library.

You can create your own drop down list, so I’ve attempted to capture the workflow in a “status” field which currently contains the following:

Seeking Partner: Since virtually all my projects are with others, this is the first step in any application project.

Developing Project

Application Submitted

Awaiting Feedback from Funder (may be redundant with the previous step)

Under Revision

Revised Submitted

Awarded

Rejected

I was curious about the name, but I think it refers to a Japanese bento box, which are the compartmented dishes for serving Japanese food.

Here’s a review of Bento in MacWorld. They point out a couple of limitations. For one thing, there is no way to export data in anything other than a comma delimited ASCII format. 

Another limitation is that the Bento data libraries are strictly single-user data files for a single machine. Anything larger needs to go into something like Filemaker. So, is is inadvisable to think that we could run a multi-user grant flow application using Bento. That’s OK. For $50.00 we can play with Bento for awhile and work out the data that we need to keep track of. We’ll be that much farther ahead when we’re looking to move up.

At the NIH SBIR Conference in Atlanta

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Not quite live… here are notes from the first two sessions of the NIH Summer Conference in Atlanta. 

July 22

SBIR Atlanta Notes  Hot!  92 degrees. 

AirTran – filthy plane, one hour layover in Baltimore from Burlington to Atlanta, $69.00 upgrade to business class, comfortable seat.

MARTA – terrific underground transit system $13.00 for a four day pass. You wave the pass in front of a panel and it opens the door.

Omni Hotel @ CNN Center, great so far…if you enroll in their “select guest” program, you can get coffee and a paper delivered to the room in the morning at no extra charge…or add $2.95 for a croissant.

CDC is in the backyard….they are present today.
FDA is also here

One on Ones == 19 of 24 sessions leave a business card if nobody is there.
RAID – for drug discovery

Evening reception at 4:30 provided by Putnam Williams, outside the main ballroom in the registration area.

NIH staff available during lunch.

First session:
“This isn’t your grandmother’s SBIR/STTR Program Anymore.” JoAnne Goodnight
The program is in its 25th year. About 50% of the conference participants are new. Over 500 people are attending the conference; it does seem busy and big. 

SBIR/STTR Program Overview
NIH SBIR/STTR Program Specifics
Solicitations and Funding Opportunities
Gap funding

STTR is only .03% of extramural funding 

SBIR is 2.5% of extramural funding a

STTR is was set up ten years after SBIR. Designed for more academic co-operative R&D.

The programs are the largest seed capital source…. 2.3 billion dollars
NIH is one of the biggest of the the 14 or so agencies that participate.

Phase III can not use SBIR/STTR funding for final commercialization.

Failure is OK. Sometimes you won’t reach the marketplace.

These programs are unique in the government. High-risk, high-reward research.
SBA is the administrative umbrella.
Company organized as a for-profit
PI primary employment must be with the small business concern at time of award and for the duration of the project period
US owned 51%

STTR must include an intellectual property agreement worked out with the research institution

Difference between SBIR and STTR
STTR allows the PI to employed by the business or the research institution.
SBIR requires PI to be employed by the business.

Nuances of the NIH.

Not just drug development
Not just medical devices

SBIR/STTR are fully integrated with the NIH agenda
23 NIH centers support SBIR/STTR

Cancer
Heart Lung and Blood
Diabetes

Average award for Phase 1 are $170,000 and 12 months

Phase II competing renewal —
Question does NIA participate in the Phase II competing renewal? Answer…yes it does. 

Timlines – 6-9 months (although my experience was close to 12).

Scientific Review
Council Review
Award Date

There are initiatives to reduce the review timeline (number of months between submission and an award) .

Number of applications are decreasing (!)
Why?
Trying to figure out why —

This is good news, current funding rates are:

24% Phase 1 funded (of grants submitted)
42% Phase II funded
19% Fast-Track funded

There are more and more university startups.
1/2 attendees  today are  affiliated with a research institution

The differences between university and business

Advice: 
* Communicate with the program director
* Understand the institute mission and needs
* Read solicitation and follow instructions
* Don’t go it alone — find partners 
* Don’t depend solely on SBIR STTR funding
* Have an outcome
* Be persistent

Second Talk Dr. Suzanne Fisher Director of Receipt and Referral CSR/NIH
About how the Center for Scientific Review Works

One issue was a question as to whether they will keep the three due dates.
or have some kind of rolling, ongoing application process

IC = Institute or Center
SRO = Scientific Review Officer

Changes in the past 1.5 year or so

* Two day error correction windows (shortened from five days)
* Multiple Principal Investigator option. (contact PI must meet the SBIR requirements)
* No paper letters like the summary statement are sent anymore.  Everything appears on the NIH commons web site. 

Anyone not registered with the Commons must get registered.

Late applications:
We don’t give permission in advance

Format: requirements must be met. Use headers and bold, etc.
Contact the scientific review officer, to make changes.

One attachment should be a cover letter. There is a suggested format

Don’t submit derivative applications (multiple diseases)
You can resubmit twice. You have to receive the summary statement before resubmitting.

Only 1 Phase II from a single Phase I is allowed.

Electronic Submission is done between Grants.Gov and the NIH Commons

Do the research plan as one document and the cut it up so that you can stay within the page limits

If you do not see your NIH image on the Commons…NIH doesn’t see it either. (so follow up after submitting and make sure it is there).

There are referral guidelines for institutes and centers. You are not owned by a single institute….try to diversfy.

The secret two-letter decoder ring for NIH agencies as part of your grant #.

Peer Review Group
Scientific Review Group
Advisory Council

SRG does the score….
Councll is institute

Funding decision made by Institution/Center

Small business representatives are on review committees

Trying out videoconferencing, and wikis

Most peer reviewers have a Doctoral degree

First thing they do is “unscoring”… find the 40% that are to be rejected, however any reviewer can say they want to perform a review.

Significance
Approach
Innovation
Investigator
Environment

Priority Score – 100-350
100 is the best possible score, 350 is the worst.

All institutes have put a lot of work into their web sites and FAQs.

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!

More About Us

Our Podcasts

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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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.

Indirect Expenses: Calculations for Federal Grants

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After reading the article from The Grantsmanship Center about calculating indirect rates, I started to drill down a bit further. This is a dense subject. I’m already on my third cup of coffee, and that is probably due to the fact that I don’t have access to anything stronger to ease the pain. However, one way to learn something is to look for patterns and repetition. If you read something three times, and see it referenced by other documents, it starts to fit into some kind of ordered symmetry. So, here are some resources:

The Office of Management and Budget Circular A-122 appears to be the ur-text for all things indirect. The title of this missive is Cost Principals for Non-Profit Organizations and the summary is:

1. Purpose. This Circular establishes principles for determining costs of grants, contracts and other agreements with non-profit organizations. It does not apply to colleges and universities which are covered by Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-21, “Cost Principles for Educational Institutions”; State, local, and federally-recognized Indian tribal governments which are covered by OMB Circular A-87, “Cost Principles for State, Local, and Indian Tribal Governments”; or hospitals. The principles are designed to provide that the Federal Government bear its fair share of costs except where restricted or prohibited by law. The principles do not attempt to prescribe the extent of cost sharing or matching on grants, contracts, or other agreements. However, such cost sharing or matching shall not be accomplished through arbitrary limitations on individual cost elements by Federal agencies. Provision for profit or other increment above cost is outside the scope of this Circular.

So, assuming you aren’t a government, college or university, or hospital, it appears A-122 is for you if you are a 501c(3) non-profit. Here is a link to a PDF version of the document (accuracy and provenance unknown). For for-profit companies, such as SBIR companies the relevant discussion is in the Federal Aquisition Regulations, FAR Part 31 Contract Cost Principles and Procedures. Indirect is discussed in subpart .203 but only very generally.

Here is a Powerpoint presentation as a PDF that was from a training provided by HUD (Housing and Urban Development).

Here’s a one-page explanation on calculating indirect rates with an example. This is from the Compassion Capital Fund, which appears to be an offshoot of a government initiative to support faith-based and community organizations. Lots of resources and links here.

Jim and Gail Greenwood have a brief discussion of indirect as related to SBIR proposals. This is one of a whole host of useful articles relating to their business in supporting and counseling aspiring SBIR grantees. As an aside, I recommend SBIR grantees attend any of Jim or Gail’s frequent workshops. Be sure to read their material. They are a rare combination of highly knowledgeable consultants who can turn government mush such as FAR 32 Part 3.201 into reasonably understandable English. They will also review your grant proposals. I had them review my Phase II. They are also funny and eminently approachable speakers.

National Institutes of Health – Ruth Bishop’s PowerPoint presentation

Health and Human Services – Example cost proposal by a non-profit. This appears to be quite useful. (or maybe I’m starting to get it?)

Five-Day Grantsmanship Center in New Hampshire

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The Grantsmanship Center is bringing their five-day training program to New Hampshire July 28th through August 1, 2008.

The center’s web site has a series of thirty free papers with hints and discussion of the grant-writing process. I just found a terrific eight-page explanation which describes how to calculate indirect costs.

Chron this week and NPQ

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The Non-Profit Quarterly has been out for several weeks. Although most on-line articles are for subscribers only, they publish a summary sheet of the issue’s articles.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s May 1 issue has been published. Haven’t gotten very far, but there was an interesting review of Oprah Winfrey’s Big Give program, which sounds like a version of Survivor:Philanthropist. Hey, whatever works, right?

Ten Ways – Redux, the final 3

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Following up on Ten Ways to Improve the Federal Grantwriting Experience post, here are three more suggestions to provide an even ten ideas:

  • Mind The Indirect
    Grant budgets include direct expenses; money that is spent on items and services directly related to fulfilling the grant objectives, and indirect expenses; money that is spent as the cost of doing business, such as office expenses, heat, utilities, etc. Grantor agencies may or may not allow you to charge indirect expenses to the grant…but you do have to be able to account for those expenses. Enlightened grant-givers will allow you to charge a portion of your indirect to the grant and they will acknowledge these expenses. They will be suspicious if you don’t account for the indirect expenses.

    Indirect can be called different things. For example, the National Institutes of Health call it ‘F&A’ or “Facilities and Administration”. Depending on the nature of the institution, the percentage rate can be quite high. For example, the current rate for our university is around 56%. This means, of course that if I want to receive a hundred dollars worth of services from the uni, it will cost me $156.00. Ouch.

    My own history with indirect has been less than stellar. Attempting to follow the example calculations, I came up with a 33% rate, which I thought was fairly reasonable. Turns out NIH has a default rate of 25% if you don’t start negotiating a different rate. If you say you’re going to negotiate a higher rate, then they’ll only give you a provisional rate of 10%. After spending some days on this, including hiring and firing a CPA/consultant who was supposed to figure it all out, (and almost losing my own CPA and bookkeeper in the process), I gave up temporarily and have been living with the 10% rate.

  • Plan For Financial Management
    Related to the indirect issue, I was amazed and surprised at the amount of time required to just manage a federal grant. Let me count the ways:
    1. Obtain a DUNS number
    2. Register for the Central Contracting Registry
    3. Obtain a Federal Wide Assurance (FWA) number for my company.
    4. Register with the Institutional Review Board at the university
    5. Create a plan for the Institutional Review Board (which manages human subjects data and protection…in our case because we’re doing research with human subjects).
    6. Repeat the above three items on a yearly basis
    7. Manage three separate online government web applications for reporting and submitting, as well as an application for transferring money to my company bank account
    8. Maintain separate bank accounts for each grant
    9. Manage the grant as a separate class or company within QuickBooks.
    10. Develop the consortium agreement with the university (including budget, and scope of work)
    11. Pay consortium, and about eight separate contractors or organizations on a bi-weekly basis

    I could go on. But the point is, in addition to direct work, there is a 20-25% level of effort that can reasonably be charged for administration.

  • Realize that the first grant will change your life and organization.
    This is the “be careful what you wish for” idea. For all the effort required to write the application and get all the pieces in place, the real work starts in month 1 of your first budget year.

There are moments of exhilaration. After weeks of trials and tests, we’ve gotten our research project into production beginning this week.

Earned Income Strategies from the Grantsmanship Center

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EMail from The Grantsmanship Center, below reproduced in its entirety. The seminar is in Schenectady NY.

Would you like to generate unrestricted funds,while strengthening your nonprofit organization’s core mission and developing more credibility with funders?

Come find out how! Sign up now for The Grantsmanship Center’s Earned Income Strategies workshop, offered in Schenectady, NY, May 5-7, 2008, and hosted by The Hamilton Hill Arts Center.

New streams of unrestricted funding mean greater stability. Earned income programs can be a key to long-term survival.

Besides increasing revenues, well-planned earned income programs can benefit your nonprofit organization by:

  • Building on your existing capabilities, resources, and relationships to increase your organizational capacity
  • Demonstrating your organization’s sustainability – which is often a key element in winning grants and major gifts!
  • Enhancing your organization’s mission impact – through income-generating programs that further your core purpose and key values

Limited to only 30 participants, The Grantsmanship Center’s Earned Income Strategies workshop combines structured analysis, focused discussions, and small-group work. You will leave this workshop knowing:

  • What it would take for your organization to develop a viable earned income program one that can actually strengthen your core mission
  • What financing options are available to nonprofits like yours
  • How to capitalize on your organization’s existing capabilities…and much more!

Tuition for this comprehensive 3-day training is $575.
To make sure that every participant receives individual attention, enrollment is limited to 30 participants, so register early to reserve your spot.
To register for this workshop: http://www.tgci.com/eisregister.asp
For more information, visit http://tgci.com/eis.shtml
or call The Grantsmanship Center’s Registrar at (800) 421-9512.

Ten Ways to Improve a Federal Grant Writing Experience

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Following up on a post a couple weeks ago about applying for U.S. government grants, I had the pleasure of putting together an NSF ITEST grant application with about a dozen colleagues. Briefly, ITEST is:

The Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST)* program was established by the National Science Foundation in direct response to the concern about shortages of information technology workers in the United States. The ITEST program funds projects that provide opportunities for both school-age children and teachers to build the skills and knowledge needed to advance their study and to function and contribute in a technologically rich society. The ITEST program also funds a National Learning Resource Center to support, synthesize and disseminate the learning from the program to a wider audience.

This is a fairly ambitious project, about US$1.5 million over three years. We assembled a collaborative group consisting of a senior professor at a local college, a couple of non-profit executive directors, a local economic development guru from our mayor’s office and a local school board president. All of these folks will get a piece of this grant. We used BaseCamp as our project manager.

Our applicant organization of record was the Vermont Software Developer’s Alliance. This is the organization which, if we receive an award, will administer the grant. This is no small responsibility, and we included a full-time program manager/curriculum developer as a staff person for vtSDA within the grant application.

Grant writing is “on spec” or speculative. You don’t get paid upfront for writing grants. This makes the whole proposition quite a gamble, and the investment in time and aggravation can be significant. I recall being somewhat taken aback when a fellow applicant told me that, for his SBIR Phase II grant application, he had two staff people working on it for three months. This was significantly more time than we put into the ITEST application, and my guess is that it will show. The process wasn’t entirely smooth, and here are ten things I wish we had done better.

  1. Start Early. I wish we had started earlier for a project of this magnitude. Six months is not unreasonble, 12 months would have been even better. The reason for this is that to successfully compete for grants of this magnitude, you need a program. If the program doesn’t exist, (and why should it, that is why you are looking for grant money), you have to essentially imagine the program in sufficient detail to be able to coherently describe it. Grantwriting is essentially a sales job, and you have to have a value proposition and/or a product to be able to sell.
  2. Exploit the strengths of your the software. BaseCamp has strengths and weaknesses. A notable weakness is the word processor; it is fine for light work but not helpful for the kind of formatting with tables, illustrations, references and footnotes that a proposal requires. On the other hand, BaseCamp has a useful task list, which allows you to list parts or chunks of the proposal as tasks, and attach a “person responsible” and deadline for the task. This is quite motivating.
  3. Have a designated boss. One of our issues was the application couldn’t have come at a much worse time; all of us were deeply into other projects, and of course it is tax season. So no one stepped up to be the boss, we worked more or less as a weaker collective. The boss really needs to have some time to invest, (100 hours or more?) if he or she is going to truly have the whole project scope on their radar. This makes it tough for volunteers. For those who prefer a less hierarchical title, maybe “shepherd” would be a better designation than “boss”.
  4. For BaseCamp users, exploit the BaseCamp “revision system”. This allows you to upload revisions of previously existing files on top of the older files, and which preserves the older version file. You can add notes to each revision, so you can see at a glance what changes were made by each update. We didn’t entirely master this concept, and ended up with several dozen separate files scattered over a three page listing of files, when things could have been more compact. Sharepoint might work better for this, as it allows you to “lock” or check out a file, just like a real revision system.
  5. Integrate the moving parts. Going back to the idea of the shepherd, somebody needs to take the individual components of the proposal and integrate them together so that they all fit. This includes the budget and budget narrative; if you describe a position in the program narrative, you need to make sure that the same title is used in the budget line item. In our case, we actually had no less than five sub-projects or sub-programs, all which integrate beautifully and complement each other. I hope were able to effectively illustrate how well they fit together and how each sub-program contributes to the overall project.
  6. Stay on top of the grant guidelines and the website quirks. Turns out that the NSF FastLane site becomes the “choked commuter artery” several hours before the application deadline, even if the deadline is 5PM local time. If you are still trying to upload PDF files at 3 on the east coast, those lucky folks on the west coast are at it too, and it bogs down the server until nothing works. You don’t get much sympathy from the NSF at this point either, their advice is simply to start early and make sure you’ve everything uploaded before 2PM local time on the east coast.(Irrelevant aside: Is this a problem because java server pages don’t scale?)
  7. Use Instant Messaging. I’m in Vermont in my home office. John is 30 miles away in his office. Peter is in Florida taking a day off from his vacation. Everyone has two or more phone numbers which may or may not work. We’re all working on this for two days before the deadline. Instant messaging to the rescue! We can say who “has” a particular file, or briefly find out what the status is of something or ask a quick question.

I’ll add the other three suggestions next time.