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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.

Odds and Sods

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Via Make Magazine – Get your warning labels, warning signs, church signs here.

Innovation Economy – A blog about start-ups and innovation around Boston and New England. Check the post regarding the Detroit Automaker Bailout.

The Economist agrees about the bailout.

Getting down to the wire on our NIH grant application, I just casually attempted to log in with my usual credentials into Grants.gov. Using Internet Explorer…the latest version, (I guess) it didn’t work. I downloaded a fresh copy of FireFox, and was in. It also worked on Safari. So there is something odd going on with IE. I’m now thinking the ideal grant application machine is a Windows XP machine with dual monitors, so you can keep the instructions open at the same time you are filling out the forms. You also need a copy of Adobe Acrobat…the full application to slice and dice .PDF files.

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.

Windows vs. Linux – Open Source vs. Commercial

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I got sucked in to a bit of back and forth on our local Linux/Unix list a couple days ago and wrote:

Ten years ago I was consulting for a multi-national education non-profit, and I discussed with the systems manager the notion of using open source…in particular I was talking about replacing their Windows 2000/NT servers, with Linux. This would have been a logistical wrench, not least because they had several client/server applications that used SQL-Server as the back end. His point was that as an educational institution, they got such good discounts on any proprietary software that the amount spent on the software was a miniscule percentage of their IT budget. So, there was no economic benefit, and certainly no performance benefit that justified such a change.

Later that year I was doing an inventory of their machines at one of the european sites and couldn’t find the terminal server box. Turns out this was a Linux box running VMC or something and it had been bricked up in a wall during a recent renovation, and been merrily running, unseen, for several months.

So, the moral for me was, use what works. At the time I actually got them to go from running four O/S’s in the organization to two, Windows, and the aforementioned Linux. We dumped Macs in one site, and Novell in another, and my advice to subsequent clients was to run one and only one OS in the organization.

I’m happy to say that they didn’t all run Windows.

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.

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.

Logging in as Root in Ubuntu with Live CD

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We just had a little contretemps as we attempted to replace system files on our Windows XP embedded machine with a new image. The easiest way we’ve found to copy the files is to run an Ubuntu Linux Live CD, which boots up a Linux desktop. Since the default user in the Linux desktop is guest, the user does not have privileges to replace the files a second time. To get around this, you have to log in using the root account. Steps:

1. in the original desktop, under the security tab for logins, be sure to check the box “allow local administrator to log in” under system->administration->login window.

2. Open a terminal session

3. type sudo passwd root

4. enter a password for the root user

5. re-enter a password for the root

6. shutdown – change user, and log in as root with your new password.

Background: There are three sort of funny things about this process for users who are not familiar with Ubuntu.

1. Ubuntu does not install a root user account by default. Or, maybe it installs the account, but it doesn’t allow its use. Thus, the act of assigning a password to the root user account is necessary to activate the account.

2. Even if you have a valid root account set up, by default Ubuntu does not allow you to log into a standard Gnome desktop. That’s why you have the change the setting in the security preferences.

2. In this example, since we are using the Live CD, you have do step 1 first. If you restart the computer from scratch all configuration settings are lost, because the Live CD does not allow you to permanently write anything to the disk.

Woof.

In any case, this solved our problem; we were able to blow away the system files on our target hard drive C:, so that we were able to copy a fresh version of our XPe image to the drive.

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.