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How grant writers can use HRSA’s Uniform Data System (UDS) Mapper system: a post in honor of Service Area Competition (SAC) season

HRSA’s Uniform Data System (UDS) Mapper is powerful but also incredibly hard to use, and I suspect most people get stymied by its clunky user interface—and give up. The difficulty of using the UDS Mapper inspires me to write a guide describing how we tend to use it. “Giving up” is a legitimate reaction to software with a poor user experience and user interface, but giving up won’t help a HRSA needs assessment get done, and it won’t move your organization closer to being funded. Healthcare organizations like Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) in particular need to use the UDS Mapper. However frustrating the UDS Mapper may be, the UDS Mapper also collects healthcare indicator data not available anywhere else, and for that reason it’s useful not just in HRSA or healthcare proposals, but a wide range of other proposals.

If you look closely at the UDS Mapper’s output, you’ll see what I mean in terms of HRSA collecting data others don’t. The curiously named set of columns for the “health center penetration rate” in particular can yield insights into local areas; are people who are low income or living in poverty managing to access healthcare? I’m not aware of other places that collate such data. The Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) tab similarly gathers data not readily available elsewhere.

Right now, it’s also Service Area Competition (SAC) season, which means mabt FQHCs need to use the UDS tool, along with others like it, to prepare their SAC applications. We’ve written about the SAC experience in a bunch of places, including here, and we encourage organizations that are applying for SAC or other HRSA funding to contact us.

I developed the UDS Mapper guide to be used internally, but it occurs to me that others may find it useful, so I’m uploading it here. Questions or comments? Leave them below. This draft of our guide isn’t the last word.

Click here to download the guide.

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Curious instructions in the DOL’s “Nursing Expansion Grant Program” FOA

The Department of Labor’s (DOL) “Nursing Expansion Grant Program” funding Opportunity Announcement (or “FOA,” which is DOL-speak for “RFP”) has a peculiar instruction, which we, as grant writers, noticed right away: “NOTE: Full points will not be given for simply repeating the requirements stated below or elsewhere in the Announcement.” This is a humorous instruction because many FOAs tell applicants what to do, and the applicant’s main duty is to tell the funder that the applicant will in fact do whatever it is that the funder wants the applicant to do, and which the funder has specified already. “We are going to tell you what to do and how to do it,” the funder seems to be saying, “but we want you to tell us what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it.” The DOL, for the “Nursing Expansion Grant Program” application, says:

For example, if the applicant is asked, “Describe in detail how strategies to expand diversity, equity, inclusion and access to recruit participants will be implemented,” applications will not score the full points (and zero points may be received) for simply stating, “We will implement strategies to expand diversity, equity, inclusion, and access in our participant recruitment.” To receive full points, the applicant must describe, in their own words, the process or procedures their institution will use and what evidence is available to show those processes are effective for meeting the stated requirement.

The word “diversity” occurs 12 times in the “Nursing Expansion Grant Program” FOA, so there are a lot of places where applicants can pick up some diversity lingo for their applications. And, to the DOL’s credit, the strategies to be used “to expand diversity, equity, inclusion, and access in our participant recruitment” are pretty standard for an experienced grant writer: hire diversity consultants; provide diversity training; favor candidates from particular demographic groups in employment, while simultaneously complying with laws that forbid discrimination; subject all recruitment materials to review by diversity consultants who are experts in all facets of diversity and the implementation of diversity; and so on. Are diversity consultants particularly qualified to judge the success or failure of diversity efforts? Maybe. Does hiring diversity consultants improve actual, real-world diversity on the ground? Maybe, maybe not. But the DOL wants diversity and therefore applicants are obliged to promise that they’ll focus on diversity, albeit without appearing to quote the DOL’s instructions that describe what the DOL wants.

The FOA questions have the air of an Inquisitor during the Inquisition: “We are asking the question, and we know the answer, but you must supply the answer we are looking for.” If the DOL knows the answer, why not just tell the applicant what the specific expectations are?

I don’t want to pick on diversity too much here, because the DOL also offers instructions like “Clearly identify the training strategy(ies) that will be deployed to train participants enrolled in the Nurse Education Professional Track or the Nursing Career Pathways Track, as described in Section I.E. Program Design and Allowable Activities,” as if humans don’t have millennia of experience in “training strategies,” almost all of which reduce to some combination of direct instruction and hands-on practice. How do you ascertain someone’s blood pressure? We’re going to show you how, then you’re going to do it, then we’re going to give you feedback, then you’re going to teach someone else to do it.

Who knows: maybe some applicant to the “Nursing Expansion Grant Program” will reinvent the entirety of human education and knowledge transmission, but I’d personally bet against that, and I’m guessing that the same strategies will be used that anyone who’s ever participated in K – 16 education will be familiar with. There’re only so many ways to slice a salami and all that.

Some applicants could use online modules as part of their education effort (someone is probably vending those for nursing education), and those online modules might be appropriate for highly motivated trainees, but we’ve seen through the course of the COVID-19 pandemic that, in most cases, online modules don’t effectively replace in-person learning for most people.

I’m (obviously) a grant writer, but I also occasionally teach writing and related subjects for undergraduate college students and have seen the results of online “education” firsthand. Non-traditional nursing students may be more motivated than typical undergrad cohorts, but much of nursing is a hands-on discipline that needs in-person training, and thus it’s not likely to be highly efficacious online—and that’s particularly true given online education’s existing drawbacks.

Continue reading Curious instructions in the DOL’s “Nursing Expansion Grant Program” FOA

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How to fund a Juneteenth Day Black Rodeo (Hint: not via grants, this time)

In addition to our usual calls (e.g.,substance abuse disorder treatment, workforce development, at-risk youth services*, etc.), we sometimes get inquiries from folks seeking more esoteric grants–some favorites include R & D for the eternally elusive perpetual motion machine and expeditions to find the Lost City of Z. Last week, we got a call from a self-described black cowboy (let’s call him “Tex”) in Texas who wants $50K to fund a Juneteenth Day Black Rodeo.**

While we’ve been referencing Juneteenth celebrations in the outreach or needs assessments sections of certain proposals for years, most Americans, including many African Americans, outside of Texas and the Old South had never heard of Juneteenth until it suddenly became a new national holiday last year. Since it’s not cost effective to hire S + A to secure the ~$50K in grants the caller sought, I was ethically bound to decline the assignment. Still, Tex was a reasonable guy with a pretty good idea for a community celebration; he called on a slow day, so I took about half an hour to give Tex free advice on how to fund his vision of a Juneteenth Black Rodeo, which is plausible, just not with grants. Here’s my advice, which can be applied many similar local events or small human services programs:

      • Fiscal Agent: Find a local nonprofit to serve as the fiscal agent to handle and account for donations and make them tax deductible to the donor.
      • Website and Social Media: Create a simple website and set up accounts with the usual social media suspects. Find a local artist to draw a catchy logo. It should be easy to garner attention for this unique project: who doesn’t like a black cowboy (such as Deets in the epic Western novel and mini-series Lonesome Dove), combined with a rodeo?
      • Initial Event Planning: I asked Tex if he had a Stetson, Justin boots, big belt buckle, horse trailer, and pickup truck. He said yes to each in turn. Perfect! Select a Saturday for the initial public event. Send out press releases to local and selected national media (Daily Mail, etc.) and use social media starting a couple of weeks in advance to get the word out. But don’t send anything to the big box store that is your first target. Check with local cops and city to see if any permits are required, but it may be best to skip this in hopes that a media grabbing attempt will made to stop you. That would really get media attention, as they drag you and the horse to the hoosegow!
      • Roll Out Event: Put on the gear, put the horse in the trailer, and park the F-150 two blocks from the biggest Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club in town, but out of sight. Get the horse out and trot around the corner to the front of the store slowly. Then make a big fuss about tying the horse to something. A couple of Black pals in cowboy/rodeo outfits on their own horses would also be desirable, if possible. Try get to a Black “Rodeo Queen” to carry a flag. Get someone to video the whole thing surreptitiously. At this point, you should be surrounded by a herd of parents, kids, media, and more, all going bonkers, and dozens will be using their phones to video and upload the spectacle, increasing the chances of scoring a viral video. Place colorful flyers, a banner with your cool logo, and info sign-up sheet on a folding table staffed with with your pals. Have them circulate in the crowd with actual feedbags to collect donations. Put on your best John Wayne face, stride forcefully into the store to the manager. The manager will be dumbfounded by the unexpected hoopla. Explain politely, but loudly, what you’re doing and ask for an immediate donation of $5,000. You’ll likely get at least a $1,000 on the spot just to get you to go away. Make sure to tell the manager that they’ll get acknowledgment on signage at the Rodeo. Edit and post videos on your social media accounts immediately. With luck, you’ll soon be on the locally produced morning shows, and maybe national shows. Keep your buckle polished just in case.
      • Rinse and Repeat: Do several more of the above events around town until its gets stale. After that, just walk unannounced into car dealers, banks, big retail stores, etc. making a pitch directly face-to-face with the manager. Most of these kinds of entities have budgets for making small donations to local nonprofits and events and will make donations of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars for the asking, as long as you have a fiscal agent for the donation.
      • Ongoing: Set up a GoFundMe Page to publicize the effort after you’ve developed a sufficient level of awareness and use social media to flog that page.

    You can modify the above strategies for any local effort that doesn’t need more than $100K annually. Except for the social media and GoFundMe aspects, this is how I often raised money in the mid 1970s (yes, I’m that old) when I was Executive Director of the Hollywood-Wilshire Fair Housing Council and on the Board of the Harbor Free Clinic in Los Angeles.


    * The recently released FY ’22 Department of Labor FOA replaces the term “at-risk youth” with “opportunity youth.” Now you know.

    ** To fully enjoy this post, listen to “Ghetto Cowboy” by Bone Thugs N Harmony, from 1998.

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Confusing NIH and other Small Business Innovation and Research (SBIR) application guidance

In theory, an “application guide” for a Small Business Innovation and Research (SBIR) grant from a federal agency is meant to make the application process easier: the applicant should presumably be able to read the application guide and follow it, right? Wrong, as it turns out. The difficulties start with finding the application guide and associated RFP (or “FOA,” Funding Opportunity Announcement in NIH-land) . If you go to grants.gov today, Sept. 9, dear reader, and search for “SBIR,” you’ll get 74 matching results—most for National Institutes of Health (NIH) programs, which we’ll use as an example for the sake of this exercise, and because I worked on one recently. I’m going to use “PA-18-705 SBIR Technology Transfer (R43/R44 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)” program, which has download instructions at Grants.gov. When you download and review the “instructions,” however, you’ll find this complication:

It is critical that applicants follow the SBIR/STTR (B) Instructions in the SF424 (R&R) SBIR/STTR Application Guide (//grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/url_redirect.htm?id=32000)except where instructed to do otherwise (in this FOA or in a Notice from the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts (//grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/)). Conformance to all requirements (both in the Application Guide and the FOA) is required and strictly enforced.

Notice that the URLs in the quoted section are incomplete: it’s up the applicant to track down the true SBIR application guide and correct FOA. I did that, but the tricky phrase is “follow the SBIR/STTR (B) Instructions […] except where instructed to do otherwise.” For the particular NIH application we were working on, the FOA and the Application Guide disagreed with each other concerning how the narrative should be structured and what an applicant needed to include in their proposal. So what’s an applicant, or, in this case, a hired-gun grant writer, to do? With some SBIRs, there is no canonical set of questions and responses: there’s the “general” set of questions and the FOA-specific set, with no instructions about how reconcile them.

To solve this conundrum, I decided to develop a hybridized version for the proposal structure: I used the general narrative structuring questions from the application guide, and I tacked on any extra questions that I could discern in the program-specific FOA. The only plausible alternative to this hybridized approach would have been to contact the NIH program officer listed in the FOA. As an experienced grant writer, however, I didn’t reach out, because I know that program officers confronted with issues like this will respond with a version of “That’s an interesting question. Read the FOA.”

The challenge of multiple, conflicting SBIR guidance documents isn’t exclusive to the NIH: we’ve worked on Dept. of Energy (DOE) SBIRs that feature contradictory guides, FOAs/RFPs, and related documents. It takes a lot of double checking and cross checking to try to make sure nothing’s been missed. The real question is why inherently science-based agencies like NIH and DOE are seemingly incapable of producing the same kind of single RFP documents typically used by DHHS, DOL, etc. Also, it’s very odd that we’ve never worked on an SBIR proposal for which the federal agency has provided a budget template in Excel. In the NIH example discussed above, the budget form was in Acrobat, which means I had to model it in Excel. Excel has been the standard for spreadsheets/budgets since the ’80s.

We (obviously) work on grant applications all the time, and yet the SBIR reconciliation process is confusing and difficult even for us professional grant writers. The SBIR narratives, once we understand how to structure them, usually aren’t very challenging for us to write, but getting to the right structure sure is. For someone not used to reading complicated grant documents, and looking at SBIR guidance documents for the first time, the process would be a nightmare. Making SBIRs “easier” with extra, generic application guides that can be unpredictably superseded actually makes the process harder. This is good for our business but bad for science and innovation.

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Another piece of the evaluation puzzle: Why do experiments make people unhappy?

The more time you spend around grants, grant writing, nonprofits, public agencies, and funders, the more apparent it becomes that the “evaluation” section of most proposals is only barely separate in genre from mythology and folktales, yet most grant RFPs include requests for evaluations that are, if not outright bogus, then at least improbable—they’re not going to happen in the real world. We’ve written quite a bit on this subject, for two reasons: one is my own intellectual curiosity, but the second is for clients who worry that funders want a real-deal, full-on, intellectually and epistemologically rigorous evaluation (hint: they don’t).

That’s the wind-up to “Why Do Experiments Make People Uneasy?“, Alex Tabarrok’s post on a paper about how “Meyer et al. show in a series of 16 tests that unease with experiments is replicable and general.” Tabarrok calls the paper “important and sad,” and I agree, but the paper also reveals an important (and previously implicit) point about evaluation proposal sections for nonprofit and public agencies: funders don’t care about real evaluations because a real evaluation will probably make the applicant, the funder, and the general public uneasy. Not only do they make people uneasy, but most people don’t even understand how a real evaluation works in a human-services organization, how to collect data, what a randomized controlled trial is, and so on.

There’s an analogous situation in medicine; I’ve spent a lot of time around doctors who are friends, and I’d love to tell some specific stories,* but I’ll say that while everyone is nominally in favor of “evidence-based medicine” as an abstract idea, most of those who superficially favor it don’t really understand what it means, how to do it, or how to make major changes based on evidence. It’s often an empty buzzword, like “best practices” or “patient-centered care.”

In many nonprofit and public agencies, evaluations and effectiveness are the same: everyone putatively believes in them, but almost no one understands them or wants real evaluations conducted. Plus, beyond that epistemic problem, even if evaluations are effective in a given circumstance (they’re usually not), they don’t necessarily transfer. If you’re curious about why, Experimental Conversations: Perspectives on Randomized Trials in Development Economics is a good place to start—and this is the book least likely to be read, out of all the books I’ve ever recommended here. Normal people like reading 50 Shades of Grey and The Name of the Rose, not Experimental Conversations.

In the meantime, some funders have gotten word about RCTs. For example, the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Bureau of Justice Assistance’s (BJA) Second Chance Act RFPs have bonus points in them for RCTs. I’ll be astounded if more than a handful of applicants even attempt a real RCT—for one thing, there’s not enough money available to conduct a rigorous RCT, which typically requires paying the control group to follow up for long-term tracking. Whoever put the RCT in this RFP probably wasn’t thinking about that real-world issue.

It’s easy to imagine a world in which donors and funders demand real, true, and rigorous evaluations. But they don’t. Donors mostly want to feel warm fuzzies and the status that comes from being fawned over—and I approve those things too, by the way, as they make the world go round. Government funders mostly want to make congress feel good, while cultivating an aura of sanctity and kindness. The number of funders who will make nonprofit funding contingent on true evaluations is small, and the number willing to pay for true evaluations is smaller still. And that’s why we get the system we get. The mistake some nonprofits make is thinking that the evaluation sections of proposals are for real. They’re not. They’re almost pure proposal world.


* The stories are juicy and also not flattering to some of the residency and department heads involved.

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USDA Community Connect program: Technological change and bringing broadband to rural America

The USDA just released the Community Connect Grant program RFP, which has $30 million to fund 15 projects that will provide broadband in underserved rural communities. We’ve written a bunch of proposals related to rural Internet access, most during the heyday of the Stimulus Bill around 2010. Almost all of those projects involved, on some level, either digging a trench or stringing a wire. Both activities are very, very expensive, so not that many people can be served.

Google has discovered as much, albeit in urban areas: the company famously launched an effort to roll out gigabit fiber Internet about eight years ago, but relentless and ferocious legal and regulatory pressure from incumbents has led the company to scale back its plans. The combination of regulatory capture from other Internet providers and the inherent cost of digging and stringing defeated even Google.

But, at the same time, Google has also announced plans to offer wireless gigabit services in some cities, by placing antennas on the roofs of multifamily buildings and using an antenna-to-antenna system to bypass the digging-or-stringing-a-wire problem.

By now, you can probably see where I’m going. In the old world—like, the world of ten years ago—Community Connect-style programs only really worked with wires. But today, wired hubs combined with radios or lasers may allow projects to deploy broadband to far more locations with far less funding. I can’t speak to the technical feasibility of such projects (though we often write scientific and technical grants). But it doesn’t take an electrical engineering degree to know that “costs less” and “provides more” is a winning argument. I think that smart rural utilities will be looking into wireless systems for last-mile connections. The technology, it would appear, is here; it wasn’t in 2010. As you can likely tell from the title of this post, grant writers who can argue that the technology is here should be able to demonstrate cost benefits over fully wired systems.

We may also be in an interregnum period: While SpaceX has proposed low-latency satellite Internet, that technology is in the prototype stage and is not here yet. Ten years from now, low-orbit satellites may provide latency times as low as 25ms.

Overall, technological change should drive a change in the way Community Connect proposals are written. Many human-service grant programs change very little over time; eight or nine years ago, we began mentioning social media in proposals, but for the most part human service programs have the same fundamental structure: an organization gets some people with problems to come to a facility to receive some services, or the organization sends some expert workers to people with problems to receive some services. Even today, however, most human services nonprofits don’t make much use of social media in service delivery, although it is often used for volunteer recruitment, donations, etc. Technical grant proposals like those being written for Community Connect, though, can and should be driven by technical change.

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The HRSA Uniform Data Source (UDS) Mapper: A complement to Census data

By now you’re familiar with writing needs assessments and you’re familiar with using Census data in the needs assessment. While Census data is useful for economic, language, and many other socioeconomic indicators, it’s not very useful for most health surveillance data—and most health-related data is hard to get. This is because it’s collected in weird ways, by county or state entities, and often compiled into reports for health districts and other non-standard sub-geographies that don’t match up with census tracks or even municipal boundaries. The collection and reporting mess often makes it to compare various areas. Enter HRSA’s Uniform Data Source (USD) Mapper tool.

I don’t know the specifics about the UDS Mapper’s genesis, but I’ll guess that HRSA got tired of receiving proposals that used a hodgepodge of non-comparable data sources derived from a byzantine collection of sources, some likely reliable and some likely less than reliable. To take one example we’re intimately familiar with, the five Service Planning Areas (SPAs) for which LA Country aggregates most data. If you’ve written proposals to LA City or LA County, you’ve likely encountered SPA data. While SPA data is very useful, it doesn’t contain much, if any, health care data. Healthcare data is largely maintained by the LA County Health Department and doesn’t correspond to SPAs, leaving applicants frustrated.

(As an aside, school data is yet another wrinkle in this, since it’s usually collected by school or by district, and those sources usually don’t match up with census tracks or political sub-divisions. There’s also Kids Count data, but that is usually sorted by state or county—not that helpful for a target area in the huge LA County with a population of 10 million.)

The UDS Mapper combines Census data with reports from Section 330 providers, then sorts that information by zip code, city, county, and state levels. It’s not perfect and should probably not be your only data source. But it’s a surprisingly rich and robust data source that most non-FQHCs don’t yet know about.

Everyone knows about Census data. Most know about Google Scholar, which can be used to improve the citations and scholarly framework of your proposal (and this is a grant proposal, so no one checks the cites, but they do notice if they’re there or not). HRSA hasn’t done much to promote UDS data outside the cloistered confines of FQHCs. So we’re doing our part to make sure you know about the new data goldmine.

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How to write grant proposal work plans

In addition to the ever-present requirement for a project narrative, some RFPs require a “work plan.” For many novice grant writers, confronting the work plan raises a sense of dread similar to having to prepare a logic model. Unlike logic models, which involve a one-page diagram that displays project elements in a faux flow-chart format, work plans are usually structured as multi-column tables, like the simple illustration in this PDF (or try here for the Word version).

(Note: if you don’t want to write your proposal’s work plan, contact us, and we’ll do it.)

As the attached file shows, the work plan usually contains a blank for goals, with blanks for objectives under each goal and activities for each objective. Other columns may include timeframes, responsibilities, deliverables, data to be collected, and so on.

While it’s possible to create a 10- or even 20-page work plan (the work plan is usually not not counted against the project narrative page limit), there’s little reason to do so, unless you’re required to by the RFP. Instead, one overarching goal statement is generally enough. A goal statement might be, for example:

The project goal is to improve employment and life outcomes for formerly incarcerated cyclops by providing a range of culturally and linguistically appropriate wraparound supportive services.

Use that goal to develop three or four specific and measurable objectives, along with three or four activities for each objective. This will result in a work plan ranging from one to five pages. Each additional goal will (probably pointlessly) increase the page count and the chance to create continuity errors. A compact work plan will clearly summarize why and how the project will be implemented and it will be easy for readers/scorers to understand. That’s enough for a work plan.

It’s easy to introduce continuity errors between the workplan and narrative because goals, objectives, activities, timelines, etc., may be sprinkled throughout the narrative, budget, logic model, and/or forms, depending on the RFP requirements. Details in the work plan must be precisely consistent with all other proposal components. The more you edit each proposal draft, the less you will be able to spot internal inconsistencies within the narrative or between the narrative and the work plan. Inconsistencies will, however, stand out in neon to a reviewer reading the entire proposal for the first time.

We’re experienced grant writers, so we draft work plans after the second proposal draft is completed. But novice grant writers will find it useful to draft the work plan before writing the first draft, as this will help you organize the draft. Novices should also read differences among goals, objectives and activities before tackling the work plan.

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Should your startup seek Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants?

In response to Sam Altman’s great post “Hard tech is back,” someone on Hacker News pointed out that hard tech companies should apply for Small Business Innovation Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grants (both programs provide funding to small companies that are commercializing research). There are excellent reasons to apply, which we’ll recapitulate: most Federal agencies are required to make SBIR/STTR funds available; grants for Phase I go up to $225,000, and Phase II grants go up to $2 million; a large amount of money is available (most years see SBIR/STTR budget allocations in the billions); unlike venture capital (VC) funding, federal money doesn’t require giving up shares in return for funding; and, finally, the feds may fund ideas VCs won’t. The “feds may fund ideas VCs won’t” is particularly but not exclusively true of hard tech projects.

So far, so good. But while the upsides are real, and we’re incentivized to emphasize them, the downsides are too. One is simple timing: if the appropriate SBIR / STTR funding cycle just concluded for that year, your startup may have to wait another year to apply.* Then another 2 – 3 months for a decision. Then longer for final budget approval and contract execution. A year is a very long time for a startup. The other day a potential client called whose best potential SBIR source had had a deadline the month prior.

Second, Phase 1 grants can just be too small for the amount of effort that goes into them.

Third, SBIRs/STTRs don’t come with the advice, community, or expertise of good VCs. Applicants may still get to meet some professors in their field or other experts, but those connections seem to be weaker than the connections good VCs generate.

Fourth, applications take a lot of effort to prepare, and for first-time grant writers they can be quite hard. The alternative is to hire someone like us. While I’m biased towards doing that for obvious reasons, we also cost money. I can’t say whether our fees are low, high, or just right—as discussed at the link, we get all three reactions—but our fees are real and no qualified grant writer will ever work for contingent fees.**

Just finding the appropriate SBIR/STTR program and RFP can be hard, since different Federal departments publish RFPs at different times and focus areas typically differ in each competition. Reading the RFP is hard for the uninitiated, for the same reason that reading legal documents is hard for the uninitiated. Most of us who don’t know Python would find Python source code hard to understand.

Fifth, I can’t think of any major companies that got started through SBIRs/STIRs. I did do some searching, and the NIH website gives us some examples, like Genzyme, MARTEX, Sonicare and Abbot Medical Optics. There must be others, and if you know of them I’d love to hear more. In contrast to SBIR/STTR-funded companies, the number of VC- and Y Combinator-backed startups is too long a list to bother reciting, especially since it includes almost every large tech company.

While I don’t want to talk anyone out of applying for a SBIR/STIR, I do want to emphasize that the downsides are considerable. For many if not most startups, applying to Y Combinator is going to be more efficient than seeking SBIRs/STTRs. Still, it’s possible to do both, and for some hard tech companies “both” may be a more interesting answer than either one on its own.

EDIT: A few readers (and some callers) are incredulous that we can write scientific and technical grants; this explains how we do it, as well as some of our strengths and limitations. We’re not experts in any scientific engineering, or technical disciplines, but we are very good at integrating material from a particular discipline for a particular project and we’re also good at asking questions, listening to the answers, and using those answers.


* We’re using the word “startup” as VCs and founders themselves use it—as a term that denotes a small company that plans to grow fast and become a big company, usually via technology and technological innovation / deployment. In this sense most small businesses are not startups: They’re restaurants and consulting practices and nail salons and so on.

** One time I talked to a Y Combinator-backed nonprofit that wanted us to work for contingent fees, and my contact person didn’t grok why grant writers won’t work that way.

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The Ooma Office Business VoIP Phone System: Trials, Tribulations, Frustrations, Fiascoes, Success (sort of), Or, Our Review

UPDATED 11/11/15, GOOD NEWS RE THE FAX!

After two months of frustration, we’ve finally figured out how to get the Ooma Office VoIP system to successfully send and receive faxes. Here’s the hack, which works with a HP LaserJet Pro M521:

You must have a fax machine that allows users to change the fax or “baud” speed. Most newer fax machines default to the v.34 fast standard. Change this to v.29 slow. Next turn off ECM (error correction mode). Then connect the fax machine phone line directly to the Ooma desktop device, not a Linx wireless device. Voila, faxes work, albeit slowly. You’ll have make some effort to find the speed and ECM settings, which will be buried in your fax machine’s menus. In my case, the info is not in the project manual, but I found a 160 Trouble Shooting Guide for the M521 by googling, which explains how to do this. Our previous fax machine, which was about seven years old, a Xerox 4250 Workcentre, does not have controls for speed and ECM that can be changed by the user. My guess is that newer fax machine have these changeable settings, due to the increasing popularity of VoIP, which is not inherently compatible with the high speed fax protocol, but sometimes work with the slowest setting and ECM turned off.

The Ooma Office VoIP system works well for people in single offices who don’t need a fax machine. If you have more than one office and need a fax machine, Ooma Office may be a nightmare to set up, maintain, and get working consistently and properly (as it has been for us). Still, it does mostly work as of this writing, and we ended up teaching Ooma about a segment of their market that they didn’t know existed—so maybe they’ll improve over time.

About two months ago we decided to finally replace our fairly old, but very reliable, Avaya Partner Mail VS PBX POTS phone system with a VoIP system. Based on a very positive user survey from a large tech magazine, we picked Ooma Office.*

Ooma boxAlthough many of you will feel your eyelids get heavy around the time you finish this sentence, we’ll start by saying that replacing our Avaya landline phone system with Ooma Office turned out to not be one of our better equipment/vendor decisions. Several times during the setup process I screamed with total primal rage (not a good thing). Our tale likely won’t interest you unless you’re a) trying to pick a VoIP system for your small business, or b) starting a startup, in which case the company-client interaction dynamic should interest you greatly. We’ve written before about the “Small Business Blues: Trying to Get and Keep the Attention of Equipment Vendors is a Challenge.” This post is in its own way a continuation of that saga.

First, the good.

Ooma Office’s sound quality is high, albeit it after much struggle to find the right phones. In addition, the initial hardware costs are modest and our monthly phone bills are much lower than the old Verizon, landline-based Avaya system. A cautionary note is that the Ooma Office basic service (not including 800 number changes, other frills and taxes) is $10/line or extension, while telcos only change per line, often with unlimited long distance bundled. A complex Ooma system can easily get fairly expensive quickly compared to landlines.

The design of the Ooma Office desktop box is also excellent. So excellent that I have little to say about it apart from the fact that it could be made by Apple. The design of the wireless “Linx” devices that plug into wall outlets to extend the number of extensions, is similarly excellent, as is the Ooma Office Manager administrator web portal.

Ooma’s customer support is very good if you have a common problem that their front-line people can handle and is pretty good if you know how to work your way into the real support people found at “Level 3.” We’ve spent an incredible amount of time on the phone with Ooma’s tech support as we attempted to get our system working correctly.

To finish off “The Good,” Ooma has a fairly reliable iPhone app that allows an employee without an Ooma box in their office, or any employee on the go, to receive and make Ooma calls, without call forwarding. While the app is a little buggy, we view it like the dog playing the piano: It’s not that the dog plays well, it’s that he plays at all. In addition, software can be rapidly improved through updates, and we expect the app to get better over time.

The challenges.

Most of the online reviewers of Ooma Office have a single office, which might be home-based or not. If you have a single central office, with up to 20 employees/extensions for each Ooma box, Ooma Office should work well for you. Most online reviewers aren’t set up like Seliger + Associates: we have two offices, one in Santa Monica and one in New York City, as well as other staff who never come into either office. But we need a single system dispersed across two separated offices and roaming staff, so that anyone who calls any of our numbers can get any of us. Ooma Office doesn’t do that by default because of arcane telephony regulatory rules. It’s possible through dark arts to make this work by “merging” or remote linking of two or more Ooma boxes, but it’s not easy. It’s not possible for a user to set up more than one Ooma box, unless both boxes are in the same location, without a lot of Level 3 tech support.

Let’s talk too about the phone instrument issue. Most VoIP providers either sell compatible phones or provide a list of phones that have been tested with their system—RingCentral, for example, has a page with dedicated phones listed. For no apparent reason, Ooma does neither. Most VoIP systems also use modern IP phones, but Ooma Office is oddly incompatible with IP phones and instead only supports analog (or POTs) phones.

In a low moment after tech support struggles I sent this to Ooma’s support and to Ooma’s CEO (some cursing to follow, but hey, that was my mindset at the time; I like to think I’m moderately eloquent even when frustrated):

We’ve been trying to get an Ooma system set up properly, and the process has been, charitably speaking, a fucking nightmare. I’m sitting here and seething with rage and frustration at the latest problem.

We bought two generic random Panasonic landline phones to use with Ooma. They sound terrible. Consequently we’re trying to find phones that don’t sound like OEM equipment Alexander Graham Bell might have used. Ideally, that equipment should also have a 3.5mm headset port, but that is apparently impossible with this class of phone. Even a 2.5mm headset port would be an improvement.

Unfortunately, finding phones that aren’t terrible is itself like searching through a needle in a proverbial haystack. There are hundreds of phones, all of which appear to have been designed in 1980 and made for people who are more than willing to buy the $21.96 phone over the $22.23 phone because one is seven cents cheaper than the other. That is not us. We want phones that actually work. Trying to find phones that actually work has proven to be a gigantic hassle. At one point, many moons ago, Avaya was the standard. Or AT&T. Now there is no standard.

What I’d really like is a page on Ooma.com that says, “These handsets aren’t terrible.” Do you notice how, if you go to, say, Apple.com, you’ll only find stuff that actually works? That’s what I’d like. Digging through these fucking Amazon reviews for phones all of which appear superficially identical is making me nuts. The word “curated” has been debased by millions of bloggers and morons on Facebook, but it is nonetheless what I seek in this domain because I know nothing about the domain.

I called a support person who suggested I find something at Wal*Mart or Target. I live in Manhattan. This is not a helpful suggestion. You deal with phones every day. What I’d like is for someone to sort through the crap on the Internet, give us three or five good options, and then let us pick between them.

Let us consider Ring Central by comparison. There is a page, right here, that lists phones, none of which are (allegedly) shit. I could find a list of phones here, but only after much work. This shouldn’t be so hard. I can’t even find a support email address. At the moment I’m tearing out my hair and yelling at my computer in frustration. I don’t want to become a professional phone reviewer, buying and returning these things. I’m already a professional writer. One occupation is enough.

One page, with five good phones. That’s it. I can’t find it. Not on Ooma.com, not anywhere. Any ideas?

(A side note about companies and organizations: In medium and large companies the head of the organization often doesn’t fully know what’s going on at the feet of the organization. A CEO and other C-level people also only have so much attention. Sometimes politely and intelligently bringing a problem to the CEO’s attention is a way to get that problem fixed not only for the person sending the note but for everyone else who is having the problem.)

We know that Ooma is aware of the phone problem: conventional analog phones are stuck in the 1990s, when real companies and engineers were last interested in selling analog phones. Today is 2015 and the models still being sold are going to grandmas and legacy users and very occasionally to small business users like us. The people at Ooma are smart enough to realize this and smart enough to realize that they need to get their system working with IP phones or lose customers. IP phones are really just specialized computers, much as your iPhone is a specialized computer.

Analog phones, as I said previously, have not been of interest for a long time; one model we tried is so old that its default date is 2002! Think about the world of 2002 and the world of 2015 and you’ll quickly see the problem. There are no good modern analog phones. Zero. Zip. They don’t exist. Not anymore. All the R & D and product development today goes into IP phones. We did eventually find some Panasonic phones that aren’t offensive and that claim to support “HD Voice,” which is important because the increasing digitization of the phone system means that we’re moving towards a world with better audio quality.

Audio quality is more important to us than price because garbled or messed up words can cause us to lose important jobs. We’d rather spend more for quality than get the cheapest possible system.

Then there are fax issues. We heard an enormous amount of BS about faxes from Ooma support. The simple truth is that Ooma is not compatible with any fax machines. Virtually no VoIP systems are. This has to do the fax protocol itself, baud rates and other arcana. To use a physical fax machine, one needs a device called a Fax Bridge or ATA that converts the incoming and outgoing faxes to VoIP. Ooma Office does not support a Fax Bridge or ATA, so reliable and easy faxing remains an unsolved problem for us. Ooma finally gave us a free Virtual Fax extension, which is worth about what we pay for it. Like the Ooma app, the Virtual Fax software more or less works, but is very hard to use (I won’t bore you with the details).

Essentially, Ooma support told us to use their Virtual Fax, install land lines for our existing fax machines or buy a cloud-based fax solution from some other vendor. As of this writing, Ooma Office does not offer a reliable integrated fax solution. This is really hard to fathom as many small offices, like doctors and CPAs, still need faxes. Don’t even think about Ooma Office if you send or receive more than a couple of faxes a weeek.

Ooma and the modern tech world.

Working on the Ooma Office problems is a reminder of Apple’s tremendous influence over the last decade of change. I’m just old enough to remember portable music players before the iPod. They were terrible, and they were terrible in the exact same way the Panasonic phones we bought are terrible. They were designed by someone more like me—that is to say, with no design sense—rather than someone like Jonathan Ive (that linked article is great, and if you get lost reading it and don’t come back I wouldn’t blame you one bit).

The amazing thing about contemporary life is not how many products work incredibly well but how many work shockingly poorly, or, even more commonly, almost well. That “almost” is a key factor in frustration and is probably the driving force behind consolidated review sites like The Sweethome and The Wirecutter. Just figuring out what the good stuff is can be a full-time job. The Internet has in some ways made this better—everyone starts with a Google search—and in some ways made it worse—how authoritative is the person on the other side of that search? Among Amazon reviewers, the absolute worst products tend to get trashed, but almost every other product has a mix of positive and negative reviews. Crapware like analog phones are a great example of this.

Ooma Linx deviceOoma Office probably works well for people in a single office. For people like us, the system doesn’t quite work, and things that don’t quite work can be highly frustrating—especially when it’s obvious that Ooma has taken some cues from Apple and has done some things extraordinarily well (the wireless “Linx” extenders are an example of an elegant Ooma Office solution).

One of the most-read things I’ve written, ever, is a review of the modern Model M keyboard. It’s been so read in part, I think, because I a) know what I’m talking about, b) I know the problem domain well and exist in it every single day, and c) whatever my personal flaws may be, I can write a coherent sentence. Actually, I should also add “d)”, no one is paying me to write the review. I found a product so good that I had to write about why it’s so good and why it’s better than the sea of crap keyboards out there. Professional writers and programmers are not a large segment of the keyboard-using population but we are a segment that has particular needs that until recently weren’t being well met.

One way to read this piece is as a review of the Ooma Office system. A second, Straussian way is as an essay about the pervasive influence of Apple. There may be others.

I’m not the first person to wonder why phone quality still sounds like crap. The best quality I’ve heard is via Apple’s Facetime Audio feature, but that requires two people on iPhones (or other Apple devices) and for Facetime Audio to be specifically selected. Still, Jeff Hecht describes the larger issues in “Why Mobile Voice Quality Still Stinks—and How to Fix It: Technologies such as VoLTE and HD Voice could improve sound quality, but cellular carriers aren’t deploying them fast enough,” which I encourage you to read.

We’re not sure Ooma is going to last as a company. Ooma’s IPO appears to have failed (see also here). The company has a couple of serious problems: at the margins, many people who once would’ve bought dedicated phones are using cell phones. Archaic regulatory BS around legacy telephony means that Ooma can’t sell and configure distributed systems in a way that really makes sense. As noted above, the Ooma iPhone app is impressive in that it sort of works, but it’s not really how we want to use the system most of the time.

Perhaps the most obvious thing we’ve learned is that one should never buy a system like this if the vendor doesn’t sell all the parts. Ooma doesn’t sell any instruments. Avaya did. Ring Central does. That’s a key issue. Maybe Ring Central would’ve been no better than Ooma, and just as difficult to set up. We might yet find out.


* Don’t confuse Ooma Office with Ooma Telo, a low-end VoIP solution for the home-like Magic Jack.