A first shot at the budget

Today I had a go at a possible budget. Since this is really very coarse and will need a lot of tweaking, I am leaving it on a spreadsheet for the moment, rather than copying it onto a HTML table on the platform. Look at formulas to decode the numbers: I hypothesized a monthly full-time equivalent cost for each person, then hypothesized a committment (for example: 20% of time, i.e. one day a week) and multiplied that percentage commitment by the FTE equivalent cost and by the number of months involved (for the core team I have 3.5 months, the whole duration of the project. Non-core people (researchers) are paid by deliverable, i.e. lumpsums.

Bad news:

  • as we anticipated, we are not able to pay ourselves full market rates. As a first stab, I hypothesized 6000 US$ a month as a FTE – which is less than my normal rate. 
  • also, there is no budget to reward the time (> 100 hours) that I invested to make this tender happen. In the budget I assign symbolically an extra thousand dollars to myself, but that's really not a reward. In the (near) future, we will need to figure out how to reward dealmaking properly. 

Good news:

  • we do set aside about 17000 US$. This is the margin: it means having a little money to reinvest in the company. 

Other considerations:

  • in the first stab, I am considering the same monthly rate for all of us. Equality hath its advantages; on the other hand, we have different levels of seniority among us. We do need to make a decision about how to deal with this. I would love to hear your opinions. 
  • speaking of equality, the monthly rates for country managers are way lower than ours. This is based on some research that puts salaries in these countries well below US$ 1,000 a month (even in high-paying sectors like banking). Not sure how to deal with this. 

My FTE is lower

Definitely consider seniority, at least in my case.

I have a little over 2 years of experience in online communities, you know that already, so feel free to cut the amount in half or more. Unfortunately my only term for comparison would be previous salary from CoE, other than that I can’t put a price on it.

Also, I see you listed enthographic research as one of my potential tasks, which sounds good. Would be happy to work with (an) ethnographer(s) on this project :slight_smile: