Note: It is ORIED’s understanding that, under the new budget allocation model (BAM), 100% of indirect costs generated by sponsored projects will be returned to the colleges. ORIED’s contributions to both mandatory and voluntary cost share would therefore come from other funds set aside for this purpose.
Mandatory Cost Sharing
For any cost share required by the sponsor, ORIED proposes 50% cost share from ORIED, and 50% from any other internal contributors (any combination of college, department, and/or faculty). Any cost share provided by external contributors reduces the mandatory cost share provided by all UT contributors.
Exception: When mandatory cost share is required on proposals that do not generate full indirect costs, or when the principal investigator is in a non-STEM department that may have resource constraints, additional negotiation is possible when needed to facilitate proposal submission.
Voluntary Committed Cost Sharing
For proposals with a budget of $10 million or more, UT aims to provide up to 60% of indirect costs generated by the sponsor budget back to the project as voluntary cost share (committed or uncommitted, as allowed by the sponsor). 40% will be provided by the participating college(s) out of indirect cost returns, and 20% will be provided by ORIED from other sources; the college(s) keep 60% of indirect costs generated by the project.
Shared Vision
Significant voluntary cost share is necessary to be competitive for center-scale proposals, which have vanishingly low success rates (~2%). UT wants to win awards for projects that advance institutional and faculty prestige, and we have collective confidence that we will resolve any outstanding concerns about cost share together, at award stage, which allows us to minimize negotiation at the proposal development stage.
Goals
Voluntary cost share should: 1) demonstrate institutional support for the team and the idea; 2) resource core center operations when the project exceeds the sponsor budget, as large efforts often should; and/or 3) pay for critical project needs that are either not allowed in the sponsor budget or not advisable to include for strategic reasons.
Expectations
The project team will produce a line-item budget for the cost share request (equivalent to up to 60% of indirect costs) that clearly supports the goals above and the competitiveness of the entire effort. This is not a slush fund; cost share requests will meet the same fiscal standards as budgets submitted to the sponsor or they will not be approved.
Exception
Soft money funded units are exempt from requests for voluntary cost share. What they generate in indirect costs, they keep.
Approvals
Approvals will be provided by the ADR of any college with personnel (and associated indirect cost-generating budgets) on the project. Approvals from the ADR should represent all participating departments from that college, with no further need for ORIED to seek approval from individual departments. When a proposal is $10 million or more, and clears the expectations above, each college’s approval for their 40% of the voluntary cost share should be forthcoming with minimal negotiation.