Proposal content planning implementation
You can solve many proposal problems by how you implement Content Planning
At its core, a Content Plan:
- Sets expectations for writers so they know what they have to do to create the right proposal.
- Provides a set of specifications for reviewers to use to determine whether the authors achieved what they were supposed to achieve.
Content Plans are flexible. You can use them on simple, quick turnaround proposals or large complicated proposals. You can use them on proposals with strong centralized management and planning, and you can use them on decentralized highly collaborative proposals. In addition to figuring out what to say in your proposal, you can use Content Plans to provide training, guidance, communication, and even issue tracking.
Some of the ways you can adapt your implementation include:
- How you format the instructions that go into a Content Plan? Do they tell the reader what to write, what to research, or what to figure out? Do they go beyond instructions and include questions, ideas, problems, issues, or other things that impact proposal development?
- How do you handle access? Does everyone have access to edit the Content Plans or just a chosen few? Do you take turns? How do you pass them around for contributions?
- Do you use them for more than just writing? Do you use the Content Plans to drive consensus? To develop bid strategies? Or just to account for what you intend to write?
The most important thing about implementing a Content Plan is not the appearance or the format, but the review. If you do not thoroughly review your Content Plan prior to writing, then your writers and reviewers may not be working from the same set of expectations. This is critically important.
More tips for implementing Content Plans
- Centralized vs. decentralized models for Content Planning
- What to put into your Content Plan
- Content Planning for quick turnaround proposals and task orders
- Using Content Plans to improve proposal writing quality
- Using Content Plans with proposal recipes
- How to incorporate boilerplate/re-use into your Content Plans
- Checklist for using boilerplate/re-use material
- Addressing graphics in your Content Plans
- Inspiration for graphics
- 9 proposal metrics you didn't think were possible enabled by Proposal Content Planning
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