Chapter Five , or some honest serving men…

Our journey through the proposal writing process continiues.

The key to Chapter Five is this – know your customer (committee, granting agency, etc.). Be alinging our perceprtion of the situation (illustrated in Chapter 4) with what your customer percieves is their need, you have a much greater chance of success. We can do this by answering the asked questions in the RFP or other guidelines, but equally as important is aswering the unasked quiestions.

We get to these unasked questions by communicating with our point of contact on the grant. This contact can provide extremely helpful guidance when asked the right questions. This information is vital when answering the How question and for obvious reasons. If your How answer is not in alignment with the customers needs, it is worthless to them and leads to an unstarifactory answer (like rejection of the proposal) for you.

Here, a project mind map, one that breaks a proposed solution into workable steps, is vital to align the customer’s needs, both stated and unstated, into a project plan. By this alignment, you already are able to answer the Why questions that justify the How steps. Once these questions are answered, as proposal writers, we can then develop our thinking into a cohesive, written plan.
That plan must follow the rules of good writing. Just because it’s a proposal doesn’t mean the writing should be mechanical. A proposal writer must use the same “hooks” and transitions as the narrative writer. No one wants to read dry prose, even if the prose is written for a business proposal. We want to leave our readers with a story written just for them, and wanting to read more by funding your proposal.