Deborah's Proposal Writing Blog

These new grant announcements are compiled every week or so by Don Greismann and are then published by CharityChannel as an RSS feed. With my new Carp Koi program, I can incorporate this feed right into my own site, and it will be automatically updated (I hope) whenever the feed itself is updated.

I'm hoping this will be a useful addition to my site. I think it will, since it pretty much fits right in with my other grant-related pages. Go take a look for yourself.

There are a number of things that you can do when you know you are going to bid on a project but haven't yet received your RFP/RFA. What are they? Well, you can:

• Revise or prepare your Capabilities Statement and/or Past Performance References. Since you'll hopefully have a good idea of what the new project is going to address, you can begin writing or tailoring these documents to reflect your experience with similar projects.
• Begin recruiting staff for the new project if you think you're going to need them. Write up and place your advertisements, do some networking, and collect resumes. You don't have to make any commitments at this stage, but you'll be ahead of the game when you get your RFP/RFA.
• Tailor and format, if necessary, resumes of personnel who you know you're going to propose for the project. See my post on The Importance of Resumes for more information on this subject.
• Begin writing up your Management Plan and prepare a preliminary project organization chart.
• Conduct some preliminary brainstorming sessions.
• Gather background materials that may be useful in updating your knowledge and information on the project and preparing your proposal.
• Begin gathering costing information.

It's easy to register. Once you have found the solicitation you want to bid on, there is a "Register to Receive Notification" link at the bottom of the announcement. Just click on it and enter your e-mail address. If you register, you won't have to keep checking the website to see if an amendment has been issued -- it will come to you in an e-mail.

The Fedbizopps and Grants.gov sites will also let you register to receive e-mails on grant and contract opportunities by agency, by category or topic, and by type of solicitation. To see how this works and to sign up, go to:

• Fedbizopps Registration (for contracts).


• Grants.gov Registration (for grants).

If you are going to write an RFP, you are most likely employed by a government agency, for-profit company or non-profit organization. Your purpose in writing an RFP is to advertise your need for a product or service, and to obtain bids (prices, proposals) from companies or organizations that want to sell you that product or service. When you write an RFP, you are providing those prospective bidders with information and specifications on the product/service you are looking for so that they can respond with information on what they can offer. It makes sense when you think about it: RFP is an acronym for Request For Proposals.

Thus, when you receive an RFP and decide you want to make a bid, you are not going to be writing an RFP -- you are going to be writing a proposal in response to a Request for Proposals. They request, you respond.

The Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) allows the Government to enter into such negotiations with bidders who are determined to be in the competitive range. According to the FAR:

Negotiations are exchanges...between the Government and offerors, that are undertaken with the intent of allowing the offeror to revise its proposal. Discussions are tailored to each offeror's proposal, and must be conducted by the contracting officer with each offeror within the competitive range.

The primary objective of discussions is to maximize the Government's ability to obtain best value, based on the requirement and the evaluation factors set forth in the solicitation. At a minimum, the contracting officer must indicate to, or discuss with, each offeror still being considered for award, deficiencies, significant weaknesses, and adverse past performance information to which the offeror has not yet had an opportunity to respond.

The distinction between "weaknesses" and "deficiencies" is not really clear, although the latter is worse than the former. At any rate, each of them have to be specifically addressed and incorporated in the revised proposal.

But on Friday afternoon, I got an e-mail from my client telling me to stop work. Some of my client's staff, who are attending a scheduled site visit related to the bid, had contacted their home office to say that a new scope-of-work for the proposal may be issued. In addition, my client indicated that based on new info from the site visit, they may team up with another company on the bid. All of this is up in the air right now, so I'm having to wait to hear from my client about what they are going to do. Obviously, they may or may not need my assistance.

So I poked around on the website until I found the refurbished and clearance computers. Bingo! There was my model with even more than I had bargained for. It has a Pentium 735 processor, 1 GB memory, 60 GB hard drive, a DVD+ RW drive, large capacity battery, and integrated wireless LAN and bluetooth. Plus it comes loaded with XP Pro and the full version of MS Office Small Business Edition 2003. After an online chat with a Sony tech, I bought it, complete with an extended warranty for 2 years of on-site service and accidental damage protection. And even with all this, I saved $1,000.

I am a bit worried because I've never bought a refurbished computer. But in the past 15 years, I've probably bought 6 notebooks, and only once have I had to send one back for a repair. I figure if it doesn't work right, I can return it. Also, I would probably not have bought the extended warranty if the computer was brand new. So we'll see.

So for the next few weeks, I am thinking that I might focus this blog on my day-to-day activities with respect to this particular proposal. I'm not sure it will work, but it could be interesting and may provide some insights into the overall proposal development process. I'm going to give it a whirl.

So for the past few days I've been checking out new notebooks, pretty much going by the reviews in PC Magazine. I want another ultraportable, preferably about the same weight as my Sony. I've narrowed my choices down to a Dell, a Sony and a Toshiba. And that's about as far as I've been able to go because I am plagued by indecision. Do I go for the one that weighs the least? Or the one that has the bigger screen? Or the one with the better keyboard? What about the optical drives and the bluetooth and the docking stations -- what do I need or want? I just keep going back and forth, back and forth among the three models. Why can't someone just combine the best features of each of these computers and put them in one machine so that I can make a decision and be done with it?

My ideal client is a company or organization that wants to work with me as a team. In my view, proposal development has got to be a team effort, whether or not you use the services of a consultant. And it's particularly important when you do hire a consultant. Unless the consultant knows your organization very very well, he or she cannot prepare your proposal in a vacuum. A proposal must reflect the organization's mission, philosophy, and way of doing things -- not the consultant's philosophy or what the consultant thinks might be the way the organization should do things. If you leave it to the consultant to figure things out for you, you could be in big trouble down the road once you finally get around to reading the proposal and/or if you happen to win the project.

When doing a proposal with a client, teamwork means joint planning, holding discussions, asking and answering questions, providing and using one another's inputs, rendering assistance when needed, and jointly engaging in problem-solving. It doesn't mean that you have to be physically together every day or even talk every day. But both the client and consultant must make themselves available to one another to achieve their mutual objective of developing the best possible proposal.

More often than I would expect, I'm contacted by prospective clients who want me to just write the proposal for them -- by myself -- without knowing anything about their company or the way their company would approach the project they want to bid on. They just want to hand the proposal over to someone else, with little or no involvement on their part. I don't have to think twice about turning these types of assignments down. If teamwork isn't part of your vocabulary, then I'm not the right consultant for you.

We had prepared a draft Executive Summary, which was required by the RFA but didn't have any evaluation points attached to it. So due to the time constraints, we agreed that we would have to do a "Cut-and- Paste Executive Summary." Normally, this is something that I don't like to do, and I particularly don't recommend it for Executive Summaries that are going to be evaluated and scored. But desperate situations call for desperate measures, and in this case the Executive Summary wasn't going to be scored.

A cut-and-paste Executive Summary is just that: instead of writing it from scratch, you select appropriate paragraphs from the proposal and cut and paste them into the Executive Summary. For this proposal, I took some summary paragraphs out of each major section of the proposal: technical approach, personnel, management plan, and past performance and capabilities. Voila -- an Executive Summary! It certainly wasn't what we would have wanted to write if we had the time, but it was decent and no one could say we didn't have one.

At the time I was brought in to assist, the proposal was in its second draft. I worked with my client -- who had come here to the US from Europe -- and also with staff of some of his subcontractors who were in the Washington, DC area. During that week, about half of the technical proposal sections underwent major revisions or were re-written. Other, smaller sections were written from scratch since they hadn't been done. Since a detailed outline had never been created, we also found that the RFA included some requirements that hadn't been addressed. The proposal was also completely reformatted. Everything seemed to take forever.

My client left to go back to Europe on Wednesday, but I continued working long hours on Thursday and Friday. By Friday afternoon, it was done and production began (at the client's office). On Saurday, one of my client's staff hand-carried the proposal on a plane to Washington, D.C., where it will be delivered today.

Everyone worked very hard and we were all under a lot of stress. But in the end, the proposal came out really well. All of us, I think, felt good about it. And another good thing -- my client (and the staff of his subcontractors) were just great to work with!