Laura’s Winning Ideas

“Your biggest advantage online is your ability to create atom-splitting mental images. How? With WORDS. How much time are you spending with design vs. relevant copy?”
–Anthony Garcia of A Day in the Life of A Persuasion Architect

I love this description. Maybe it will be a new sign over my doorway:

Enter with Care
Atom-splitting Mental Images
under construction

Sometimes the proposal team gets distracted with too much emphasis on pictures, graphics, themes or other visuals, leaving too little time to design compelling words.

If you are using Storyboards and realizing a hit rate over 75 percent, this post doesn’t apply to you.

True Story: A firm related that they spent 4 days working on the Theme for their proposal. That is, 8 senior staff x 8+ hours/day x 4 days = WAY more time and money than should have been spent.

When you have an experienced leader, your theme meeting will take no more than 4 hours, and the smaller the brainstorming team, the less time needed.

A seasoned proposal team will spend most of their time on the storyboards, getting the message well articulated and compelling. That way, the writers can’t make the mistake of submitting the wrong copy, missing the strategic message and veering the proposal off course. I gladly spend 4 days (and more) working over storyboards with a team. That’s the way we create “atom-splitting mental images.”

Proposal professionals have a perspective on the outsider’s view of your firm that is unique.

Even though you may have little or no interaction with the customer/client, you spend your time understanding their viewpoint.

Here’s one thought you may want to pass upstairs: Accessibility of your corporate website.

Accessibility is especially important if your offering includes providing consumer or other public access to information you prepare for a client/customer.

I just read a diatribe posted by a heathcare patient about their hospital’s website. It was not pretty. The simplest accessibility features were missing. For example, photos should have a text description when you mouse over them. When a visually impaired person comes to your website, their web reader speaks this description. The hospital website lacked this feature.

Moreover, some of these secret images were links to other pages. But without any clue as to where they led, the visitor is stuck.

The story went on about major flaws in navigation which are easily remedied. These unnoticed details made the pages almost unnavigable for the visually impaired. The final insult was being booted out by the system when, without warning, the system announced that his session had expired because he spent too long trying to decipher a page.

Here’s the website where more information can be had about accessibility, and the things on your site which should be checked. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/

Gee. There are only 13 guidelines, and most of these are so simple, even I can fix them on an HTML site.

If your proposals ever include websites for delivery of information, or public information websites or technology transfer, you need to know your folks cover this base. Tuck this away for the next big RFP. Better yet, ask whether this has already been done and add it to your project summary database.

I’ve used Mindjet’s Mindmapping software for several years, and use it for almost every proposal, to capture all the intelligence before we begin connecting the dots to the RFP. I wrote about this software here a few months ago.

Now you can try a free software to create mindmaps, called Freemind. I’ve tried it out and it works fine for brainstorming and documenting a debrief session. If you are shy of paying for the MindMap software this is worth a try.

Mindjet Pro is about $350 at the Mindjet.com website, but cheaper from re-sellers on-line, at $170 to just over $200. (Search for Mindjet and you’ll find several re-sellers.)

Freemind is freeware, which means you don’t pay for a license to use it. However, freeware is more like “free speech” than “free beer.” Forums are set up so you may ask for help from other users, and often get it promptly. However, you aren’t a paying customer, so urgency has no place in a freeware forum.

Most large companies have great resources for collaboration, but they may be limited to players within your firm. When your proposal includes partners or sub-contractors, you may not have time to get them access to your network.

Medium-sized firms may have fewer tools, and small firms are usually looking for resources they can use on an ad-hoc basis.

Here are two tools you may want to add to your toolbox:
Vyew is a file sharing tool. Pair this with a conference call, and you can conduct storyboard and proposal reviews, look over graphics and see the selection of photos your subcontractor has available. No software to download, so you can meet without an IT pre-meeting setup. (Ever try to configure a CEO’s desktop, by phone, for a NetMeeting as your guest? Nasty.) Up to 20 attendees.
At a more conceptual stage of solution design? How about a Whiteboard for collaboration: GE Free on-line whiteboard tool. This whiteboard can have as many as three parties drawing at once. Again, paired with a conference call and you’ve got a great way to work on a drawing, mathematical or chemical problem, or discuss different ways to display data.

Let me know if you have other keen tools!