Laura’s Winning Ideas

Real stories compel engagement.

I love having great writers on a proposal team and letting them loose to pry and tease out the stories we need to bring our proposal to life.

Interviewing to find the story is hard and artful. Having a handful of good questions to get the conversation started is key:

“How does it help?” “How do we help?” — Warren Yerks

“What’s @ stake?” — Director Tom Clifford

To get inspired with ideas of how to “get the story” read Tom Clifford’s blog, DirectorTom

In the April 2007 edition of OMMA Magazine, they covered the new UPS campaign.

Big Brown Goes Back to Basics by Christine Champagne

Too cool for words. Go see the UPS website.
A very complex offering, explained in an engaging way, and organized so that every stakeholder can drill down where they want, as deep as they want.

Sound like what proposal writers aspire to?

What ideas can you steal from excellence? (Obviously, I think this site is EXCELLENT)

www.mediapostpublications.com/omma

Yesterday I was mucking with the backend code on this site. While reading the instructions to install a widget, I saw a notice offering to analyze my site and clicked on it.

The bad news it gave me was that my site was well below the top 100,000 visited sites (my Alexa score is 1,876,605 which means that the world is not beating a path to this site.)

This is hilarious. Most proposal professionals have trouble explaining to our own families just what it is we do for a living.

Fact is, my audience is limited to folks who win by writing great proposals. Among those folks, I think I’m making good progress.

…back to mucking with code.

Writing articles is a great way to establish your credentials and get exposure.

If you are positioning for large contracts, regularly submitting articles in your industry is a credibility builder you can later leverage in the proposal. Many proposal professionals are the entire marketing team for the firm and are asked to write press releases and edit articles for submission from the technical staff.

In a discussion today, a newly published author was dismayed with the editing of their submission and asked whether they should require final editorial approval next time.

As a former editor, my advise is “Do not ask for final editorial review.”

Here’s why:

First, the editor needs editorial control to edit pieces to match the tone and cadence of the publication. You aren’t likely to submit something that does this intuitively. I can always tell the difference between a publication that “compiles” articles and one that has editorial staff providing a common voice. The former comes across as amateurish and doesn’t enhance the credentials of the publication nor authors. Take advantage of having your work massaged to enhance both their and your credibility.

Second, final edits happen as the piece is being laid into the page. This happens at the last possible minute. These edits are not editorial, but rather “page fit” edits, edits made only to fit the article into the space available. The publishers wait for the last few advertisements to come in, before the editorial staff lays in the editorial content. There is no time to lay the article in, submit back to you for approval, and wait for approval, before sending for printing.

If, as an editor, I had this requirement and for some reason still wanted to run the piece, it would require that I bury the piece on the least likely page to contain an ad. Every publication has a few pages that don’t get the reader’s attention, and advertisers, ad salespeople and editors know which pages these are in their publication. Those pages could be laid first and sent last, allowing a pause for editorial approval. Do you really want your article run on the least likely page to get a reader’s interest?