Over the past couple of decades, there has been a great deal of research in psychology, cognitive science, economics, learning, decision-making, and other fields that should inform the way we design and write proposals.  Daniel Kahneman has been one of the most influential people in psychology who has written about the way we make decisions.  He was the first psychologist to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his pioneering work in this field.  Kahneman’s finding have important implications for proposal development.

For a clear and enjoyable summary of Kahneman’s work, read his best-selling Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011).  To summarize Kahnemen’s themes, this is what he says about our decision-making processes:

• Most people use fast and frugal mental processes to make everyday decisions and solve problems because their cognitive resources are limited.
• Most people make decisions and solve problems with the least amount of effort and information possible.  Good decisions do not always require amassing large amounts of information.
• We use straightforward mental processes to make decisions because of time pressure, incomplete information, and the inability to calculate consequences.
• These mental processes usually lead to accurate decisions.

Based on the research of Kahneman and his colleagues, we should design our proposals with the following characteristics to help reviewers evaluate them:

• Make it easy for reviewers to read and understand.
• Make it easy for reviewers to gather and process information.
• Make it easy for reviewers to move through your proposal quickly and with as little effort as possible.
• Make it easy for reviewers to quickly find and understand the information that interests them.
• Make sure that all your major themes have solutions, benefits, and proof.
• Write your Executive Summary for non-technical reviewers.
• Use good visuals to emphasize your features, benefits, and major themes.

In proposals, as in life, cues and clarity foster recognition and recall.  Good proposals that are easy to evaluate are more likely to be scored higher than great proposals that are difficult to evaluate.

Read Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and learn how to design proposals that take into account the decision-making processes of reviewers.

In a recent issue of Education Week, there was an interesting letter to the editor by Rebecca Wheat, a former school principal, about principals and school climate.  According to her, good schools have one major characteristic in common:  “a leader who knows how to create a positive school climate and spends a great deal of time building relationships.”

She identifies four traits of successful principals that I think fit successful  Proposal Managers.  I will list her traits and apply them to the proposal environment.

1.  Good principals meet with everyone in the school and ask “how can the school be improved?”   Their mantra is “we will work together.”

Good Proposal Managers meet with everyone on their team frequently in addition to others who might play a role in proposal development, such as the HR person.  They ask “how can we submit a winning proposal”  and their mantra is “we will work together.”

2. Good principals create strong bonds with students and their families.

Good Proposal Managers create strong working bonds with everyone involved in the proposal effort by showing respect, by treating people as professionals, and by asking for advice.  They also create strong bonds not merely  by talking, but by doing.  They lead by example.

3. Good principals are terrific listeners and they are able to reflect on the ideas of others.

Good Proposal Managers need to be good listeners as well as good speakers.  They understand that people closest to the task often understand it best.  They frequently solicit other perspectives, reflect on these perspectives, and make changes based on what they learn.

4. Good principals tend to be humble.  The people around them do not hear the pronoun “I” but instead “we.”

Good Proposal Managers understand that winning proposals can only come through a group effort.  They work on a team and as a team and frequently use the word “we.”

Proposal Managers may have a lot to learn from successful school principals.  Creating a positive school climate and creating a positive climate for proposal development may be closely related.

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It would be nice if I could take sole credit for this accomplishment, but that would not be accurate.  As the Proposal Manager, I was working closely with a dedicated team of consultants and employees who worked as long and hard as I did.  It was a forceful reminder that in proposals, as in life, the most important resource we possess are the people around us.

This is hardly a piercing insight, but it is one that Proposal Managers and organizations may forget, often with bad consequences.  There is a mountain of research demonstrating that employees are likely to stay longer at their positions, be more committed, feel more engaged, and produce good work under two circumstances:  (1) when they are matched well to their positions; and (2) when they feel respected and valued by management.

Sybil F. Stershie, president of Quality Services Marketing, tells her clients that there are three important points that organizations should learn.  “One, mission matters.  Two, the people behind the mission matter.  And three, passion for the mission can’t be taken for granted.  Once engaged doesn’t mean always engaged.”  She recommends three approaches to develop committed and satisfied employees.  I will add a fourth element and apply them to proposal development:

• Proposal teams must feel connected to the organizations that employ them.
• Proposal members must feel connected to fellow team members.
• Permanent staff and consultants must feel connected to each other.
• Proposal teams must involve young people if they want them to stay, learn, and advance in their professions.

The alternative to these four elements is a vicious cycle that begins with the inability to build successful proposal teams and ends with people leaving because they do not feel connected.  This is not a staffing problem.  It is an organizational problem.  For an interesting perspective on this issue, read “I Quit” in the latest issue of Advancing Philanthropy (Spring 2013), which inspired this blog.  Although it is aimed at nonprofit organizations, it certainly applies to the business world too.

Find ways to connect everybody in your proposal team and you are likely to produce competitive proposals.  It is that simple, and that difficult.

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It would be nice if I could take sole credit for this accomplishment, but that would not be accurate.  As the Proposal Manager, I was working closely with a dedicated team of consultants and employees who worked as long and hard as I did.  It was a forceful reminder that in grant proposals, as in life, the most important resource we possess are the people around us.

This is hardly a piercing insight, but it is one that Proposal Managers and organizations may forget, often with bad consequences.  There is a mountain of research demonstrating that employees are likely to stay longer at their positions, be more committed, feel more engaged, and produce good work under two circumstances:  (1) when they are matched well to their positions; and (2) when they feel respected and valued by management.

Sybil F. Stershie, president of Quality Services Marketing, tells her clients that there are three important points that organizations should learn.  “One, mission matters.  Two, the people behind the mission matter.  And three, passion for the mission can’t be taken for granted.  Once engaged doesn’t mean always engaged.”  She recommends three approaches to develop committed and satisfied employees.  I will add a fourth element and apply them to proposal development:

• Proposal teams must feel connected to the organizations that employ them.
• Proposal members must feel connected to fellow team members.
• Permanent staff and consultants must feel connected to each other.
• Proposal teams must involve young people if they want them to stay, learn, and advance in their professions.

The alternative to these four elements is a vicious cycle that begins with the inability to build successful proposal teams and ends with people leaving because they do not feel connected.  This is not a staffing problem.  It is an organizational problem.  For an interesting perspective on this issue, read “I Quit” in the latest issue of Advancing Philanthropy (Spring 2013), which inspired this blog.

Find ways to connect everybody in your grant proposal team and you are likely to produce competitive proposals.  It is that simple, and that difficult.

Everything in your proposal has to answer a simple question:  so what?  Features are an important part of proposals but they cannot answer this important question.  You need benefits to provide a compelling answer.

A feature is some aspect of your product or services.  Below are some examples:

• Operating hours from 9 AM to 5 PM.
• Ten key personnel in the first year of the contract.

In contrast, benefits are some aspect of your product or service that addresses an issue or problem of your customer.

The first step in creating benefits in a proposal is to identify the customer’s most pressing issues and needs.  Next, you must reach a common understanding among your capture and proposal teams about these issues and needs.  Why is the customer concerned about them?  What features of our products and services address these issues and needs?  And how can we make our benefits compelling and persuasive to the customer?

Then you must clearly link the features and benefits in your proposal’s text and graphics.  A great place to begin would be the Executive Summary.

Below is an example of how you would link a feature to a customer’s benefit (staff training).  This example comes from Chris Simmons’ articles and presentations on the subject of win themes in proposals.  He is the Founder and Principal of Rainmakerz Consulting, LLC, which provides proposal development services to businesses.

Bad:  Our technical approach includes automated coding software.

Marginal:  Our EZ-Code software reduces time and cost.

Better:  The intuitive graphical interface of our EZ-Code software reduces staffing training time by 75% to meet your service level agreements.

Great:  Our EZ-Code software reduces staff training time from 4 hours to 1 hour using the same graphical interface we implemented on more than five U.S. Department of Justice contracts.

Proposals are 10,000 details, and so it is understandable why they often become little more than laundry lists of features.  But features in and of themselves are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

Your end is what benefits the customer and only what benefits the customer.  It does not matter what you offer, only how you can address a customer’s issues and needs.  After all, if there were no issues and needs you would not be reading a Request for Proposals (RFP).

Focus on the benefits at the beginning of the proposal and tailor your most important features to address the customer’s issues and needs.  This will make your proposal more persuasive and more likely to be funded.

Unfortunately, today we all are drowning in clichés and platitudes, many of them patently insincere.  How many letters do you get a week from your bank or investment companies that tell you how much you are valued as a customer, and how many of these same banks and investment companies helped topple the economy in 2008 through their greed and criminal behavior?  Truly we are living in the age of insincerity.

As proposal managers, we are always under a great deal of pressure to adhere to schedules and milestones and produce outstanding proposals.  In the midst of our hectic work schedules, we often forget that our most valuable asset is our proposal team. 

We cannot treat each other as tools or cogs in a gigantic proposal wheel.  Instead, we must acknowledge what every study has demonstrated – that we all need thanks to feel appreciated and valued. 

We also know that when we acknowledge and thank a colleague, we feel better too.  Appreciation is a very pro-social kind of behavior. 

Saying thank you increases the likelihood that your colleagues will not only help you but help other people too.  Saying thank you is a form of social capital.  It helps build trust and cooperation.

Mark Goulson in a recent blog in the Harvard Business Review has provided us with a good roadmap for providing a meaningful thank you.  I will modify his suggestions and apply them to proposal development.

I encourage proposal managers and everyone on proposal teams to take these four steps to say thank you:

• The first and most important step is to be grateful for the work your colleagues are doing.  You cannot give a sincere appreciation and thank you unless it is real.  They will immediately see through any acknowledgement that is not genuine.
• Thank them for something very specific.  For example, you could say “Mary, I really appreciate that you stayed late today and helped us finish our gold team review.”
• Acknowledge the sacrifices that people are making.  “I know that you could be spending today with your kids at the playground.  I really appreciate you working this Saturday afternoon to finish our proposal.”
• Tell people what their work personally means to you.  “Mark, I couldn’t have managed this proposal without your great work as a Volume Lead.  You made this a very persuasive proposal.”

Follow this simple rule:  you cannot sincerely say thank you enough to your proposal team.  As Queequeg the Fiji harpooner says in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, “It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians.”

I have two reasons for recommending this series of inexpensive eBooks.  First, I think they provide a brief, straightforward, and helpful guide to fundraising.  And second, I am the author of the seventh and most recently published eBook in this series, Finding & Getting Federal Government Grants.

 I will focus on the two eBooks in this series that I think are most appropriate for grant proposal professionals.

 Book 6:  Grants & Grantsmanship

This handy guide by Lynn Delearie, Ph.D., is intended for nonprofit staff, board member, and volunteers to help them understand what the basic process of grantsmanship is and is not.  Her brief articles take nonprofits step-by-step through the grants development process from conceiving a grant and developing a grant to submitting competitive proposals.

 Book 7:  Finding and Getting Federal Government Grants

This book by me is intended for nonprofit staff, board member, and volunteers to help them research and become successful applicants for federal grants.  It is divided into six chapters:

• Chapter 1:  What is a Government Grant?
• Chapter 2:  Get Ready to Apply.
• Chapter 3:  Manage your Grant Proposal.
• Chapter 4:  Organize to Write.
• Chapter 5:  Write Grant Prose Persuasively.
• Chapter 6:  Use Proposal Graphics Effectively.

 For example, chapter 3 on managing a grant proposal is divided into four brief sub-chapters.  The first, “Follow Eight Core Ideas to be a Great Grants Proposal Manager!” describes the attributes of successful grant proposal managers.  The second, “How Do I Manage a Virtual Proposal Team?” describes the challenges of managing a proposal team that is not physically working together. 

 The third sub-chapter, “Don’t Let Your Grant Proposal Time Slip Away!” explains the importance of time management in grant proposal development and how to mange a grant team’s time efficiently and effectively.  The last chapter, “Get the Shipley Proposal Guide 4.0! highlights one of the best resources for grant professionals, a detailed guide to developing proposals that is really intended for companies doing commercial and government proposals.

 Especially for beginning and mid-level grant proposal professionals working in the nonprofit world, I think my Book 7:  Finding and Getting Federal Government Grants is a practical and inexpensive overview on everything from searching for federal government grants to using graphics in proposals effectively. 

 I would be happy to hear from readers of my eBook.  Have you find it helpful?

 You can purchase Jayme’s new eBook, “Finding & Getting Federal Government Grants,” at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/283382

Proposal professionals can learn how to create good work environments by looking at Fortune magazine’s the “2013 Best Companies to Work For.”  These companies vary in their size, products, and services, but they have three things on common:

• Employees trust each other in the workplace.
• Employees have pride in their work.
• Employees enjoy their colleagues.

Salaries, benefits, and perks are important, but employees also need to feel that they are appreciated.  No holiday bonus or company picnic can replace the feeling that their day-to-day work is valued and that they like working with their colleagues, whom they trust.

If your company has a good work environment for proposals, you are very fortunate indeed.  But if you believe that your work environment needs improving, short of leaving there are steps you can take to make positive changes:

• Don’t work in a “war room.”  These places are awful.  They have no privacy, no opportunities for thinking and solitude, and no opportunities to build social capital with your colleagues.  By definition, a “war room” is a demeaning and unprofessional environment.
• Find out what the best companies do to foster great work environments and copy them.
• Start small.  Make small changes at first because they are easier and may have big consequences.  
• Suggest policies to senior management that make for happier, more productive work teams.  Provide evidence to support your argument.  Expect skepticism and resistance but be quietly persistent.
• Become the change you advocate.  This is advice from Gandhi and it is still sound.  You will have no credibility if you do not model the changes you want to see in your proposal environment.
• Lead the charge – offer to help make the changes by taking a leadership role.
• Get social.  A bowling night or a pot luck lunch with a prize for the best dish will help employees build trust and friendships…as long as this carries over into the workplace.  This is foundation for making changes, not a substitute for them.

Your goal should be to create a proposal work environment where people feel appreciated, trust each other, like each other, and take pride in their work.  If you can do this, you are likely to improve the quality of your work by improving the quality of your work environment. 

We all want jobs in places where we enjoy coming to work.  Figure out how to do this in your own company to become a happier proposal professional.

You can receive these blogs automatically by clicking the Twitter button on this page!

Grant proposal professionals can learn how to create good work environments by looking at Fortune magazine’s the “2013 Best Companies to Work For.”  These companies vary in their size, products, and services, but they have three things on common:

• Employees trust each other in the workplace.
• Employees have pride in their work.
• Employees enjoy their colleagues.

Salaries, benefits, and perks are important, but nonprofit employees also need to feel that they are appreciated.  No holiday bonus or annual picnic can replace the feeling that their day-to-day work is valued and that they like working with their colleagues, whom they trust.

If your nonprofit has a good work environment for proposals, you are very fortunate indeed.  But if you believe that your work environment needs improving, short of leaving there are steps you can take to make positive changes:

• Don’t work in a “war room.”  These places are awful.  They have no privacy, no opportunities for thinking and solitude, and no opportunities to build social capital with your colleagues.  By definition, a “war room” is a demeaning and unprofessional environment.
• Find out what the best companies do to foster great work environments and copy them.
• Start small.  Make small changes at first because they are easier and may have big consequences. 
• Suggest policies to senior management that make for happier, more productive work teams.  Provide evidence to support your argument.  Expect skepticism and resistance but be quietly persistent.
• Become the change you advocate.  This is advice from Gandhi and it is still sound.  You will have no credibility if you do not model the changes you want to see in your proposal environment.
• Lead the charge – offer to help make the changes by taking a leadership role.
• Get social.  A bowling night or a pot luck lunch with a prize for the best dish will help employees build trust and friendships…as long as this carries over into the workplace.  This is foundation for making changes, not a substitute for them.

Your goal should be to create a grant proposal work environment where people feel appreciated, trust each other, like each other, and take pride in their work.  If you can do this, you are likely to improve the quality of your work by improving the quality of your work environment. 

We all want jobs in places where we enjoy coming to work.  Figure out how to do this in your own nonprofit to become a happier proposal professional.

You can purchase Jayme’s new eBook, “Finding and Getting Federal Government Grants,” at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/283382