Chapter 13
Preparing the Organizational Information

Most sponsors will ask for organizational information either in the body of the proposal or in an appendix. You will want to be selective about what organizational information you include and make sure that you pick the most relevant information to demonstrate that your organization is the best one to conduct the proposed project. In this chapter, you will be engaged in an exercise to determine your organization's competitive advantages and then learn how to feature its strengths in the organizational information section. This exercise will also provide another check to make sure that you are featuring your strengths and neutralizing your weaknesses in the proposal itself. You have already gathered some information about your organization's strengths and evidence of the organization's accomplishments in the strategic planning exercise in Chapter 1. You will build on and enhance that information in this chapter.

Learner Outcomes

After completing this chapter, you will be able to

  1. Determine your competitive advantages from the perspective of the sponsor

  2. Select relevant organizational information for your proposal

  3. Complete a draft of the organizational information section of the proposal

Key Terms

Bidder's conference—A bidder's conference is a meeting sponsored by a government agency, usually held in key cities across the United States or in Washington, D.C., to which everyone interested in submitting a proposal is invited. At the bidder's conference, a representative of the agency issuing the RFP or RFA reviews its key provisions and answers questions from the audience.

Competitive advantage—Your competitive advantages are the positive differences the sponsor perceives between your organization and your competitors' organizations. Your competitive advantages uniquely qualify your organization to implement the proposed project.

Influencers—The influencers are the competitive advantages that will persuade a sponsor to fund your organization rather than someone else's. The influencers tend to increase your credibility and increase the sponsor's trust in your organization.

Rhetorical purpose—Your rhetorical purpose is to convince the sponsor that yours is the best idea or the best solution to the problem and that your organization is best qualified to implement it. Unless you achieve your rhetorical purpose, you will not achieve your instrumental purpose (getting the funding or equipment or whatever you ask of the sponsor).

Summary

In Chapter 13, you learned how gain your sponsor's trust and establish your credibility. Earlier you learned how to determine and state the instrumental purpose of your proposal. In this chapter, you concentrated on determining your rhetorical purpose and convincing sponsors that yours is the best organization to help them accomplish their objectives. In the organizational information or capabilities section of your proposal, you will want to shift perspective and present information about your organization from the perspective of meeting the sponsor's needs. To help you do just that, you learned how to determine your competitive advantages by identifying the differences between your organization and your competition. You categorized these differences into four categories: "ho-hum," "aha!," "uh-oh," and "ghost." The rhetorical strategies you use to present these differences are to feature your "aha!s," neutralize your "uh-ohs," and turn your competitors' weaknesses ("ghosts") into your strengths.

Writing Assignment

  1. Complete Exercise 13.1 and Worksheets 13.2-13.3 to ensure that you are writing your proposal from the perspective of the sponsor and to determine your competitive advantages. These exercises will lead through the entire process of determining your competitive advantages and writing the organizational information sections of the proposal.
  2. Copy the results of your exercises from this chapter into your electronic or print notebook. The following worksheets will help you do the planning and information gathering necessary to write your organizational information section for the proposal. You may want to download the worksheets for your use.

The Researching Sponsors' Priorities Worksheet 13.2, the Determining Your Competitive Advantage Exercise 13.1, and the Organizational Information Section Worksheet 13.3 can be downloaded here for your use.

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