Chapter 7
Advance Planning

By now, you should have had some time to refine your proposal ideas and explore what a number of sponsors want to fund. You should also have a more realistic view of what it will take to write the full proposal and, if funded, to implement it. In this chapter, you will do an advance planning exercise in strategic organizational communication. Whether you are working alone on the proposal or as part of a proposal development team, you will have to get buy-in from key people in your organization, either to gain authorization to write the proposal or to marshal support to gather resources and implement it. The advance planning exercise will also help you decide with whom you should collaborate within your organization and whether you should be looking for collaborators outside your organization.

Learner Outcomes

After completing this chapter, you will be able to
  1. Build support for your project idea in your organization

  2. Determine if you will have to find external collaborators

  3. Set up a proposal development team

Key Terms

Accountant—The accountant is a member of the proposal development team who is responsible for preparing the proposal budget, participates in proposal development team meetings, and uses the drafts of the proposal to determine what personnel and nonpersonnel costs will be associated with implementing it. The accountant is also well acquainted with the RFP, RFA, or program announcement and the sponsor's financial guidelines.

Advance planning—Advance planning is a strategic organizational communication process by which the key personnel for a proposed project assess what resources they have and still need, determine communication strategies for getting buy-in from the organization's management, and find collaborators inside and/or outside the organization to help with writing the proposal and implementing the project.

External collaborators—External collaborators are the people outside your organization who have committed to work with you in the proposal development process and/or project implementation.

Internal collaborators—Internal collaborators are the people within your organization who have committed to work with you in the proposal development process and/or project implementation.

Kairos—Kairos is the concept of adaptation, first stated by Gorgias, which states that speakers/writers should adapt their communication to be more effective with different audiences and in different situations.

Lead writer—The lead writer is a member of the proposal development team who spearheads the proposal development process and is responsible for integrating the comments and suggestions of the other members of the proposal writing team into a coherent document that follows the sponsor's guidelines and sounds as if it were written by one person. The lead writer produces the body of the proposal, the executive summary, the cover page, and is often the chair of the proposal development team. The lead writer is sometimes the project lead.

Organizational culture—An organizational culture is a system of shared meanings that are expressed through a number of different documents (mission, goals, strategic plans, etc.), norms, and customs‹and that function to hold a group of people together.

Organizational paradox—The organizational paradox is that people within organizations want to fulfill their own needs for autonomy, creativity, and sociability, but at the same time, they need structure and stability. The organization provides the necessary structure and stability by limiting the members' autonomy, by directing their creative activities toward ends that meet the needs of other members of the organization, and by guiding the members' interpersonal relationships.

Project lead—The project lead is a member of the proposal development team who serves as the project director or principal investigator and is responsible for implementing the project. The project lead is usually a subject matter expert who will have final decision-making authority on the design of the proposal and the implementation of the project. This person is sometimes also the lead writer.

Proposal development team—The proposal development team usually consists of three to five people who collaborate to write the proposal, and most of them are involved in implementing the project. The team generally consists of a lead writer (who may also be the project lead), an accountant, and a team secretary. It might also include some of the key personnel who would be involved in implementing the project from both inside and outside the organization.

Strategic organizational communication—Strategic organizational communication is the ability to analyze a situation, select appropriate communication strategies from a number of options, and enact those strategies effectively. This kind of communication is especially important during advance planning.

Team secretary—The team secretary is usually a principal secretary or administrative assistant who is responsible for gathering or producing all of the appendix material and visuals that will appear in the proposal, including short vitae of the key project personnel, proof of nonprofit status, information about the mission and goals of the organization, names of members of the board of directors, organizational charts, and letters of support from other organizations or stakeholders. This person is also responsible for putting the proposal package together, getting the necessary signatures, conducting a final check with the project lead or lead writer, making the required number of copies, and seeing that the proposal is mailed or sent by express mail to the sponsor in time to meet the sponsor's deadline.

Activities

Additional Example

In the chapter, Example 7.1 provided the advance planning that Elizabeth Michaels did to write a proposal for a multimedia courseware shell. The following is the actual proposal she wrote. You may want to review this proposal
  • As a sample proposal written by an individual rather than a team
  • As a complete short proposal so that you have an idea of what you will be producing
  • As a means of furthering the discussion of advance planning to see how the ideas in the advance planning exercise (in the chapter) were carried out in the proposal
Example 7.1 Proposal for a Multimedia Courseware Shell

Summary

In Chapter 7, you learned that you have to secure the cooperation of people from within your organization, and sometimes from outside your organization, to complete a proposal and implement a project. At the very least, you will need your manager's authorization to write a proposal and submit it for funding. To accomplish these tasks will mean that you will probably need release time from some of your other duties to undertake the grant seeking and proposal writing processes. If the proposal is complex and you are seeking a large sum of money, you may need to get other people to work with you on a proposal development team. Whether you have to marshal resources from within or outside your organization, you will also have to develop skills in strategic organizational communication. When you communicate strategically, you are adapting your message to the different audiences you will be addressing, and identifying arguments that are persuasive to different audiences. One of your objectives in strategic organizational communication might be to recruit people for your proposal development team; another objective might be to engage in advance planning activities to assist you either with writing a proposal or implementing a project. The advance planning exercise in this chapter is designed to complement the strategic planning exercise in Chapter 1. You are using some of the same information to develop your arguments. But now your purpose is different. Instead of gathering information to identify a project that will further your organization's strategic plan, you are now seeking authorization and support to write a proposal and to get help in implementing the project.

Writing Assignment

  1. Answer the questions posed in this chapter by completing the advance planning exercise on the following pages. Be prepared to discuss your answers with your peer group or proposal development team. If you are working with a proposal development team, you can make this a team exercise. You will find yourself using information from your strategic planning exercise from Chapter 1 in some sections of this exercise. The difference between the two is the use to which this information is being put in the advance planning exercise. Before you were gathering information about the organization's strategic plan to determine whether your proposed project would help your organization to meet some of its objectives or goals. Now you are revisiting that information to determine what kinds of arguments you can make to get organizational buy-in and approval for your project.

  2. Include a copy of this exercise in your electronic proposal development notebook or your print notebook as a reference document and a checklist for what you still have to do to gather support to write the proposal and later to implement the project. This exercise will also provide you with a record of what arguments worked with different audiences so that you will be even more effective in adapting your communication with internal and external audiences in your next proposal.

    Feel free to download Example 7.2 Advance Planning Exercise and complete it as part of your own advance planning for your project.

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