Crafting High-Quality Outlines

There is natural cognitive load for a government evaluator when the person is reviewing a company proposal. This cognitive load intensifies especially for 50+ page proposals that are dense in content. Therefore, one of the key differences between a winning or losing submission is the clarity, organization, and relevance of your RFP Volume submissions. Starting with a well composed Volume outline is the first step to creating a clear and easily understood submission. An outline serves as the backbone of your submission, ensuring that your response not only meets the evaluators' criteria but also highlights your company's unique strengths in a coherent message.

Why the Outline is Fundamental

Listed below are four principles as to why the outline is fundamental to the RFP Volume writing process. The GovSignals team uses these principles to assist our approach to the user experience inside the platform:

1. Foundation for Clarity and Relevance: Establishing a clear and relevant outline is your first opportunity to demonstrate an understanding of the RFP's requirements. It allows your team to organize a response in a manner that is both logical and directly aligned with the evaluators' expectations. A clear and relevant outline ensures that every section and subsection directly aligns to your overall proposal narrative.
2. Strategic Positioning of Strengths: Organization of the Volume outline enables a strengths-based approach to the your proposal team’s content creation strategy. By carefully planning each section, you can ensure that your capabilities and differentiators are showcased in the most impactful way, directly addressing the RFP's criteria.
3. Facilitating Team Coordination: In the Volume writing process, different team members are often responsible for various sections of the RFP. A clear outline provides the framework for clean handoffs to the various proposal writers. Therefore, from a management perspective, the goal is to make the section and subsection content requirements clear and easily understood by the proposal writers, which allows for parallelization of writing which reduces proposal development time.
4. Streamline the Content Integration Process: A clear Volume outline simplifies the integration of content from different contributors. It provides the roadmap for assembling the various pieces into a cohesive whole. Moreover, with clean and traceable content integration, the proposal manager can quickly determine the status of content creation and where the team needs help for completing various sections.

A Strategic Approach to Creating an Outline

Developing a well-structured outline for RFP Volume submissions requires a strategic mindset with a tactical approach. This process is key to ensuring clarity, relevance, and the strategic positioning of your company's strengths. Additionally, a well-crafted outline facilitates a smooth handoff to proposal writers, ensuring that the final submission is cohesive and compelling. Here's how to achieve this:

1. Analyze the RFP and Statement of Work (SOW): Begin with an analysis of the RFP and the Statement of Work (SOW). This step is critical to understanding the specific requirements, evaluation criteria, and the scope of work. Identify key themes, requirements, and any explicit and implicit instructions on proposal structure or content. Pay particular attention to areas where your company can demonstrate its unique strengths and capabilities.
2. Organize Volume Outline Headers: Based on your analysis, start organizing the Volume outline by aligning your headers with the structure requested in the proposal instructions. This ensures compliance with the RFP's format and makes it easier for evaluators to navigate your proposal. Ensure that these headers clearly represent the major sections of the RFP, such as company background, technical approach, project management plan, past performance, and so on. This organization sets the stage for a coherent narrative.
3. Develop Strategic Sub-Headers: For sub-headers, delve into the specifics of each section. Here, you have the opportunity to showcase your company's strengths and how they align with the government's requirements. Design sub-headers to address specific aspects of the RFP requirements, integrating your company's unique solutions, technologies, expertise, or approaches. This is where you can differentiate your proposal by clearly articulating how your strengths directly address the needs outlined in the RFP.
4. Standardize Flow for Evaluator Comprehension: Standardize the flow of information in your outline to make it as intuitive as possible for the government evaluators. Aim for a logical progression that naturally leads the reader from one point to the next. Avoid the pitfall of making evaluators 'jump around' the document to understand its structure. A linear and logical flow reduces cognitive load, making it easier for evaluators to grasp the full value of your proposal.
5. Integrate Clear Handoff Points for Writers: Clearly define sections and sub-sections in the outline to facilitate a clean handoff to different proposal writers. Each section should be self-contained, with clear instructions on content and the specific points to cover. This clarity helps proposal writers understand exactly what is expected in each section, ensuring consistency and coherence in the final document.
6. Review and Refinement: Once the initial outline is drafted, review it for clarity, coherence, and alignment with RFP requirements. This might involve iterating on the structure, refining headers and sub-headers, and ensuring that the flow is logical and efficient. Engage with key stakeholders during this phase to gather feedback and make necessary adjustments. Their insights can be invaluable in fine-tuning the outline.

GovSignals Approach to Outline Creation

In the GovSignals platform, we have automated the above steps to enable users to quickly create high-quality outlines for the various Volumes required in an RFP. Through recursive RFP analysis, we orchestrated the back-end of the system to find not only the headers requested in the proposal instructions, but also provide recommendations for sub-headers and supporting content.

We utilize a company’s data of past submissions, product overview sheets, brochures, whitepapers, etc. to determine the relevant strengths per identified section. We are then able to flow the structure and recommended strengths to the user per sub-section. Which provides a clear and transparent hand-off for users to start creating sub-section content.

Figure 1 below shows a snapshot of how the platform automatically organized the Volume I: Technical Approach for a specific RFP. This shows the top-level headers based on the proposal instructions.

Diving one level deeper, in Section 3.0 Management Approach sub-section, the platform recommended the structure presented in Figure 2 to help organize the content.

Overall, the GovSignals team is focused on delivering high-quality outlines for the proposal creation process. We realized that without a strong and compelling outline workflow, the proposal development process would become difficult to manage.

For a live walk-through of the GovSignals platform and to see the outline creation process in action, visit our website govsignals.ai and book a demo.