Proposal: What It Is and What It Does

Main purpose: to convince your boss, the accounting dept., the government or a private foundation that:

1) Either problem or opportunity exists

2) That problem or opportunity is worth solving or pursuing

3) You can likely solve the problem or return a profit if they help you

4) They should pay you to research solutions to the problem.

Entire academic, governmental and even private organizations are funded based solely on the basis of winning funding through grant or funding proposals.

Formatting:

1) The format forces you to cover all the necessary bases; by filling in the blanks, you necessarily produce a complete document. This has four results:

       a) It is easy to write quickly

b) It is easy to read or skim quickly

c) It is hard to fake. It is easy to see if the writer’s is full of crap or actually knows what he/she is claiming. It reveals whether you know what you’re talking about or not, whether or not resources exist to get you necessary information, whether you will actually be able to produce the report you hope to.

2) These four results produce the following related outcomes:

a) It is redundant; the document repeats itself. That’s ok.

b) It is boring to write. It ain’t art; it’s a tool to get the money and freedom to research something valuable to you.

c) It is boring to read. Even that’s ok; whoever reads is getting paid to read it.

3) Spending time writing a decent proposal greatly simplifies and saves time writing the report.

       a) It forces you to do your research early.

       b) It forces you to clearly define the scope of your research.

       c) It forces you to outline your report, so researching becomes a matter of filling in the outline.