What is proposal production?
Proposal production is the process associated with creating, finalizing, and printing the proposal to submit it to the government or customer. It is an important part of proposal development that helps build a cohesive, polished, and compliant submission. The key to ensuring a successful production is integration throughout the entire proposal process—Request for Proposal (RFP) release to submission.
By including the production team in the proposal process from the beginning, your team will save time and minimize potential rework. It will also result in higher quality graphics because the production team is able to be more involved, allowing them the chance to understand the effort and messaging necessary to create meaningful visuals. The production team’s role is also crucial to formatting and ensuring compliance with RFP formatting requirements, such as font style and size for both content and graphics, margins, delivery, and printing, if necessary.
What roles are included in a proposal production team?
A successful proposal production team is typically comprised of, but not limited to, the following roles:
The Production Manager works with the Proposal Manager, Proposal Coordinator, Graphic Designer, and Desktop Publisher (DTP) to stay abreast of the schedule, finalize the proposal, and oversee the final production of the proposal. The Production Manager is typically responsible for assigning team roles to ensure smooth and successful production. The Production Manager will work with the Proposal Manager to understand the production needs of the proposal.
Does the production job require formatting and graphics?
Is this an electronic/soft copy or hard copy submission?
What supplies (binders, CDs/thumb drives, tabs) are needed?
Is a quality control/book check, printing, and/or packaging needed?
The Desktop Publisher formats the text and integrates final graphics according to a template developed early in the proposal process. This template is usually a Microsoft Word writing template that ensures compliance with the RFP formatting requirements such as font style and size, margins, and spacing consistency. This will improve formatting before color team reviews and submission.
The Graphic Designer turns draft illustrations into polished graphics that meet all RFP specifications. The Graphics Designer creates a graphic template that will show the RFP requirements for graphics and tables. These requirements are usually different from the body text requirements. The graphics template will show the client’s colors (branding), font, and text. The Graphic Designer will provide conceptual graphics and replications and update accordingly.
The Editor reviews and proofreads text and graphics for spelling, grammar, consistency, clarity, style conventions, and obvious errors.
Depending on various factors, such as the size of the proposal effort, the number of available resources on your team, or team member skillsets, one person can be responsible for more than one role on a production team. If your team has limited resources, combining roles and responsibilities can be a great way to provide the same production support with fewer people or a smaller budget. Just be sure your team members have the appropriate skillsets to support multiple production roles and have the bandwidth based on the size of the proposal effort and other assignments. You can also consider outside support to meet your production needs.
The Proposal Production Process
A best practice proposal production process presents the necessary steps for an organized and successful production. When proposal development begins, whether this is pre-RFP or once the RFP is released, the Proposal Manager should engage the production team along with the rest of the proposal team members to ensure resources are available and responsibilities are assigned.
Article written by KSI
Comments