Posted by Jon
I have a new favourite website: anyone else come across Wordle? Here, for example, is a pictorial illustration of our posts at The Proposal Guys over the past (nearly) three years:
I have a new favourite website: anyone else come across Wordle? Here, for example, is a pictorial illustration of our posts at The Proposal Guys over the past (nearly) three years:
That’s rather fun. But let’s play with the proposal-specific applications here. Here’s a Wordle of the content of an RFP that I wrote back in my purchasing days (with a few words taken out to protect confidentiality):
See how easy it would be to drop your customer’s requirements document into this, and get a view of their pet phrases and key issues?
And, of course, it’s great for reviewing your draft proposals. At a glance, you can see whether you’re talking more about your own organisation than the customer; you can see whether your key themes are coming through strongly; you can compare the language used in different sections of your proposal; you can see how your language matches the map you made earlier of the customer’s RFP.
It does get rather addictive – especially since you can play with colour palettes, layout, text orientation and suchlike. Here’s a final picture – showing the words in the APMP accreditation syllabus. This one taught me that a little “playing around” is sometimes needed – for example, the phrase ‘the candidate should’ appears in almost every line of the APMP document, and it contains numerous codes, so I deleted these before creating the picture. It suggests that the most important things are that we understand the management and development of a proposal for a customer – pretty much spot on, I think, although I wish the word “winning” was more prominent!
And, of course, it’s great for reviewing your draft proposals. At a glance, you can see whether you’re talking more about your own organisation than the customer; you can see whether your key themes are coming through strongly; you can compare the language used in different sections of your proposal; you can see how your language matches the map you made earlier of the customer’s RFP.
It does get rather addictive – especially since you can play with colour palettes, layout, text orientation and suchlike. Here’s a final picture – showing the words in the APMP accreditation syllabus. This one taught me that a little “playing around” is sometimes needed – for example, the phrase ‘the candidate should’ appears in almost every line of the APMP document, and it contains numerous codes, so I deleted these before creating the picture. It suggests that the most important things are that we understand the management and development of a proposal for a customer – pretty much spot on, I think, although I wish the word “winning” was more prominent!
You can create you own Wordles by going here. Have fun!
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