Writing A Winning Proposal

It's impossible to give a description of how each evaluation process works; every firm and agency that evaluates proposals has its own way of doing it. But it is possible-and very useful-to explain a few things about proposal evaluation in general.

Evaluating a proposal is really a process of elimination, rather than a process of selection. That's why when you write your proposal, you ought to be focused not on writing a proposal that will be selected. Instead, you should focus on writing a proposal that cannot be eliminated!

You must be aware of this as you write your proposal. You need to write it in such a way that there is no possibility that the evaluator can toss it into the reject pile, not at the beginning of the evaluation, nor at any time during the process as the pile of "keepers" grows smaller and smaller.