From training and hiring to work policies and procedures, Standard Operating Procedures — or SOPs — help companies stay organized, operate smoothly, and ensure that employees understand how to accomplish their assigned tasks.
But here’s one thing we’ve learned from more than a decade of working with companies of all sizes: Even though nearly all companies have some sort of SOPs in place, they don’t always have them written down.
Or if they do have them written down, it’s been years since they’ve reviewed or updated them.
In most cases, it comes down to time.
When day-to-day operations get hectic, internal projects are often the first to fall to the wayside.
And while it’s true that writing, reviewing, and updating your company’s SOPs can be time-consuming, we think it’s worth it in the long run.
Need a few reasons to make written SOPs a priority? Here are just a few benefits of having written SOPs:
1. Reduce employee training time.
Training-related SOPs help standardize orientation and training. A written set of guidelines helps ensure that all new hires get the same training, on the same topics and responsibilities, in the same amount of time. Not only will this help ensure that new employees settle in quickly, it will also help save time and money in the long term.
2. Maintain consistency across your brand.
You’ve worked hard to establish a very specific personality, look, feel, and tone for your brand. Protect that hard work by establishing a set of written branding standards. A few possible items to cover: • Use of your company’s logo, colors, and tagline • Policies for employee social media use • A style guide to ensure uniformity in written communication • Guidelines for email formatting and signatures • Rules for speaking to the media • Use of your company’s logo, colors, and tagline • Policies for employee social media use • A style guide to ensure uniformity in written communication • Guidelines for email formatting and signatures • Rules for speaking to the media
3. Reduce errors and enhance productivity.
Written SOPs can take the guesswork out of day-to-day operations and help ensure that all of your employees understand the processes, policies, and procedures associated with their jobs. And because they provide clear, written examples of what is expected from employees, SOPs are also helpful when developing employee review or development plans.
4. Meet legal requirements.
Depending on your industry, you may be required to have written SOPs that protect your employees and/or customers — and ensure that you won’t be held legally responsible if something goes wrong.
5. Establish a chain of command.
Everyone in your company should have a clear idea of your company’s leadership structure, and this is especially important in situations where work products go through multiple stages of review and approval.
6. Transfer work easily.
Most employees take a sick day here and there, but in the case of an extended absence, written SOPs make it easier to transfer work to another employee.
By outlining how a task or project should be done, you’re making sure that any employee can complete the work with a little direction.
Of course, these six benefits are only the tip of the SOP iceberg — but you can probably see where we’re going with this: Written SOPs are an indispensable part of any organization.
Your files are inventoried and you know exactly which ones you’ll migrate to your DAM solution, but there is one more thing you need to do: optimize that all-important metadata so your system will function as you need it to.
Let’s start by defining what metadata is and talk about why it’s so important to the functionality of DAM.
What is Metadata?
Metadata is what allows users to find, retrieve, edit, and share content.
Kevin Gavin, CMO at Canto.com sums it up nicely. “Metadata is information about the digital asset that makes it easy to search and filter in order to organize and manage large collections of digital assets,” he says. “Standard metadata for images, for example, include things like the date, time, and location that a photo is taken as well as the camera and resolution.”
Amy Chan, SR Product Marketing Manager at Extensis says “Metadata is the underpinning of an effective digital asset management system. Without a good process in place,” she says. “a DAM can fall short of its effectiveness.”
Most metadata fall into these 3 categories:
Administrative Metadata
This type of data helps manage your content and includes things like the date it was created, who created it, and who should have access to it.
Descriptive Metadata
Having the right descriptive metadata helps users find the content they’re looking for. Some of the descriptive data to include in this are the title of the content, the author, and keywords. A keyword is what an end user types into the system to find content. For example, by typing “DAM” into the system, the user would see content related to that subject. Gavin says a keyword list can include as few as a dozen or up to hundreds of keywords, depending on what the DAM administrator determines. Additional keywords can also be added as the system grows.
When you include metadata that shows the copyright status and licensing provisions of your content, it will identify how and where it can be used. Gavin says that digital rights management is built into DAMs and “can be tracked at the individual asset level.
What is a Metadata Schema?
A metadata schema, according to Chan, “is the framework or concept that helps organize and interpret information.
It is your structure and the list of fields (such as: date, author, name, subject, etc.) that you would like your catalogs to contain.
This helps define how people add, categorize, search, and understand assets.” In other words, a metadata schema is the structure you use to organize your metadata.
Chan recommends organizing information into 3 buckets:
Crucial information:Information you need to have about your assets. Make this a mandatory field for anyone cataloging your digital files. In an example workflow of a sports photographer for a university, crucial metadata could include: » Event » Subject » Photographer » EXIF metadata’]
Nice to have information: Data that you would prefer to have, but it’s not essential in your workflow. Following our previous example, this could include: » Full description of photo » Opposing team
Negligible information: Information that you could live without, but it does not hurt to capture. Examples: » Final score of game » Relevant keywords’]
When and How to Add Metadata to Your Files
You will have the choice of uploading your metadata as is, or editing it before you migrate to your new DAM solution.
“Some metadata is added when an image is created such as the time, location, camera, and settings of photographs and they are tied to the file,” says Gavin. “Other metadata is custom and gets added along the way.”
He believes the more metadata that is added and the earlier it’s done, the better.
But he says that metadata should always be retrieved and migrated.
“It is a judgement call if it is worth the work to go back and add metadata to old files,” he says. “The more the files are used and needed, the more important it is to have metadata so that they are more easily found when conducting a search of the metadata.”
If you’re confidant that the existing metadata is good, your DAM solution probably has the capability to automatically import it when ingesting the files.
On the other hand, if you want to change or expand the metadata, you can choose to do that before migrating or afterwards.
Once you get a clear picture of the metadata that exists on your assets, you can determine whether or not you will need to edit or add to it.
There are some widely used open source tools that help edit and manage metadata such as EXIFTool and Python. Both of these tools can be used on Windows and Mac computers.
If you would rather add the metadata using the tools on your Windows PC before uploading to a DAM, you’ll have to create an Excel spreadsheet.
In this case, you would create a spreadsheet listing all of the files, and then create columns for each metadata field you want to create. You can create as many fields as you want.
Next, you can embed some of the metadata directly into the document, or use the spreadsheet as a guide while you’re migrating the content to the new DAM.
To embed the keyword metadata directly into the Word document, follow these steps:
Use the “Save As” function.
After you’ve typed in the file name, click on “Add a tag” underneath it.
Add tags or keywords related to the file. These tags will become part of the metadata associated with the file.
If you’re adding metadata to images on a PC, use Adobe’s Bridge to help embed the data directly into the photo.
If you decide that your metadata needs editing, once it’s complete you should export all of the newly revised metadata to a .CSV file so you’ll be able to ingest the entire batch to your DAM.
Keep in mind that if you add metadata to your files on a Windows Machine, you will need to update the files one by one.
On the other hand, it’s possible to embed metadata to your files in batches if you do it while migrating to a DAM.
Once you get a clear picture of the metadata that exists on your assets, you can determine whether or not you will need to edit or add to it.
Bringing it All Together: How Preliminary Work Will help you Choose the Right DAM Solution
Doing the preliminary work will give you a better idea of what you need from a DAM solution, and that will help in the selection process.
Chan stresses that “The long-term success and adoption of a DAM starts with the foundation you put in place in the early stages.”
In other words when you take the time to define your workflow, structure, and metadata practices, you’ll ensure your DAM is set up for success.
But she says success also requires best practices be put into place after the migration as well.
“Ensuring the guidelines are clear to all users is imperative for maintaining the effectiveness of the system,” she says. “Some companies will hire a digital asset librarian to manage this foundation. At a minimum, having a person to champion this infrastructure is key.”
If you’re thinking about migrating to a digital asset management (DAM) system, you likely have one key goal: to centralize your content so that it’s more easily retrieved, edited, and shared. And DAM is the ideal solution for many organizations.
But before you migrate, it pays to do some preliminary work so that your content is ready to be transferred.
We’ll talk about how to do that in this 2-part series, but first, let’s address some basic issues.
What is a Digital Asset Management System?
You likely use a primitive form of DAM right now, even in your personal life.
For instance if you organize your files into folders, you are centralizing them in a way that makes sense to you.
That way, when you need to find a document, you have a hierarchy of file folders that you can sift through to retrieve the desired file.
A DAM works much the same way, but instead of the system making sense to only the creator, it works across an entire organization.
Its core competency is to centralize all digital assets, and then make it easy for employees, partners, or other authorized users to find, edit, use and share the content.
Some types of content stored on a DAM system are:
Digital documents
Images
Videos
Audio files
PDFs
Removable media on flash drives, CDs and DVDs
Digitized analog media such as slides, prints, and negatives
What are the Benefits of DAM?
To make the best use of digital assets, they must be properly structured in order to increase organizational efficiency.
A DAM system does that in 4 main ways:
By organizing documents into pre-defined classifications, millions of pages can be corralled into a system that makes sense to everyone who uses it.
User governance. Not all content is meant to be public, and DAM can help restrict access to sensitive assets.
Audits. It helps to know when a document was last updated, edited, or used and DAM systems keep detailed records.
Through the use of unique metadata, which we cover in-depth in part 2 of this series, end users can easily retrieve the assets they need.
How to Find Your Existing Data
The first step in preparing your data is to locate all of the assets you currently own.
According to Kevin Gavin, CMO at Canto.com, it’s common for digital assets to be scattered across a lot of storage platforms like Google Drive, Dropbox, SharePoint, and other file storage systems.
“Our customers usually start with the content owners who already know where they are storing various assets and ask them to provide an inventory of digital assets to be centralized in the DAM,” he says.
Amy Chan, SR Product Marketing Manager at Extensis agrees that identifying the key stakeholders and asking them to deliver the assets that need to be cataloged is the best way to accomplish the task, but she doesn’t believe it needs to be done in one step.
“This can happen in multiple stages,” she says, “with the first focused on the primary assets the organization wants to include in the DAM.” She notes that with Portfolio, her company’s DAM solution, additional assets can be identified and added at a later time.
Some of the types of stakeholders that may own content in your organization are:
Marketing team leaders
Creative team leaders
Visual and audio specialists
Content creators
Customers
Distributors
Vendors
Customer service representatives
Social media campaign managers
Sales representatives
IT department members
Deciding Which Content to Migrate and What to Leave Behind
Once you have an inventory of all the digital assets, it’s time to determine what you will migrate and which files you will delete or archive.
For example, some content will be outdated, no longer used, or duplicated.
Gavin says the best approach to deciding what should stay and what should go is: “If in doubt, centralize it in the DAM.” He says that the cost of storing the files is relatively small unless you’re storing high-resolution video files, so best practice is to centralize the storage of all digital assets in the DAM.
“Once they are centralized, then you can run reports and see which assets are being used and which ones are not. Those that are not being used are candidates for deletion or for transfer to archive storage.”
Chan has a different approach.
She suggests first defining the goals of the DAM, and then having all stakeholders agree to them.
“This can be based on the greatest challenges the organization is facing with their digital assets,” she says.
For example, if out-of-date or unapproved assets are being used, identifying those assets and archiving them should be the driving factor in deciding which content to migrate.
The Next Step: Adding Metadata
Now that you’ve located your content, organized it, and deleted any duplicates, it’s time to add metadata to it so end users will be able to find it easily.
This is a big topic so we’ll cover it in part two of this series.
Your company’s hiring manager has a great human-interest story about a group of employees who donated vacation days to help out a sick co-worker. She shared the story in an email the people in her department — but the story never found its way to the company’s social media director. Nobody outside of the HR office heard about it.
An engineer from your company just presented an award-winning whitepaper at a global conference. Your clients would benefit a lot from the information, and it could even be re-purposed into a great editorial for an industry publication. There’s one problem, though: The paper hasn’t found its way to the marketing team.
Your company’s VP of marketing creates a beautiful, informative new brochure — but half of the company doesn’t know it exists. The sales department starts writing a totally new brochure. The CEO starts writing another one. None of the new brochures look or sound alike.
We could go on — but you probably see where we’re going with this: communication gaps lead to missed opportunities, duplicated work, and wasted time and resources. This happens with all sizes of companies, in every industry. Everyone assumes that they’re communicating and sharing, but they’re often unaware of what’s going on in other departments.
But how do you close those gaps? How do you ensure that your company’s departments are communicating and sharing information?
Here are a few strategies to help you improve communication across all of your company’s teams and departments:
1. Establish a point person/content manager to keep track of all content, across all departments. This person should be responsible for keeping up with everything from digital and print ads to whitepapers and editorial content to internal newsletters.
2. Invest in digital asset management software. If you need a starting point, check out the solutions provided by Widen Collective, Brandfolder, and Libris. All three solutions have high customer satisfaction ratings and are designed to be user-friendly. Widen’s VP of Marketing Jake Athey cites Widen’s depth of design, highly integrated platform, and responsive service. Brandfolder incorporates a “visually elegant UI” and a “unique twist on folder hierarchy,” according to Product Marketing Manager Laura Hamel.
On a budget? You can even use free cloud storage options like Google Drive. Whatever you choose, make sure that you organize your content in a way that that makes sense and is easy to search/browse.
3. Spread the word. Once you’ve got a point person and a cloud-based library in place, it’s time to let everyone know about it. Use email, intranet, and/or your company’s internal social media accounts. Include important information like the name and contact information for your new content manager and login info for your storage system.
4. Establish a “communicate before creating content” policy. Encourage everyone to check in with your content management point person before starting a new project. A simple Skype message like, “Hey I need X type of content”, or “Do we have a brochure about X?” should help cut down on duplicate work. You could also use your company’s intranet to share and exchange quick updates about the content you need, the content you have, and share any other useful information.
5. Consider project management software.
If your company creates a lot of content, a project tracking tool might be a good investment. Tweet this
Project management software allows real-time collaboration, and it helps ensure that everyone is on the same page. Web-based project management tools such as Asana, Wrike, Basecamp, or Trello) are ideal for workforces that are dispersed across geographic regions. To learn more, read reviews, and compare platforms, g2crowd.com is a handy resource.
6. Have monthly or quarterly and check-in calls. Your content manager should conduct regularly scheduled calls with key people from each department to ensure that everyone is in the loop about new or updated content.
7. Keep your content up to date. It’s important to review your content library periodically. This will give you a good opportunity to update, discard, and revise your content as needed.
What makes you want to open your morning news source? A shrieking headline?
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels
A New York Times Morning Briefing text every five minutes on your IPhone?
The latest from your local journal?
Answer: you open, turn on, watch, or buy the news because you’re looking for something that peaks your interest. Maybe even something you can’t afford to miss.
That’s what you’re going to offer on your intranet.
And although you can’t use screaming headlines to lure people to your homepage, you can offer plenty of legitimate content-bling, more than enough to make everyone from the CEO to the stock boy want to check in at least once a day.
On an intranet, content is the star of the show. No question that the co-star is superb engineering. Without it, content is nothing.
And great graphics improve the experience exponentially. But content is what keeps the crowd coming.
That’s why decisions about what content, how often it will appear, how much space it will be given are made long before the site goes live. And knowing what your audience wants and needs will help your intranet team make some of those decisions.
an Employee Directory—profiles with photographs and some personal information—for ease of contacting one another
a file repository that provides a powerful search function for content, allowing people to access information more readily
HR forms that can be filled out online
real-time activity feeds that permit commenting and empower employees to share what they are doing. This also provides a venue for thanking colleagues who went above and beyond in helping out.
interactive tools that keep employees engaged such as surveys, feedback forums, or wikis.
Other interactive features can include threaded discussions, Q & A forums, competitions, and micro blogs.
Entire intranet sections are sometimes set aside for
training and educational opportunities
executive communications
document libraries
teams
corporate news
Intranet content is as diverse as the companies and organizations that host them. The more networking you do, the more you’ll find out what unique features and devices other intranet teams have created.
Writing for Your Intranet
Okay, putting some of the above features onto your intranet will only involve transferring digital data. But some will involve actual writing.
And you and your Intranet team probably don’t have staff writers.
You have busy HR professionals, trainers, accountants, and coders. Perhaps you even have mechanics, pastry chefs and airline pilots.
And you are asking them to produce a regular amount of intranet copy in a lively consistent style.
Hmmmm. Big ask. Other than offering fresh cookie rewards, these ideas may help:
Encourage your writers to stick to a few basic rules of style (punctuation and usage) to give the site some consistency. A good resource is the AP Style Guide.
Subscribe to the shorter-is-better concept: shorter words, shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs. (Note: Not necessarily shorter content.)
Don’t write for your college professor. Write for a fifth-grader. Microsoft Word helps you do that; see The Writers for Hire blog titled ‘Word Tip of the Week: Using the Readability Feature.’
Cut back on the adjectives and other descriptives in general, unless you’re sharing your trip to Botswana.
Don’t ramble on. Before you start writing, ask yourself, “What am I trying to say here?” And then, just say it. Keep it simple.
Let your personality shine through! Presumably, you are not required to be anonymous.
Use plenty of graphics.
Update! Update! Update! Keep your particular task area fresh. Don’t let readers see the same thing week after week. I know you can think of something new to say!
Make it relevant! Irrelevant content was the No.1 gripe among Intranet Haters polled in 2017. Keep it real!
A word to administrators. Producing good content, whether it’s writing, editing, proofing, or updating, is time consuming.
So, a strategy for accommodating employees tasked with this new responsibility—post launch—must be developed.
Success for the shiny, new intranet means giving writers adequate time to attend to their new intranet duties, be it researching, writing, editing or updating.
Image by Pixabay
If your stable of newly christened writers are a little wobbly, help is at hand.
First of all, be sure they have the technical skills needed to upload copy.
Next, schedule a half-day writer’s workshop, presented by a professional writer.
Offer one-one-one training from a professional who can help inexperienced writers organize materials and produce copy more easily.
Create easy-to-use templates with goals for each piece and instructions on types of information required for each content area.
Set doable deadlines that are agreed to by the subject matter experts (SMEs), and give SMEs a reason to meet those deadlines. Tying content to a real time event – even if it’s just a weekly announcement giving kudos or mini-awards to contributing authors, can help encourage your SMEs to push through to the finish line.
The Graphics: How Your Site Looks
Think of your intranet visuals as the cover on the book, the headlines above the fold, the landscaping in your front yard, the façade of a retail store.
The exterior is not where the real stuff is, but it does invite you in.
And even more important, like Ikea’s endless aisles, if the exterior is enticing, it might just lure you deeper into the interior!
“Don’t spend all the time and effort planning out your intranet and coming up with content strategy just to stumble because it doesn’t look pretty,” advises Carlos Ruiz, Phase2 Account Director. He warns that sometimes out-of-the-box solutions lack the ‘wow’ factor companies are looking for.
But beyond simple esthetics, the visual appeal of your intranet can be extremely important when it comes to building a lasting relationship your users.
Think of the many Websites you’ve been exposed to.
Each site is meant to influence a visitor’s psychological state of mind as well as impart information.
Designers will tell you that’s because the colors, the lines, the slant of the curves, the movement of the eye either to the left or the right, or up or down, are all calculated to please a particular audience.
It’s no different with a company intranet.
It sends a visual message about who you are as a corporate entity and it adds to the value of your corporate brand.
Equally important, good graphic design increases the usability of a site, helping to keep navigation simple,
No doubt when you’re in the planning stages, you’d like to take a look at other intranets to get a feeling for visuals that appeals to you.
But unlike print materials, and Websites, you can’t view intranets and say, “Hey, I like the visual feeling of that one.”
Intranets are, by nature, private.
However, you can catch a glimpse of other intranets by ordering The Neilson Norman Group’s Intranet Design Annual: 2018.
This 463-page report has detailed information about its ten prize-winners for the year including 155 full-color screenshots of before-and-after designs, which are usually protected behind the organization’s firewall.
In Conclusion
Think about it.
When it’s done, your intranet site will be an amazing communications channel with usability and features that would have been impossible even a few years ago.
Serving multiple objectives and reaching a broad audience, its many features will function in a variety of ways that that owe their existence to constantly improving technology.
At the very least, your intranet will be easy to use, pleasant to look at, make work faster for your employees, give them a greater sense of engagement, and a greater voice in the company as a whole.
When starting a project with a writer – be it a book brochure, website or whitepaper – it’s common to focus on the end goal. How will it read when it’s done?
Less focused on, but equally important, are the mechanics of creating the document.
That is, a smooth journey from blank page to finished manuscript, can not only directly impact the quality of the final product, it can mean the difference between a fun and positive experience and a tortuous and inefficient disaster.
So how does one ensure this smooth journey?
Turns out, when working with a writer, there is no “one size fits all”.
Some writing teams use outlines and project management systems. Others rely on meetings, or texts, or campaign briefs, or process maps.
But do these tools work for you?
It’s not unreasonable to ask your writer or writing team to adjust their process to fit your style of working.
But before you start giving them pointers on their writing process, you may want to walk through this quick exercise to determine…
What type of learner are you?
Turns out, understanding your individual learning style can go a long way towards picking the right tools for getting your writing job successfully to the finish line.
Mariaemma Willis is an expert on learning styles. Based in California at Reflective Educational Perspectives, Mariaemma is often called upon to help companies, students, and juries learn how to exchange information.
Mariemma advises, “Each person will bring their own style of writing and writing management to a project – but using your learning style to set expectations as the project manager – you can set best practices that work specifically for you. Use those traits to find the best way to communicate what you need to have a successful end product.”
Preparing the team
Besides the obvious (disseminating relative project information), take the time to discuss process during your initial kick-off meeting.
Mariaemma suggests reviewing past projects for guidance. Ask the contract team for similar project briefs, examples of prior work, and outlines/roadmaps. Asking for this information will help shed light on the way projects were executed in the past.
Take this as an opportunity to set YOUR expectations and tweak the process to fit your communication style.
Be proactive about telling your writers how you work best:
How much time do you have to allocate to communicating about the project?
Will you be available on a weekly basis?
What means of communication do you prefer? Written or verbal?
If you like written communication, do you want longer emails with tons of detail or shorter more concise updates?
If you prefer verbal, do you like to talk organically about goals? Or, do you have a short, concise list to guide you?
When providing feedback on the project, how do you want to communicate draft changes and comments? Email? Phone?
You may also want to mention specific communication tools that work well for you.
Not sure what to suggest? Knowing if you are an auditory, visual or kinesthetic learner can give you a clue.
Three Types of Learners
Auditory
Let’s start with Auditory.
Auditory Learners have a preference for transferring information via listening. Either to the spoken word itself, conversations, sound or noises.
An Auditory Learner uses phrases such as “tell me” and “let’s talk it over.”
These are people who can remember all the words to songs that they hear. They’ll also be able to perform a task after listening to an expert.
This group pays attention to detail and likes to be in the thick of things.
If you’re reading this and thinking this sounds familiar, then the following information might help.
Encourage lots of verbal Q&A. You learn best by talking things out. Rather than asking questions in an email or providing feedback on a Word document, get on the phone with your writing team and talk through any questions, concerns, or corrections you’d like to make to your draft.
Talk through project scope and timeline. Detailed project calendars, timelines, and flowcharts can seem overwhelming if you’re more of a “let’s talk” type. Make sure that you discuss all of the goals, objectives, and steps of the project with your writing team. You learn by hearing and speaking, so all of those dates and deadlines will seem more “real” once you’ve talked them over.
Steer clear of outlines for written content. If you’re like most auditory learners, you’d rather run a mile through Death Valley than sit down and read a bullet-pointed outline of your next whitepaper, web page, or annual report. To you, planning and organizing happens best during a face-to-face meeting, phone call, or Skype session. Set up calls with your writing team. Verbally confirm that you’re on the same page, about what you’ve seen so far, and give them the green light to start writing a draft.
Set up a standing weekly call. Regular communication is a must for any large project — but you have zero interest in wading through “update” emails from your writing team. Here’s an auditory-learner alternative: Pick a time that works for everyone and schedule a 30-minute standing weekly “check-in” call. This is a win-win for everyone: You don’t have to sift through a massive amount of emails, your team has a guaranteed time to ask questions, keep you updated, and bring up potential roadblocks. Everyone will hear the information and stay on the same page.
Visual Learners
Visual Learners tend to be the opposite of Auditory.
Visual Learners have a preference for seen or observed things, including pictures, diagrams, demonstrations, displays, handouts, films, flip-chart, etc.
They use phrases such as “show me,” and “let’s have a look at that.”
These are people who will work well with either reading instructions or watching someone else perform the exercise first.
At the same time, Visual Learners don’t want to be bogged down with lengthy wordy emails where the main point is hard to decipher.
They’re also not fans of long meetings where the goal or point is lost.
If this resonates with you, then you might find these tips helpful.
Ask for examples. Visual Learners as stated like to be “shown” ideas. Ask your writer for an example of previous written pieces to use as a catalyst for conversation. Take a look at the way the draft was written. If you see something that doesn’t work or might be a method that you don’t like – point it out on the initial calls.
Carve out time for a longer kick-off meeting. When you have your kick-off meeting with the contract team, carve out a minimum of an hour or more for an initial in-depth discussion. The preference would be a face-to-face meeting in this category, but when this is not possible, an extended phone meeting might do the trick. If the phone doesn’t work for you, and you need to have a more visual experience, try Skype or an online meeting site (think GoToMeeting) to make up for the lack of a visual connection.
Use call agendas. Talk with your colleagues and put together a list of questions you’d like to have answered by the contract team when going into the kickoff meeting. You have certain things you’d like accomplished during the meeting and would prefer to keep it high-level. The drafted questions will serve as a guide, and be a visual cue to what needs to be accomplished with the scheduled time.
Ask for process maps and at-a-glance schedules. During the meeting, ask for a roadmap or a chart of the project plan. Take into consideration the way you review written information, and create a timeline that includes highlighted keywords or color-coded cues for essential items.
Pick the progress report that works best foryou. Progress reports on a weekly basis work better for you when they are typed out. Seeing is believing, and processing information in this manner allows you to take in what’s said. Also, don’t hesitate to ask for these notes to be to the point and short. An example would be asking for a report that highlights three items for the week – and have the contractor recap any of the three accomplishments, roadblocks, or action items that are the most important to the project. A short, brief, note will provide a quicker review and revision cycle with your contract team.
Suppress the urge to write commentary. Do you feel like your writer missed the mark? It’s ok to write up your comments, but keep in mind that you’re prone not to provide a lot of detail in written feedback. This can be confusing to your writer if you are trying to convey a lot of complicated concepts at once. Pick up the phone and give your writer a call. It’s not your preference to chat for long stints of time. But, carve out 15 minutes to go over initial drafts and give feedback. The chat will prove valuable to your writer, and get them back on the right track.
Tactile/Kinesthetic
And finally, there is the Tactile/Kinesthetic Learner.
Tactile/Kinesthetic Learners are DOERS, and have been known to have a lot of energy.
Hands on experience and real-life activities help these learners remember.
A Kinesthetic Learner will use phrases like, “let me try” or “how do you feel?” and will be able to perform a task by just trying it out.
Think about someone who likes to experiment with a recipe before reading the book. No measurements or suggestions for them. They love for learning to be as experiential as possible.
Is this you? Here’s some tips that might help:
Pick the best project management tool. The Kinesthetic/Tactile group is another group where an in-person meeting would probably be preferred, but when meeting in-person, you might lose interest. You prefer to see what you’re doing and jump in to correct things. Try Google Docs to connect if possible, and to manage the project. Google Docs is a living, breathing, version of the document and will allow you to make edits real time. You’ll be able to be apart of the process and as hands-on as needed.
Express your vision. Visualization is another strong asset for Kinesthetic/Tactile Learners. Though visualization is normally an internal exercise for you as a person, you can share your vision by drafting a list of what you’d like to see in the document or what you hope to accomplish. Share this with your team, and explain the thought process behind it.
Come with examples. Another exercise to “visualize” the project is to show examples or writing samples of projects you like. Don’t just rely on your writer for examples: come armed with your own. You’ve got ideas about what you’d like to see written, and without psychic abilities, your team won’t be sure how to retrieve them. So show examples of what you’d like to see, explain the steps involved, and why it worked for you in the past.
Take action, and keep up with progress. Recaps or progress reports for the Kinesthetic/Tactile learner work best when you can take action. Think physically acting things out. You might prefer setting a 15-minute time each week to go down the list with the group, and physically cross items off. Or, you can combine an activity with your review and recap sessions of written pieces. Kinesthetic learners like being physical – studies have shown that combining a physical activity such as jogging on a treadmill or jumping on the elliptical fulfill the need to act out while reviewing. It might help you dig deeper and concentrate to really focus on what’s been accomplished and what still needs to be done.
Not everyone will fit into a neat category when it comes to using your learning style.
And, there is no simple answer on how best to tackle a writing project.
Your own personality traits will also play into a learning style and can impact your interaction with your writing team. But, using how you learn and work as a guide to communicating the vision for your project is a significant initial step in the right direction.
Before your team meets, distribute the RFP to all members. Instruct them to read it from cover to cover and come to the meeting with questions. After all, you’re not the only one who should be preparing.
2. Choose the proposal management software
If the proposal is extensive and/or requires many different hands, you’ll want to consider software to help you manage the process.
Your company may already use a certain project management program.
But be aware that there are software applications designed specifically for answering RFPs.
Capterra, a website with the byline “The Smart Way to Find Business Software” has compiled a list called Top Proposal Management Software Products. It includes the names, reviews (when available), and links to the websites for 95 web-based and installed applications.
The list offers the capability filter your choices and select and compare products.
You will likely not have the time to weigh all these choices before your kickoff, but keep in mind that there are many tools available to help you.
It would be well worth your time to research these options before an RFP crosses your desk if your company is considering bidding on any proposals in the future
3. Decide how the various sections and related documents will be reviewed
Will you simply email drafts and versions to your team?
If the proposal is small enough, this might be sufficient.
But for complex projects, consider document management software such as SharePoint® or a repository such as Google Docs where contributors can add and review content.
Of the 95 proposal management software products listed on Capterra, 42 include a content repository and document management.
4. Go through the RFP again
Make a list of every project deliverable.
Outline the terms used in the RFP that may need clarification with your team.
The RFP may have a glossary of terms, but there may be other jargon in the RFP that is unique to its issuer.
5. Create a spreadsheet that lists every deliverable in the RFP
Even if you have RFP project management software, the experts we consulted still recommend a good old-fashioned master spreadsheet.
A spreadsheet offers an at-a-glance overview of what you’ll need to produce and shows team members the status of each action item.
Plus, even the most tech-averse on your team will usually be comfortable with spreadsheets.
“Include columns where a name or names will be placed beside every deliverable,” says Carey Miller, a professional writer who has project managed dozens of RFPs. “Add column heads for project milestones, due dates, and reviewers for the initial drafts as well as reviewers for the final package.”
Please feel free to use our spreadsheet template to get you started.
Conducting the Kick-Off Meeting
Your team members must be absolutely clear about their roles, deliverables, and deadlines when they leave the first meeting.
It’s also critical that you cover certain rules of the game, so they’ll understand the company’s RFP process and some best practices in proposal writing.
Cover the topics that follow for a successful meeting.
1. Address the team members' questions about the RFP
When you circulated the RFP, you asked that team members come prepared with their questions about the RFP.
Address those questions up front so that they’re not interfering with people’s concentration during the other meeting topics.
2. Assign team members their roles
As each team member is assigned a role, clarify the responsibilities associated with that role.
3. Place a name or names in the column besides each deliverable
Go over the spreadsheet, one deliverable at a time. Determine whether the Subject Matter Expert (SME) will write it or if someone else will write the section using information provided by the SME.
Miller notes that the writer should be clear about the point person for information: “With an unusually complex proposal, there may be several point persons for various sections.”
4. Establish the reviewer for each section
The reviewer’s name may appear in multiple rows, depending on how many deliverables are in a section and how many sections that reviewer is qualified to review.
Hewitt stresses, “Designate reviewer(s) for the various sections and the reviewers for the packaged proposal.
The drafts can be reviewed by multiple SMEs; the finished package should be reviewed by only a small set of key players.”
5. Establish a timeline
In Winning Library Grants, A Game Plan, Herbert B. Landau writes, “To ensure that the deadline will be met, I start with the proposal delivery date and work backwards to the present.” \
Build in a pad in case something unexpected results in a project slowdown.
Landau also suggests, “To allow for all contingencies, set the date to have the complete proposal, including all forms, the narrative, the budget, and all attachments, at least four days before the day the proposal must be submitted.”
Include each of the following milestones in your timeline:
The completion date for the initial draft of each section or part thereof (according to the list of deliverables)
The completion date for the initial review by one or more SMEs
The completion date for incorporating the requested changes into the initial draft
The completion dates for any additional review cycles
The required submission date for the budget numbers and any attachments
The completion date of the draft of the packaged proposal
The completion date of the package review
The completion date for incorporating review revisions
The completion date of the final proofreading (ideally set at four or more days before proposal delivery)
Tip: Build in as much time as possible for the proposal writer to organize and format the information, write the executive summary and conclusion, ensure that everything in the RFP has been addressed, incorporate the required dollar amounts, and ensure that the proposal reads as though one person wrote it. If there is a particularly tight deadline for proposal submission, consider insisting on very tight deadlines for reviews.
6. Distribute and discuss your list of terms in the RFP and their definitions as they apply to the contract
This will ensure that, in echoing the lingo of the RFP, the terms will be accurately and consistently applied by your team.
7. Explain how documents will be reviewed and progress tracked
As the leader of this meeting you should have a clear idea from your pre-meeting planning as to how these processes will flow.
8. Discuss lessons learned
Consider including a brief review of lessons learned by previous proposal teams.
You may have conducted lessons-learned reviews following other proposals, but, depending on how long it’s been or whether there are members who didn’t participate on those teams, it may be helpful to review a few of them now.
CONGRATULATIONS!
You have successfully put the proposal process in motion.
You have scrutinized and absorbed the RFP, captured the requirements, consulted various key players, anticipated and worked through potential roadblocks, made critical project management decisions, initiated a team, and put the team in motion.
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What’s the most important part of an email message? Hint: It’s not the body copy.
In fact, it’s the subject line. Subject lines are important because of one simple reason: If they don’t compel your reader to actually click and open then email, then your email marketing campaign has failed.
Nowadays it seems like everyone’s inboxes are bursting at the seams – I get emails from my salon, my friends, my boss, any online store I’ve ever bought from, my university’s alumni association, etc., etc., etc.
So your email marketing campaign has some stiff competition: You’re competing against all of your target audience’s other emails for attention. The email marketing moguls, Constant Contact, say that you have exactly three seconds to grab someone’s attention: one second as they read the “From” line, and two seconds spent reading the “Subject” line.
That’s not a lot of time to catch someone’s eye. So first, let’s examine some of the finer points of what makes a good subject line. An attention-grabbing subject line:
• Is concise (the experts say to keep it around 30 to 40 characters, or 5-8 words)
• Creates a sense of urgency, a reason why people should open it right now: trigger words like “Today” or “Limited” can create that urgency
• Uses numbers to grab attention, like “Top 5 Ways to Save Money on Bank Fees”
• Are personal, using words like “our,” “your,” and “we”
• Is motivating and energetic: consider the difference between saying “OK Books Newsletter” and “$5 Off Any Purchase – Donate to our March Book Drive”
Now, there are a few telltale signs of very bad subject lines: These subject lines never even make it into an inbox because they’re picked up by the spam filter. Some of the most common spam filter triggers to be avoided in subject lines at all times are:
• Words like “Sale,” “Free,” and “Advertisement”
• stra!nge@ punctuation or ALL CAPS
”
It’s not always easy to be interesting and cool and catchy and informative in such a short amount of space – especially when you know your reader only has 3 seconds to read the subject line. That’s why Constant Contact says to make the first 2 words of your subject line the most important. All of your creative effort should be focused mainly on those two words – and then it should draw your reader through the rest of the subject line.
For instance, say the first two words of your subject line are “Cooking Tips.” That’s not especially engaging, and I didn’t even bother to read the rest of your subject line. But imagine if the first words are “Tonight: Easy” – that’s already more interesting, so I might go along with the rest of the subject line – “Tonight: Easy Meals For Two Under $10.”
I might caution against expecting to get every email subject line correct every time. Throughout your email marketing campaign, you should take note of your subject lines and compare them with the open rates. It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.
