Articles / Using an AI Writing Tool to Speed Up Your Proposal Writing /

At the time of this writing, ChatGPT by OpenAI is probably the most well known and one of the most powerful apps, but there are also many others on the market today with every major player scrambling to release one. Each has its strengths and weaknesses.

All these programs require human prompts to begin any sort of writing effort, and they can only generate text that is as good as the prompts they are given and the data they are trained on. The results they create will typically be generic. Only you know the details of the project you are proposing and understand the needs and interests of the audience that you are pitching the project to. No AI app has the knowledge or experience that you do.

However, these programs can be used along with Proposal Kit to jump-start your writing project. Following is an example that demonstrates how you can quickly create an outline for your proposal.

Using ChatGPT, we entered the following prompt:

“How to write a proposal outline for what to talk about for an eco-friendly sustainable water treatment plant in a remote village in Africa”.

In seconds, ChatGPT generated the following outline:

1) Introduction: Provide background information on the current water situation in the target village and explain the need for an eco-friendly sustainable water treatment plant.

2) Problem Statement: Clearly define the problem and explain how it affects the community. Discuss the limitations of existing solutions and explain why a new approach is needed.

3) Proposed Solution: Describe the proposed eco-friendly sustainable water treatment plant, including its design, technologies, and methods used for treatment. Explain how it addresses the problem and its expected impact on the community.

4) Implementation Plan: Outline the steps required to implement the proposed solution, including timelines, resources, and partnerships. Include a detailed budget and funding plan.

5) Monitoring and Evaluation: Describe how the success of the project will be measured and monitored, including performance indicators, data collection methods, and evaluation criteria.

6) Conclusions: Summarize the proposal and its potential impact on the community, and reiterate the importance of the proposed solution to addressing the problem.

So, the outline of chapters we can then match that to in Proposal Kit for creating the proposal template would be:

Cover Letter, Title Page, Table of Contents, Introduction, Present Situation, Needs Assessment, Problem Statement, Solutions, Facilities, Design, Technology, Project Methods, Eco-Friendly, Impact Statement, Implementation Plan, Time Line, Resources, Partnerships, Budget, Funding Plan, Monitoring, Evaluation, Conclusions, Recommendations, Back Page.

How we turned the ChatGPT output for its recommended outline into a concrete list of Proposal Kit chapters was to:

A) Add the common Proposal Kit chapters like Cover Letter, Title Page, Table of Contents and the final Back Page.

B) Add the major topics from the ChatGPT outline: Introduction, Problem Statement, Proposed Solution, Implementation Plan, Monitoring, Evaluation, Conclusion.

C) Then flesh out those major headers with Proposal Kit chapters picked out from the buzzwords within the ChatGPT sentences.

At this point the Proposal Pack Wizard software can build a complete template as an editable Word document that you can fill in for this kind of proposal. We are only using ChatGPT here for its rapid research capability to help us create our document in just a few minutes. We are not going to rely on ChatGPT to write any of the actual content as that will be very specific to the company creating the solution and the needs of the specific community.

Another example shows where the chatbot falls down a bit. This could be due to the prompting not being descriptive enough or just that the AI isn’t trained well enough yet. The first can be solved on your end by working on your prompt engineering. The second will improve over time as the AIs are better trained.

In this example we asked “what chapters should I include in a security guard services proposal using the Proposal Kit chapter templates?” The AI only came back with a very generic set of chapters that while good for a generic services proposal did not contain any topics related to a security business or situation. The AI also did not know anything about the specific chapters used by Proposal Kit even though there are tens of thousands of web pages with this information that have been online for well over twenty years. The AI did know enough to mention that the list of chapters it suggested would vary depending on the software being used. The list of chapters it suggested do have matches in the Proposal Kit library for the most part with just some minor spelling variations.

This is an example where the hundreds of curated lists of chapters and written out samples for very specialized proposals is much more detailed and better than what the AI may generate and is just as fast or faster to load into your project in the Proposal Kit software. There are scores of layouts for a wide variety of security related proposal situations already created in the Proposal Kit software as well as for every other industry.

You can see that using an AI app to create an outline and then matching that outline to the Proposal Kit templates can be an efficient method for quickly structuring a proposal. Then, after your proposal chapters have been assembled, you can fill in the proposal pages with all the specific details that your readers need to know.