How to Use Proposal Kit to Respond to a Covid19 Situation - (2024)

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In this video we're going to cover some of the ways that Proposal Kit has been used recently in the last few weeks and how it can be used in the coming months and even longer for companies dealing with the Covid–19 crisis. Now the content in Proposal Kit that we're going to outline has been in Proposal Kit for years, so we haven't added any new actual content as far as writing goes for these kinds of situations. However the Proposal Kit has many layouts of chapters from our library of topics that can be assembled to cover situations that companies are running into.

Some of these situations have actually been in the Proposal Kit for quite some time, many years in some cases, for some of our layouts that we're going to show. And in the last few weeks we have been working with companies coming up with proposal situations they need to create documents for. Either reports, business plan changes, reports, studies, and so on using the Proposal Pack chapter library and our design themes to come up with customized templates.

I'll outline what some of those companies have been doing so you can get an idea of how this might fit into your needs. So first we'll show some of our visual design themes because the starting point of using the Proposal Kit is to pick a design theme that fits your situation. So click on our website on the Proposal and Contract Product page and in our Proposal Pack list we have hundreds and hundreds of graphic design themes.

How people use these it's usually split 50/50 so maybe half of people use our plain design theme called Proposal Pack for Any Business. This is our collection of templates that is just black and white text that's also the easiest to custom build your own graphic design theme in if you're using our Proposal Kit Professional. That has features that let you brand this pack that's in the Proposal Kit Professional with your own logo, your own background designs, your own accent graphics, colors, fonts and so on.

For people who want a pre–made design theme we have hundreds of designs. If you scroll down you can see this button here View All Designs. You click that you'll see all 400.

Just scroll down or if you want to look by categories. A lot of technical companies are dealing with having to outsource services. They're having to have that their workers work from home so some of the proposals are how to change their business model to support home workers or supports remote clients and so on.

Some of these technical proposals can be having to move training and educational services online for companies that are currently doing it face to face. So say if you're an IT company you may come into the technical category and you can just pick from any of these design themes. The underlying content of every pack is the same so you have the same boilerplate content for pages like your Cover Letter, your Executive Summary, or Price pages, your Services and Products, your Technical Details.

All the content that's going to outline everything you need in your business plan, your proposal, your reports and studies and so on. Then the design theme is basically the skin over the top of that, so you pick the skin or the design theme first. You might be writing a proposal dealing with drones so the Tech #9 design might be good for that.

Now maybe you're doing a proposal to move training services online for someone so Computers #6 might be a good design to use. Maybe you're doing a proposal to retool a production line to create a new line of products in an emergency so you might use the Robotics #2 design theme for that. These are just if you want a pre–made logo and photo or line art design theme pre–built over the documents so you don't have to do all that graphic work yourself.

A lot of companies are dealing with, obviously, healthcare issues. If you're dealing with emergency medical services Medical #5 might be a good design theme. If you're dealing with hospital services or medical issues you might use Medical #7.

Nursing healthcare this Healthcare #2. Pharmaceutical companies might use this Healthcare #5 or even this Medical #2. So the design theme just has graphics or photos that are related to a specific kind of industry or situation.

Transportation and logistics is a big issue right now so we have transportation design themes like Transportation #1. That's a line art design that might be good for cargo hauling. Transportation #5, that's a photo design version if you're dealing with international shipping.

Imports and exports you might use Transportation #7 or #8. Home delivery services can use Transportation #9 and so on. You might be a security company having to deal with extra security or safety issues so you can come down and look at the safety security design themes.

Once you've picked a design theme, you've purchased it, you've downloaded it, you've got our Wizard software installed. If you're on a Mac and can't use the assembly software the templates will still work on Word for Mac we can also help people assemble a custom template if they do not have access to a Windows system. So the next thing we'll show is once you have the design theme selected then you need to actually create a document for whatever business situation you're in.

So we'll cover how that gets done in the software and what layouts are available then how to custom create your own layout. So the first thing you'll do is once you've got the Wizard software set up and installed, you've gone through the tutorials and so on. This is the Wizard home screen that you see.

These four numbered buttons, and preferences. This is where you can customize the settings and so on. Document Styles, this is going to be where you've got settings for the style.

Everything happens right here in this Document Projects but once we want to actually create a document we click Document Projects. Now I have the Transportation #5 design theme installed. So we're going to show a layout for a transportation issue that we just recently put together for another company.

These will be layouts we have in here that these companies have used or we've set up for them. They will have the layouts of our stock boilerplate chapters. So now we're in the Project Screen we'll click the Pick Documents button and on this Pick Document screen all these tabs are different ways of getting chapters selected for your specific situations.

So this first tab you'll see are out of the two thousand plus chapters available these are 40 of the common ones. Most everybody might use a Cover Letter, Title Page, Table of Contents for a longer document, Back Page, Introduction or Cost Summary maybe a cost page and some common body pages. Now to get to the rest of the 2,000+ chapters you can click this drop down and for in this case we're in a transportation situation let me just scroll down the list and we see it three pages here of Supply Chain/Logistics/Transportation chapters.

So we can just click chapters on these pages. Each one of these we check off is basically a one or two page template of ours with this as a chapter header. Then they'll have some boilerplate text, bullet points, tables, and so on for you to actually fill in with your real information.

So what we're doing here is we're going to put together a Word document that covers the situation we're in. So we're going to show a template we've just recently added to the system. This will be a template for a Supply Chain Disruption and Risk Report that was recently added to the system.

You can see here, 622, this is the number of layouts we have of chapters you can pick from. So you can scroll down but you can also do a search for a common word like transportation or supply chain. So I'm just going to use the word supply.

That's going to show every layout in a system that is tagged with word supply. So I narrowed us down from 622 down to 23. So now I can easily find the Supply Chain Disruption and Risk Report outline.

Once you've highlighted any template you'll see the list of chapters that have been selected for it. You can also see since I just type in the word supply there's quite a few outlines already here, so you just basically pick one that sounds like it's similar to your situation as your starting point and you import the topics. Now our project has these 20 chapters out of the 2000+ available that were selected for this specific kind of report.

You can see it starts with the Cover Letter, Title Page, Table of Contents, Executive Summary. It's got topics in there to talk about the supply chain disruption and risk issues that this particular company wanted to talk about. Now not everybody is going to use the same exact set of chapters for their proposals, business plans, reports and so So that's why you can customize this list.

So say if I didn't want to talk about the long–term and short–term objectives I could just click these and remove them from the layout. If I wanted to add additional topics to talk about I can just go back to the Add Templates tab and I can just check off any chapters I want from any category. So say at the end of our report here I wanted to add a call to action type page like Take Action.

Now I can view the selected templates, I can see Take Action is here and I'm going to move this down. So this is an example of how I can customize any of these pre–made layouts. So now we've added a chapter after the Recommendations for a call to action type page.

There's really no difference technically between a proposal and a business plan or a report or a study document. It's just a matter of what templates you selected and how you ordered them and created the final document. Everything, whether it's a business plan, proposal, report, study.

In the end it's a Word document with X number of pages with different sets of chapter headers. Okay, so we're finished with this, we have 21 chapters selected. So this is going to create around a 21 page Word document.

Now you can come into the Company Data screen and this is going to be filled in when you first install and setup the software. But you can enter anything you want here. This is basically your company information, who is writing the proposal or who is writing a report.

You have a pick list here, so if you have multiple people in your company writing their documents you can pick whatever you want to populate in here. And then Client Data, this is the name and address contact information for the person that the proposal or business plan is being written to. This is usually going to get populated into things like the Cover Letter, About Us, the Title Page and so on.

So I'm going to leave this blank for right now. Once we're done selecting our chapters and we've entered in the data, all you have to do is click the OK, Save Project button and now the Wizard is going to generate a complete Word document with all those chapters assembled, all the data applied, and it's going to spit out a Word document that you can just finish filling in and editing in your word processor. Ok, this report has been generated.

We'll open that up and take a look at it. You can see since we did not enter in the data for the Client Data screen it's just left the original tags in here. You can just type right over it.

And it merged in things like the current date. You can see here that this is the Company Data so whatever you would have entered in the Company Data screen would get merged into these parts of the document. You can see the background design theme is the Transportation #5 and since we're writing a report it swapped out the Proposal graphic for the Report graphic.

This can also say Business Plan. There's around 20 different graphics in every pack you can swap in and this can also be replaced with your own logo. So a lot of people will also pick a graphic design theme of ours that has a visual look and color scheme that would look good with their logo.

So then they can easily swap out some of our graphics with their logo and retain some of the stock graphics using our Expert Edition in the Proposal Kit Professional. You can also customize our stock design themes so you could actually swap in your own graphics and your own photographs in place of these ones. You can make your own full page background designs and import those in.

The software will actually do all the grunt work for you. All you have to do is create some logo graphics, these watermark graphics, accent graphics and so on. Then the software will swap in your custom graphics for ours.

So there's lots of ways to customize the visual look. You can see the boilerplate text of the templates with some pre written text, bullet points and so on. These are the chapters that were selected in the Pick Documents screen to make up this report.

This document is ready for you to just start editing in your actual information. The whole structure of the document has been created. This will save you hours or days creating the overall outlines for complex documents.

You just have to do the editing. All right, so now we'll illustrate another business situation that has come up recently for another industry. Now only the design theme or themes you purchased will be selectable.

You don't get all hundreds of the design themes. Each is an individual product and because a design theme is kind of like your business card. People don't have multiple design themes typically for writing different documents.

They're going to stick with one design theme. It's kind of like you have one website design, you have one business card design. Usually all your documents are in one design.

So that's why you pick one Proposal Pack design theme or customize one and then you stick with that typically. So in our illustrations here we just happen to have all of our designs loaded into our demo. So our next one is we're going to illustrate our Computers #6 design for another layout we just recently added and we're going to show a proposal for moving training services online.

So just like before whenever you're going to create a new document you click the Pick Documents button, Add a New Project. I've been unchecking the Dynamic Excel Link box here in the demo just to speed up the demo. In our Expert Edition the Wizard will link the cells of financial chapters like cost pages, estimate pages and so on to actual Excel spreadsheets.

So you can do the Excel calculations and then have the output linked directly to the Word document so you don't have to manually type in all your numbers into a Word document. As you change your spreadsheet the Word document auto updates. That's a feature in our Expert Edition in the Proposal Kit Professional.

We're going to show a Moving Training Services Online proposal and we'll just do the same thing as before. We'll just do a search on the word training. So we know that word is in the title.

Here's the Moving Training Services Online proposal. This is a layout we've just recently added in the last couple weeks for another company dealing with a covid19 situation. Lots of companies that do face–to–face training or educational services are now having to move them online and that usually takes a fair amount of technology.

So like before we've highlighted that outline. This is a 17 page document. We import the list and just like before now you can remove chapters that don't apply to your specific situation.

You can go into the Search by Name, Add Templates, you can add additional chapters and customize this layout to suit your specific situation better. We'll just stick with a stock list of 17 chapters and like before enter your Company Data and Client Data. When you're all done click the OK, Save Project and let the Wizard build the document.

Okay, now this document has been generated. Let's see what this looks like. Just like before, same data merging going on and this is now in the Computer #6 design theme.

You'll see the Table of Contents is the list of chapters out of that same library of 2000+ chapters we generated the Supply Chain Disruption and Risk Report from. Just a different set of chapters and with a different design theme. So you don't have to pick a design theme that exactly matches the industry you are in either.

Any one of the hundreds and hundreds of design themes we have can be used to generate any of the hundreds and hundreds of layouts. You basically just mix and match depending on what you want the document to look like and what you want in it as far as chapters go. So you can see this proposal has chapters that are related to training, doing webinars, setting those up for someone, list of courses, the benefits to moving online, what hardware and software is going to be needed, your implementation plan.

Now in addition to our financial topics being able to be linked to Excel spreadsheets in the Expert Edition any of our schedule templates can be linked to an Excel spreadsheet to do the start and end date calculations and so on. In the Novice Edition that are individual Proposal Packs these are just plain text templates you just edit in Word. Same with the Cost Summary, these can be directly linked to Excel spreadsheets to do the calculations, subtotals, totals, grand totals, taxes and so on.

In the Novice Editions the basic Proposal Packs these are just stock Word tables you edit in Word. The same with Cost/Benefit Analysis. In the Novice Edition you still do have the Excel spreadsheets.

We'll illustrate this right here. The Cost Benefit Analysis Calculator you can edit this spreadsheet and all the totals and calculations will be done for you. You can just then manually type in the totals and calculations into the table.

If this was the Expert Edition and you are linking these then changes in the spreadsheet would just auto populate into the Word document automatically. I will show one last example for a different industry, a different layout. I will just pick the Robotics #2 design theme and we're going to illustrate a layout for a Manufacturing Company Retooling a Production Line.

This has been a situation that's been coming up a lot recently where companies are having to retool to create emergency supplies. Now I can search for the word retool. I can search for the word production.

Usually searching for a single word is the best way to do a search because then you'll pick up anything with that title or tagged in its descriptions. We can see the Retooling Production Line Proposal layout. This is another one of the layouts we've just recently added due to companies coming up with situations they need templates for during this Covid–19 crisis and you can see this is an 18 page layout we are importing this into our project.

Take a look at those chapters and again this is just a different set of 18 pages out of the same library of 2,000+ plus chapters. We've picked ones that are going to be talking about retooling issues, equipment, fabrication, production schedule, project management, the costs, your company's capabilities, capacity, resource allocation issues and so on. Again, just like before we can customize this list of chapters by adding additional templates, removing and reordering them and so on.

Once we're all done just like before save the project and we'll build a third document. All of these different proposals and all these different design themes, all these different industries and situations are using the same Wizard software of ours. They're just plugging in a different design theme, selecting a different set of chapters.

Now this document has been generated and you can see the Robotics #2 design theme, the list of chapters are selected and just like the other documents it's just a Word document with a specific design theme and a list of chapters for that specific situation. It's up to the individual to then fill in these pages with their own. Now Proposal Kit does have hundreds of completed example proposals.

Since those completed ones are in the past they're not going to be covid19 specific situations that you can just slap your name on and do some tweaking. Those haven't actually been written by anybody yet because this is all new. So, just like everybody else who's used this in the last couple decades who's had to write their own proposal you do have to write in your unique content.

But we've created in a matter of minutes a complete multi–page Word document all laid out ready for you to just start editing and that is what Proposal Kit can do for you. Now one thing we do help people with recently is if you need some help coming up with a set of chapters for your specific kind of situation. We can help you create this list of chapters so you can quickly get a document generated without spending too much time learning how our software and system all works.

So, we'll get you ramped up faster. That's part of our Fast Track Service that we've been throwing in for free recently for anybody who gets a Proposal Kit Professional or Proposal Pack. So take advantage of that offer and let us know what kind of proposal or document, report, study, business plan you need to create and we'll help you get it set.