How to Write an Information Packet - (2024)

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In this video we're going to show how to create an information packet document with the Proposal Pack and Proposal Pack Wizard. There's another video that we have that's very similar on how to create an instruction manual or a handbook. The steps will be almost the same, it's just a difference in the actual templates you select.

We've got a page on our website here, this is the Proposal Packs page. You'll start by using any one of the hundreds of design themes we have and on our website you can scroll down all the hundreds of design themes. There's general purpose designs, there's designs that are line art based, photo based, there's designs for specific types of industries and situations and just general purpose designs.

You can customize all these designs as well with your own logo and using the Expert Edition there's software features that let you actually create your own design theme. That covers the visual look of your proposals. Now we're going to illustrate this information packet document using a pest control company just for illustration purposes.

We're going to show our Pest Control #2 design. On our website this is the actual product Pest Control #2 and the Word documents will actually be in this design theme when we're finished creating the Word document. Once you've purchased a Proposal Pack or the Pro kit and got it all installed, got the Wizard software installed you'll be ready to create a document.

A lot of times you're going to be creating proposals, contracts, bids and so on. Those can all be created with the same Proposal Pack and Wizard. It's just a different set of chapters that you're going to select.

You could actually create your services proposal, your product sales proposal and you can also create your instruction manuals, handbooks, or information packets. So, we have our pest control design theme set as our current style and whichever one or more styles you've purchased and installed will be available in this Document Styles button up here. Whenever we're going to create a Word document whether it's a proposal or our handbook, manual or information packet we'll click the Document Projects button.

We'll click the Add New Project. I'll just give it a project name, you can give it any name you want, this is just for your information to find it in the database. We'll click the Pick Documents button.

This is where you're going to select all of the chapters that will make up your information packet. A lot of times you'll just start with a Title Page, maybe if it's long enough Table of Contents, Back Page, Introduction perhaps and then you've got thousands of options for the interior pages. You're seeing the top 40 most common pages right here in these check boxes but if you click this drop down you have entries here that'll take you to pages of chapters that will cover all 2000+ chapter templates you have available.

For example, we can just click one of these general information pages and you can just scroll through all sorts of different chapters you can add to your document. If you know a specific name of a chapter and you want to just search the database of thousands of chapters. What if we want to add a Frequently Asked Questions to our information packet.

We'll just search on a word like frequent and it's found every template that has the word frequent in and related chapters that we've tagged that might be related. We can add this to our project just by clicking it and add the selected template. Now we've got the Frequently Asked Questions in our list.

We already have a sample of an information packet. If you go to the View Samples tab there are 200 sample documents. Most of these are proposals but there is an information packet and this is why we are illustrating this with our pest control design because it just happens to be a Pest Control Information Packet that was designed to go along with the Pest Control Services sample as an example of how you can use the Proposal Pack to create a services proposal and a follow–up information packet to leave behind with your client.

If you go over to the Quick Start tab you'll also find that same Pest Control Information Packet along with hundreds and hundreds of other layouts. These hundreds of layouts will not all have sample content, the actual writing of the interior pages. About 200 of them will and all of the ones here, the 200 samples, have pre–written content that you can import into your document you're creating in the Wizard.

We're going to select the Pest Control Information Packet. If we want to look at just a PDF copy of that sample I can click this button, open that up as a PDF document. I'm going to click the Import Content, so now that's imported this list of seven chapters.

These are just seven out of the two thousand possible chapters we can pull from and it's also going to import when it builds the document the interior writing of that sample into the template it builds. We have a list of chapters selected and we can now alter that list of chapters. If we want to add additional chapters from the library, if we just want to add the Introduction chapter.

Now you see we're up to eight pages and just put an Introduction in front of What you can Expect. The Introduction chapter since we've added that from the general purpose library of templates won't have the sample content related to the Pest Control Information Packet. You'll have that page there ready for you to fill in with some additional information you might want to put in, in addition to the sample content.

So, we have all of our chapters selected for this document. I'll click the OK, Use Selected Templates button and that takes us back to the project page. You'll see this drop down here it changed from the default to Information.

That is going to be the main Title Page graphic that is going to be put onto this document so instead of it saying Proposal on the front cover it's going to say Information. There's a list of about 20 some options you can pick from for the title of the front cover. An information packet is generally going to be more of a general purpose document, it's not going to be customized per client.

You usually are going to have client tags in the document to fill in and the company information. This is just going to be your information, your name, address, phone number, basic contact information that's going to get merged into the document when it gets built. Then, if you do want client specific data in this document then you can enter your client information.

This is going to be more commonly used in a proposal or quote that's tailored specific to each client versus a manual or handbook or something or an information packet that's going to be a general purpose document. Once we have everything set up, we have all the settings, we have the chapters selected, the import content selected and the mail merge data figured out. We click the OK, Save Project button and the Wizard will build us the Word document.

Just sit back and wait for it to create. Okay, our information packet has been generated, open this up and take a look at it. You can see the front cover letter, this is where you can use client data tags if this information packets can be customized per client.

If we had entered that data into the Client Data screen, you'll remember I left it blank, it would have been merged into these tags here. This will actually be your company information. This is the information that was in the Company Data screen, which is ours for the demo.

This is all editable text, anything that got merged in can just be edited at any time as just a normal Word text. You can see the graphic on the front Title Page is now Information instead of Proposal. This is the Introduction page that we added which is a fill in the blank template because it was never part of the original actual written sample.

The rest of the pages, What You Can Expect, Precautions, Monitoring and so on. These are the actual sample content pulled into the fill in the blank templates that are all assembled into this information packet document. Now all you have to do is finish editing, save it as a PDF, print it out and that is your information packet.

You can create this in any combination of hundreds of design themes all customizable and in countless variations of the chapter pages that are going to make up the body of the information packet. There's pretty much unlimited combinations of documents you can create using the Proposal Pack Wizard. That is all there is to creating an information packet document.