5 Quick Tips: Winning Proposal Graphics

This excellent article on #proposalgraphics is by my friends at Global Services, from 3/9/18 to #helpgovconsgrow. Want Top Tactics to Increase Your Win Rate and #growFedbiz? Grab my free on-demand webinar HERE.

Creating the best-suited graphics can be difficult even for the most adept graphic designers. Beyond the normal constraints and best practices followed by graphic designers, there are even more complexities and challenges for proposal graphics.

Meaningful graphics can help your proposal be more succinct and stand out. Although they can alleviate difficult-to-describe ideas, proposal graphics cannot remedy a poorly written proposal. In the following post, we’ll explore some best practices and the difference between missed opportunities and winning graphics. But first, let’s dispel two common misconceptions.

Proposal Graphic Misconceptions:

Misconception 1: Making proposal graphics requires expensive or difficult software.

This is a common misconception. Truthfully, many effective proposal graphics are made in widely available programs like Microsoft suite including PowerPoint or Visio. For graphics requiring more precision, Adobe Illustrator may be quicker and easier. That being said, use the tools which are readily available and that your team is best suited and skilled at using.

Misconception 2: Proposal graphics need to be flashy.

In proposals, clarity trumps flashiness. For example, a simple organizational chart using simple linework, shapes, and a couple of well-chosen color palettes suggests the cogency and elegance of your solution. Conversely, a chart with an aggressive use of colors and over-the-top linework everywhere suggests that your solution is convoluted, confusing, and high-risk, and can turn readers away. While that second graphic may be more visually striking, it’s not nearly as compelling as the first. This is why choosing an appropriate person to do your graphic work is imperative.

Quick Tips for Improving Proposal Graphics:

Quick Tip 1: Only use graphics for important points.

Proposals can be text-dense documents and many find this to be drab and boring. A common pitfall is to try and mitigate the dull look by filling it with graphics (especially if you have a library of old graphics you can reuse). It is important to have a balance especially when page space is nearly always a scarce resource. Save your graphics for major explanations or points in your proposal. Graphics draw attention to themselves, so ensure you’re using them to their full potential. You should be using proposal graphics to highlight major win themes, discriminators, etc.—those essential points you most want the reader to remember.

If your proposal needs dressing up, there are alternatives to using formal proposal graphics. For example, if you simply need to provide some visual interest to a block of text, consider using a callout box rather than a true graphic—callout boxes are visually appealing and let you highlight key proof points without sacrificing much page space.

Quick Tip 2: Make sure the graphic stands on its own.

Another pitfall is to include proposal graphics that require verbose descriptions in the body text surrounding them. Whenever you add a proposal graphic, ask yourself, “Will my audience be able to understand this graphic on its own, with no other text ?” Evaluators have a limited bandwidth, and are unlikely to spend extra time breaking down and decoding your incoherent graphic. Furthermore, if a proposal graphic requires a lengthy description and explanation, is it even worth including? The text could do that work alone.

A best practice is to use stand-alone graphics that can be interpreted and understood in 10 seconds or less. Any longer and an evaluator is likely to give up and move on. The body text around the graphic should elaborate and add commentary, not explain.

Quick Tip 3: Delicately craft your action captions.

The captions below a proposal graphic stand out from the rest of the text—a hasty evaluator glancing over the page will inherently pay more attention to these captions than any one sentence in the body text. Specifically for this reason, you want to make sure your action captions meaningfully present your key points.

For instance, consider these three possible captions:

1. Company X’s Proposed Organizational Structure.
2. Company X’s Proposed Organizational Structure. Our proposed structure allows the Government direct access to senior decision-makers and subject matter experts.
3. Company X’s Proposed Organizational Structure. Our proposed structure allows the Government direct access to senior decision-makers and subject matter experts, allowing for rapid response to urgent or unforeseen Government requirements.

The first option is a missed opportunity. It does not add value. Anybody looking at an organizational chart should be able to tell immediately that it is in fact an organizational chart—if not, there’s something seriously wrong with the graphic! This caption is just wasted space.

The second option is better, as it calls attention to a key feature of the organizational structure. But it doesn’t explain why that feature is a benefit to the customer—it stops short and hopes that the evaluator will make the desired inference. That may or may not happen.

The third option is the best of the bunch. It calls attention to a feature of the graphic, and explains why that feature is beneficial to the customer. An evaluator who skims through the body and reads only the caption will still understand the key benefit that makes your solution the right choice.

Quick Tip 4: Scrutinize fonts.

Most proposals have font restrictions in place (e.g., all text must be Times New Roman 12-point). Unless the RFP specifically states otherwise, these restrictions apply to graphics as well as body text. If you reuse a graphic from a previous bid and forget to update it from Arial 10-point to Times New Roman 12-point, your proposal is non-compliant and at risk of rejection.

Quick Tip 5: Always build graphics at actual size.

The most common compliance problem isn’t using the wrong font when building the graphic, but rather, accidentally making the text too small after the fact. Inexperienced proposal graphic designers will often make a graphic using the correct font size in the PowerPoint or Illustrator source file—but when the graphic is added to the proposal document, they find that it’s too big. So they adjust it to fit the page—and now the font is the incorrect size, rendering the graphic non-compliant and your proposal at risk of rejection

To avoid this pitfall, always design your graphics at actual size. As an example, if your proposal has 8.5”x11” pages with 1-inch margins, you have a maximum of 6.5”x9” of usable space. Make sure you set your slide (PowerPoint) or artboard (Illustrator) to those dimensions before you start building the proposal graphic. When you insert it into the proposal, it will be exactly the size you need, eliminating the compliance risk and possible rejection. Never shrink graphics to fit into the proposal document. If they don’t fit, go back to the source file and make the appropriate changes there. Alternatively, never expand small graphics to fit the page either—this leads to blurry, distorted graphics. Instead, go back to the source file, where graphics can be resized without loss of quality.

Finally, designing your graphics at actual size has the additional benefit of making it clear from the beginning how much page space the graphic will take up. In severely page-limited proposals, shaving that extra half inch off the side of the graphic can make all the difference.

Just by incorporating these five quick tips from Global Services, you can immediately improve your proposal graphics and, by extension, your proposals and boilerplates as a whole. For further assistance with proposal graphics, page layout, or any other part of the proposal process, contact Global Services today!

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