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Project Proposal

Due date: Thursday, October 16

Though the proposal itself is not due until October 16, you should begin thinking about a topic for this proposal several weeks prior to the due date.

Purpose and audience

For this assignment, you and your partner will be identifying a substantial informational problem or need in your school, community, or workplace and then proposing a detailed plan for solving this problem through the composition of various informational products.

An example might be a student organization that is suffering declining membership enrollment due to poor publicity that might be reversed through a detailed publicity package. Or perhaps a non-profit group here in the Ames area needs help putting together a website in order to publicize their services more widely. If you think about it long enough, there are numerous information problems all around us that you now have the expertise to help solve. While the above examples are more marketing problems than technical communication problems, I encourage those in technical fields to focus their projects on the formation and presentation of technical information.

This assignment will set you on the road to solving at least one of them. Once you have identified an informational need or problem, you will develop a proposal that describes the problem in detail and suggests a solution. In writing your proposal, direct your analysis and solution of the information problem to the decision-maker(s).

These proposals will set the stage for your main work throughout the remainder of the semester, culminating in both your progress report and final project report. For this reason, do your best to provide a detailed framework for carrying out these other projects down the road. As the addage goes, "Well started is half done."

Planning and drafting

In preparing the proposal, you should talk with the people directly involved in the organization to learn more about the history of the problem, the solutions that have already been attempted, the constraints that must be considered, and so on. In doing so, try to collect samples of their past informational products (brochures, pamphlets, posters, websites, etc.) so you can analyze these past efforts and improve on them.

Make sure that you address the probable expectations of your readers by focusing on the following:

• Situation - provide a definition of the need or problem, including information that situates the problem in the organization.
• Plan - present a plan for addressing the need or resolving the problem.
• Benefits - explain probable benefits that will result from adopting the plan.
• Approach - outline methods for implementing the plan, including management plans, schedule, and possible costs.
• Evaluation - identify evaluation strategies for determining whether the proposed plan will work when implemented.
• Qualifications - establish your qualifications for submitting the proposal and implementing the plan. At this point in the semester, all of you are skilled technical communicators who know more than most people in the organization about effective communication techniques and information design.

Beware of pitfalls

In drafting your proposals, make sure that you avoid the following problems:

• Absence of headers - don't just slap a bunch of text together without giving your readers visual clues as to how the document is structured. At this point in the course, you should realize that any document of substantial length should contain headers, not only as a navigational device for your readers, but also as a scaffolding device for your own composition.
• Poor evaluation of situation - try to be as thorough as possible in your evaluation of the organization's information problems. You are an outsider to the firm, which affords you some degree of objectivity, but it also makes you quite ignorant of the problem's history within the company unless you take the time to properly analyze the situation.
• Lackluster introduction - because the decision makers in your organization are extremely busy, you should provide them with an executive summary or proposal abstract at the beginning of the proposal, and then use the first few paragraphs of the proposal's body text to pull them into your way of thinking. Pay special attention to the persuasive techniques on pages 684-687 of the textbook.

Evaluation criteria

Make sure that your proposal:

• Reads efficiently and economically.
• Contains visually attractive layout and appropriate visual explanations.
• Has a summary conclusion in which you reiterate the main points of your proposal.
• Contains absolutely no grammatical, spelling, or punctuation errors.

Lee Honeycutt (honeyl@iastate.edu) · (515) 294-4617 · Office: 441 Ross Hall · Office Hours: Wednesdays, 2:00 to 5:00 pm, or by appointment.