8. Read all about it! Content Library! Read all about it!

August 2020

(2 minute read)

If you’ve been following the steps to sorting out your content library, it’ll have moved on a lot from where it was and you have some news to shout about.

Sending out an email about the updates you’ve made sounds simple enough. The thing is you really need to capture people’s imagination and get them to take action and go and have a look at all the shiny new library developments that have happened. How do you do this? Be creative, think

• Email
• Intranet
• Newsletter
• Show and Tell
• Q&A sessions
• Quizzes…

There are lots of ways to communicate good news and if you make it fun, people are more engaged and more likely to make use of all that good work. Working remotely from each other doesn’t mean that you can’t do a ‘show and tell’ session or a quiz or team demo – you just need to spend a bit of time planning it and getting the word out. Make it fun for yourself too. Create meaning by including some statistics on how long it took you to find information before and contrast it with the new world.

The most important part is that you connect with as many people in your organisation as possible. Let them know who owns what, where to find things, how to let you know when something needs an update or there is new and exciting information that needs to be added.

If you make yourself accessible to people who need the information and have a clear set or instructions or a roadmap to give them on how to find it you’ve got a winning combo!

Now go and shout it from the rooftops that there’s an updated, central location where they can find all the information they need, and let them know you can tell them who to ask if they need something that’s not there yet.

9. Survey your users to find out what’s working (and what’s not)

November 2020

(2 minute read)

We all want to know that what we are doing actually works and provides value. The best way to find out whether it is working is to ask the people you created the library for – your bid team and relevant stakeholders.

Surveys are actually quite easy to do and don’t have to be daunting. Work out what you want to know about – quite often you can tie this in to the pain points that you knew about at the beginning of the process and then ask questions about the changes you’ve made to find out how people feel about the new system and content. Let people have a chance to provide more detailed feedback if they want to – it will help you to improve your library going forwards. Don’t ask too many questions – keep it short, you can always run additional surveys later to ask the rest of the questions.

Questions I’d include …

• Do you use the new content library? If yes – how often (give options for daily/weekly/monthly depending on the proposal load your organisation has)? If no – why not?
• Is the length of the content items correct? Yes/No.
• Have you come across anything that is out-of-date or needs to be changed?
• Do you know who to contact if you have any questions about the library or content for bids?

Add as many questions as you need to, but remember that you need to be prepared to follow up on the feedback you get. Collecting feedback without using it is pointless. This is your opportunity to understand what works and what doesn’t and take action to enable your team to be more efficient.

Surveys can be done using tools like Google Forms or Survey Monkey for example making it easy to collect the information. You could also use polling questions on emails if you have a regular update that you send to the team to let them know about changes that have been made.

Just remember – asking for feedback means you need to use it. Asking questions and using surveys is a great way to engage your audience and let them know that they’re important and you are looking for ways to make things better for them.

Get out there and find out what your customer’s experiences are!

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

10 . Process check and innovation

December 2020

(2 minute read)

If you have been following our blog, you may already have taken several steps towards an improved content library. If you have, you will also have had to develop and apply new and/or improved processes to creating and reviewing the content that you decided to keep and anything new that has been created. You may also have surveyed your users (see the previous post in the Steps to a Better Bid Library series) and have a better understanding of what you need from your library and the impact your content is having on the efficiency of your team.

It’s important that the processes that you have in place are effective and efficient. Remember that processes should be reviewed and tweaked as much as anything else we do. Innovation – which if you’ve spotted my piece on the APMP UK 2020 Awards site (scroll down to find me) – is about small incremental changes that make us a bit better today than we were yesterday. This piece is about process innovation and improvement.

Maybe you started out by saying:

1. Sort out library, analyse gaps and assign owners and review dates
2. Update existing content and create new content
3. Implement content management process

Simple example of a content management process outline. Kathryn Potter (c)

This is an overly simplified process as an example and would have specific tasks linked to each step. How can you streamline your process in your organisation? Remember that no two organisations are exactly alike – while they may be similar and you can start with a process that worked somewhere else, you will need to be aware that tweaks and refinements can make it even better for where you are now.

It’s as important here to find out whether the process works for your team and users. Canvassing their opinion and inviting them to make suggestions can be extremely helpful to the overall development of an efficient and effective process.

Processes work better when they are less complicated – whatever system you opt for, work towards simplicity rather than being overly prescriptive.

We’d love to hear from readers about the steps you’ve taken towards an improved bid content library process. Please get in touch if you’d like to share.

11. What’s the score?

January 2021

(2-minute read)

It’s been a long year and we know the world of bids and proposals has had more than its fair share of knocks. Whether that’s been losing team members and resource or simply not having opportunities to bid on, it’s been tough. So as the holidays approach we have a few thoughts for you and any content you’ve been working on or bids you’ve submitted.

When you’re looking to add new content to your library or update what you already have it’s always useful to look and see how whatever it is that you wrote/submitted scored. Bids that have lost on price may have scored well on quality, so don’t throw the whole thing out. Go through it and add what’s good. In the same way, bids that won on price may not have scored that well on quality. So, don’t go popping all those answers in just because you won the business, they might be worse than the ones you already have (depending of course on whether your library is working and up to date!).

If you’ve written new content for a specific area, or updated existing content it might be useful to apply the scoring system from a previously submitted bid and see whether what you’ve written scores well. If not, keep editing it.

It’s probably time to pop a note in about graphics and illustrations again. Submissions always look better when there are some graphics that can do the explaining rather than lines and lines of size 10 or 11 font. Do make sure though, that any graphics:

• Have optional text that can be inserted into the submission if you can’t include graphics (e.g., some portal submissions and spreadsheet type submissions don’t allow for graphics or formatting);
• Have a caption that is not a ‘Horse Caption’ – as in, the caption below the picture of a horse states “Horse”. It needs to describe what is being shown (obviously not in too many words or you’ve missed the point of a graphic)
• Are numbered – and that the formatting of your document means that they’ll update when you pop them into a new submission.

If you have a document that has a lot of graphics, include a table of figures somewhere in the same way you’d include a glossary of terms.

When you’re looking at scoring that’s been returned on submissions it can be easy to get depressed by what is returned. I know it’s not easy to turn that mindset around but see it as an opportunity to make whatever content you have even better and where necessary change/update/improve your content management processes so that you hit higher scores from the beginning.

Make sure it hits the spot by maintaining regular content reviews help to keep content scoring high and organising reviews by people outside of the topic under review. Asking someone to review something they don’t usually work with means that they’ll see things you don’t and enable you to make your content more readable and accessible to evaluators who might not be experts on the topic.

Check that you have the WHAT, HOW, WHY and WHERE answered too.

I’m happy to help guide content and bid reviews (before or after submission) so that your content gets better and better and your win rates can go up and up.

For assistance or information please get in touch.