persuasive memo
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Proposals.pptx
Proposals & Purpose Statements
Why are proposals so important?
Proposals are the way things get done in the business and professional world.
Organizations and businesses have to know that their money and employees’ time are being spent appropriately, and proposals help guarantee this by outlining budgets, teams, timelines, and efforts that will go into a given project.
Proposals are used for almost everything in business and the professional world, from sales to research. Very little in the business world gets done without some sort of proposal process, even if it’s just a write-up in an informal memo.
Every Proposal Must Answer the Following:
What problem are you going to solve?
How are you going to solve it?
What exactly will you provide for us (deliverables)?
Can you deliver what you promise?
What benefits can you offer?
When will you complete the work
How much will you charge?
Purpose Statements
Purpose statements appear near the top of a proposal or report.
Purpose statements make clear the purpose for writing the report. Purpose statements consist of the following three parts, and one optional part that gets included for longer documents.
Purpose Statement, Part 1
Describe a goal, desired state, or value that you or your organization considers important.
This part of the statement is designed to describe the company/organization’s mission or overall goal. It’s a description of the ideal that helps the audience touch base with where things should be before they get bogged down thinking about the specifics of a problem.
Purpose Statement, Part 2
Describe a condition that prevents the first statement from being achieved or realized at the current time. The statement could describe the status quo or define a competing goal, value, or desired state, but it should reveal a clash with the first statement.
This part of the purpose statement is designed to describe the organizational conflict/problem that impedes the first part of the purpose statement.
Usually between part 1 and part 2 of purpose statements, one finds what we call a signal transition, such as “but,” “however,” or “although,” which signals a move from the ideal to the problem.
Purpose Statement, Part 3
Describe some action—a study, research program, experiment, or object creation—that could resolve the difficulty.
This part of the purpose statement describes the specific questions that must be answered to solve the problem
It also describes the rhetorical purpose that the report is designed to achieve (to propose, to recommend, to request, to explain…).
Purpose Statements, Part 4
Part 4 is optional for many types of short reports, but is absolutely essential for longer reports.
It’s called a “mapping statement,” and it describes the sections of the report to come. It’s a kind of “table of contents” written out in sentence form.
Example of a purpose statement, Parts 1, 2, and 3
As members of the Public Image and Consumer Confidence Division of America Online, a division of AOL–Time Warner, we have enjoyed the challenge of striving to increase our customer base while maintaining the good faith of those consumers we already serve.
But while the recent merger has allowed us to enhance the quality of the services that we offer, we find that dramatic changes in the financial situation of AOL are compromising our ability to carry this legacy of excellence into the future. More specifically, predominantly negative public perception of dial-up internet connection in comparison to broadband technology threatens to whittle away what is already a flagging subscriber base.
To resolve this situation, we propose the creation and launch of a new advertising campaign, tentatively titled “Internet on Fire!!!” As this proposal will detail, the campaign centers around a strategy of claiming that we have totally revolutionized dial-up networking, so much so that it has proven even faster than both broadband and DSL combined.
Example of a purpose statement, Part 4
In the following four sections of this proposal, we (1) Outline the basic components of the advertising campaign, (2) Detail the costs associated with its accomplishment, (3) Elaborate a schedule for the completion of the campaign, and (4) Comment briefly on possible legal repercussions of our claims of “blazing fast” connections, in light of the fact that all we’re really doing is putting lots of animated flames on the homepage and on the mail-out software CD.
Research Proposal Purpose Statements
Research proposals begin with purpose statements just like the earlier examples Research proposals are just special cases of problem-solution proposals, where:
the ideal is that everyone has enough knowledge to make informed, analytic decisions;
the impediment is that the audience doesn't have enough information;
and how to overcome it is a research project that results in a research report.
Standard Proposal Sections
Problem/Purpose Statement
Feasibility
Audience
Topics to Investigate
Methods/Procedure
Qualifications/Facilities/Resources
Work Schedule
Call to Action
