Chapter 3, Strategic Planning for Proposals and Grants

Strategic planning is a process of setting objectives and developing a project plan to meet those objectives.

Identify - what, why, and who for your plan

Rhetorical situation - all the elements that will influence how readers intrepret proposal

• subject - what is proposal about? need to know
• purpose - what will it achieve?
• readers - primary (decision makers), secondary (advisors), tertiary(evaluators), gatekeepers (supervisors)
• context - physical, economic, ethical, and political environments

1. Determining the "need to know" versus the "not need to know" could be an excellent way to shorten a first draft and make it more focused.
2. I find the psychology of your readers and important an interesting topic for discussion. As our book indicates, the motives, values, attitudes, and emotions of these people guide the shape of a proposal.
3. Context in research proposals is critical. You should always assume that yours will be one of many proposals that the reviewers will read and evaluate. The idea that their first step would be to form a "keep" pile and a "reject" pile would probably not be a conscious decision but certainly faced with a stack of work, we all do it unconsciously. Viewing a proposal in a first scan scenario is a critical part of writing it that I hadn't considered.