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You are fractured. Your attention span is finite. Your time
is limited so you are forced to pick and choose what you focus on. You are
pulled in several directions at once. You switch focus from home to work to kids
to friends to acquaintances. One second you are concentrating on driving, the
next you are looking for your ringing cell phone, and a minute later you are
listening attentively to the breaking news on your radio. At work you are typing
a report, then answering the phone, surfing the Internet, solving another
problem, looking for your pen, chatting with a coworker, attending meetings, and
thinking about how tired you are. Everywhere you go, you are presented with an
increasing amount of stimuli—friends, family, coworkers, sales people,
telemarketers, television advertisements, and shows, news, movies, magazines,
billboards, radio spots, and web sites all competing to get your attention. It
is amazing that we accomplish anything at all!
Evaluators and your audience are no different. Just like you, they make quick decisions
based upon what they see. Studies show that we often ignore formal
decision-making models because of time constraints, incomplete information, the
inability to calculate consequences, and other variables. Intuitive judgment is
the process for most decisions. For this reason, evaluators, your audience, and
you should love graphics.
Using
visuals in your proposals...
...improves learning 200%—University
of Wisconsin
...takes 40% less time to explain
complex ideas—Wharton School
...improves retention 38%—Harvard
University
Graphics make it much
easier for your audience to understand and remember your solution.
Professional, visually appealing graphics increase your
likelihood of success by 43% (3M-sponsored
study at the University of Minnesota School of Management).
Joan Miller (name changed), a proposal manager, taught a
proposal writing course for over 10 years. The class began with students forming
source selection teams to evaluate two proposals and choose a winner based on
the established evaluation criteria. Proposal A was attractive, well written, and contained a large
number of professionally rendered, visually appealing graphics, but the proposal
was not compliant with the evaluation criteria. Proposal B was not well written and used a smaller number of
dense, difficult-to-read graphics, but it was compliant. If the source selection
teams had taken the extra time needed to understand Proposal
B's graphics, they would have realized that
the graphics suitably showed the system to be built. Not surprisingly, Miller
often found that Proposal A (the
easy-to-read, graphically appealing proposal) received the highest grades. When
asked, the students said that they had been so caught up in the presentation
that they had failed to realize the proposal was not compliant.
I am not advocating the use of quality visuals over content,
but rather the power of persuasion when both work synergistically to better
explain your message. Well-thought-out content coupled with quality graphics
result in a clear, communicative, compelling proposal—a winning proposal.
Greg Giddons, Executive Director of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Secure Border Initiative (SBInet) Program Management Office (and part of the SBInet decision-making team) said that visuals help tell the presenter's story. In addition, he said that graphics give evaluators a break because after reading several proposals "200 pages of text begin to look like ants." In fact, Greg saves his favorite graphics and keeps them with him for reference—a testament to the fact that evaluators love graphics.
Michael T. Parkinson of 24
Hour Company (www.24hrco.com) has two new
books available at BillionDollarGraphics.com. Learn to turn your ideas into
persuasive visuals.
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