Writing Proposals with MindView 3 Business Edition

As a technology consultant I am often asked by my clients to write up a proposal for my services. For many of us who are in this situation our first inclination is to open up Microsoft Word and start to draft our proposal. While I have written about this topic before, it is worth mentioning again that I have found it to be a tremendous time saver to draft my proposals in a mind map and then export them to Microsoft Word. In the past couple of weeks I have had to put three proposals together and in this instance I decided to put MindView 3 Business Edition through its paces to draft my proposals. I have been using MindView 3 Business Edition lately, to track some of my projects using the Gantt Chart and Timelines but had not investigated how to use it to generate proposals.

In general I find it a good strategy to brainstorm the topics for my proposals in the mind map which gives me the freedom to move around the key ideas. Once I have the main headings I can begin to insert the details for each main topic. In MindView 3 Business Edition I decided to add more text to flesh out my ideas by using the Notes feature. For each idea that I wanted a fuller explanation I typed in some notes into the text editor. I generally also add some graphics and icons to my maps to spruce them up. After all of my ideas and notes were completed I was able to export my mind map to Microsoft Word. MindView 3 Business Edition provides a nice set of formatted Word templates to Export your mind maps to. You have considerable control as to what comes over during the export process. I have found that MindView 3 Business Edition outputs your mind maps quickly and accurately to Microsoft Word and the finished product is very professionally formatted.

As much as I would like to think that the content of my proposals is what gets me my work, it does help when your proposals are succinct and look professional. In this case, MindView 3 Business Edition has assisted me to get my proposals in, in less time with laser focus. So the next time you need to write a business proposal open up MindView 3 Business Edition and give it a whirl you will be glad you did- take it from me.

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In the past couple of weeks I have had to put three proposals together and in this instance I decided to put MindView 3 Business Edition through its paces to draft my proposals.

Presenting Your Proposal as a Mind Map

As I am gearing up for the fall consulting season, I am often asked to provide various schools and business organizations with proposals to give them a sense of how I can help them reach their goals. During the course of the year, I am providing a great deal of professional development and training professional staff on many different educational software titles and computer technologies. For the past year or so I have decided to practice what I preach and have been presenting my proposals visually in a mind map. As a result of this decision, I have found that it takes me half the amount of time to put together the proposal in a mind map but more importantly, the presentation to my clients adds a degree of clarity and conciseness which they all favorably comment on. Many of my clients are unaware of this modality and often comment what a great way to present the information without the need to plow through pages and pages of text.

One simple mind map convey volumes and is easily digested getting to the crux of the matter. Of course if you must, you can always export your map to Microsoft Word and present them with a traditional proposal. I recently created a proposal in MindManager 8 and then exported it as a Mindjet Player which I emailed to my client. For me having the Export as a Mindjet Player feature is the real killer feature in MindManager 8. Being able to open the Mindjet Player file with the free Adobe Acrobat 9 Reader makes it easy to share my mind maps. After emailing my client the mind map it wasn't before too long that I received an email back commenting how wonderful the proposal presentation was. For me it was a win-win situation all around! My proposals take me less time to prepare and my clients find the presentation easy to read and digest. So if you have the opportunity to prepare a proposal think about the prospect of delivering it as a mind map- you will be glad you did!

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Developing a Business Proposal with MindManager

Just the other day I needed to put together a business proposal for one of the schools that I will be consulting to. The proposal included both the purchase of software as well as on-going professional development for the special education teachers. I needed in the proposal to breakdown the cost of the software that would be used by each of the teachers as well as the cost for professional development. Each of the classroom would need to use different software and the amount of professional development varied by classroom. I had already put together an Excel spreadsheet with all of the pricing for the software and was now ready to write up the proposal when it dawned on me why don't I try to use MindManager Pro 7 to develop the proposal.

So I fired up MindManager Pro 7 and got started organizing the information in the proposal. Being able to copy, cut, and paste and freely move ideas around is one of the real strengths of MindManager Pro 7. Thinking about how constrained I would have been doing it in a word processor made my decision to use MindManager Pro 7 an easy one. Once I was able to define the structure of the proposal it was easy for me to copy and paste the structure and then attach my ideas.

As noted, I had at my disposal an Excel spreadsheet which did a breakdown of software prices that was associated with each of the classrooms that I would be working with. Using MindManager Pro 7, I was able to attach an Excel Range right within the mind map that pertained to each of the classrooms. At once it was very easy to see the software titles and the costs associated for each of the teachers classrooms. Now I had to do a breakdown for the professional development and decided to use the Insert Spreadsheet in MindManager Pro 7 to figure out the associated costs. When I was done I had the complete picture in front of me for each of the classrooms and the associated costs.

Since I needed to send this proposal to the Superintendent I decided to export the mind map to Microsoft Word and made sure to check off Export Data containers, Insert Table of Contents, and Export Overview Map, when presented with the Export Dialog box. When MindManager Pro 7 had completed the process, I simply opened the document in Microsoft Word and had a very professionally formatted document with a Table of Contents to email to the Superintendent. By selecting Export Data containers all of my Excel data was neatly put into a table format within the proposal. Just today I received these comments from the Superintendent in an email, "Give me a few days to review this and get back to you. Thanks~very professional!" While initially I had never thought of doing the proposal with MindManager Pro 7, the results turned out spectacular. This is a definite repeat for me when doing written proposals.