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O P I N I O N
Boilerplate a la carte
S tandardizing marketing text seems like a great idea. You don’t have to write generic sections every time you start a statement of qualifications or proposal. You just import the “about the firm” section, and the “project staffing” or “project experience” introduction from the appropriate existing files. Marketing text has to be what the project owner needs to see. If you can standardize to accommodate an array of proposal types, great. If not, develop new recipes.
Bernie Siben THE FAST LANE
Sounds like a great timesaver, right?
But the text was so generic that anyone reading it knew it was boilerplate. “Standardized text is text pulled out of the database; we used to call that ‘boilerplate,’ and many people argued that it was always bad to use boilerplate in a proposal.” At the headquarters office, marketing staff created documents that included more than 15 pages of resumes and projects that were not relevant to the potential client’s project. And because most people assume that what is already in the database
So what’s the downside?
In most of the ways that count, standardized text is text pulled out of the database; we used to call that “boilerplate,” and many people argued that it was always bad to use boilerplate in a proposal. In the early 1990s, my then employer got a database with virtually unlimited capability for expansion. When populated with firm capabilities, awards, resumes, project experience, and other information, the database could easily produce a document of more than 150 pages including any or all of the firm’s offerings. And it could produce the document in both regular text and SF 254/255 (now SF 330) formats.
See BERNIE SIBEN, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER June 11, 2018, ISSUE 1252
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