What is a Proposal Coordinator?
Meet Martha Black.
President
Proposal Writer and Manager
Bio
Martha Black has been a Proposal Coordinator for over 30 years. She started her own consulting firm in 1995 and focuses primarily on environmental remediation projects (the removal of pollution and contaminants from water and soil).
How did she get started in this profession?
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Martha's original intent after college was to get into public relations. She started out writing copy for television and radio but found it to be an unstable job that did not pay well. She saw a job posting for a proofreader for government contracts at an environmental consulting firm and decided to try it out. Although when she went to college there were no degrees offered in technical communications, she always had an interest in it. She started off proofing proposals at the firm and would keep herself busy in between work by reading old proposals. In time as she gained more experience, she became a junior copywriter that helped prepare proposals, and then was soon after promoted to a full proposal writer.
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How does she describe her job?
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In her current job as a proposal coordinator, she likes to describe herself as a traffic cop. It is her responsibility to direct her team to make sure that everything runs smoothly and that tasks stay on schedule. Her writing is centered on technical proposals and project submittals (i.e., Work Plans, Quality Control Plans, Environmental Protection Plans, Emergency Response Plans, Community Air Monitoring Plans, H&S Plans, etc.) that deal with complex environmental remedial action (RA) projects. These are diverse scops of work that require significant collaboration between specialty contractors, engineers, health and safety specialists, estimating, operations, and the legal/contracts team.
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The projects she takes on have a lot of moving parts, in terms of the amount and type of information she works with, and the various teams she is a part of that draft the proposals/submittals. As a proposal writer/editor, her goal is to ensure that the document has "one voice" A disjointed document with many voices or different styles implies that the various companies/specialists/departments are not a collaborative unit. A cohesive document with one voice sends the message that the team has worked together to plan/estimate/design the project, and this provides reassurance that this collaboration will, by extension, translate to well-executed field implementation. The Project Owner must be comfortable in the knowledge that the contractor they hire to implement the work will do so safely, cost-effectively, and in accordance with all applicable federal/state/local laws and regulations.
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Possible consequences of poor work
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If a proposal is submitted and it is not compliant with all standards and procedures, then it will not be considered for a bid and the team could lose out on a big project, a job in progress could be shut down, or the entire project is fined for delays in work. In addition, an extreme consequence of poor work is that if the proper experts and people certified do not review and sign off on certain aspects of the project, then there are health and safety risks for those working in the field.
It is imperative that Martha submit all proper documentation to the appropriate channels in a timely manner in order to avoid any chances of financial and safety risks.
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Advice for those interested in becoming a proposal coordinator
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There is a lot of work available out there and it is not going away.
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Get an internship and work as much as you can at it, even if you are just starting out.
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Apply as an assistant and read as much as you can and ask any and all questions you have.
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Pay attention, be detail-oriented, and follow instructions.
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Things are constantly changing (in every field) and it is important to be able to adapt.
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Do the best you can because mistakes happen; it is an incredibly fast-paced environment.
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What is the work environment like?Martha workes remotely from home, and she has throughout her entire career. Most of her clients are in New York and New Jersey, so using Microsoft Teams, Sharepoint, and cloud-based software allows her to manage a team from anywhere. If she needs specfic information from "the field" (i.e. a construction/clean up site) there are people that conduct physical walk-throughs and report the information back to her. Martha used to have to go to the site and meet with experts, but nowadays she attends these virtually. Anytime she is out of her office is time not spent writing, so travel is not usually a strong characteristic of the job.
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What is a day like for you?How much writing and general work Martha will do in a day depends on where in the development stage she is with a proposal. For small jobs, she could have 4-5 things going on in a day. However, Martha sometimes has a superfund job, and these are large government projects that are time consuming, especially close to the due date. Creating an inital proposal draft requires roughly 7-10 hours of writing, or about 90% of her work day. Early on in a project, the writing to collaboration ratio is about 50/50; she must read through and understand the current project, and then meet with her team in order to gather further project details, client information, cost estimates, etc. In the latter stages of development only about 10-20% of her day is spent writing, while the majority is focused on editing. Apart from writing proposals there are administrative duties that need to be taken care of, such as meeting with clients and billing. These can be done between projects and deadlines.
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What genres do you generally work with?Martha would broadly classify the type of writing she engages in as marketing and technical writing. While the bulk of her work consists of developing technical proposals for enviromental remediation projects, she also generates statements of qualification, assists in writing technical text for websites, and creates sales brochures and presentations. Enviromental remediation, or enviromental cleanup, also requires special plans put in place that are dependent on the project. These can include plans for operation, protection, and quality control.
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What is the collaboration process like?Martha works with a team for each proposal and there are various members involved for each stage of the project. Martha emails her team a draft schedule/checklist prior to the the initial bid development meeting/submittal planning (where documents are organized and submitted for review to try and win a contract for a project). The participants usually included at this stage are her client's estimating and operations team. Because they are all in different locations, these meetings are typically held via conference call, Microsoft meeting, or Zoom. During the meeting they discuss the project and determine what specialty subcontractors will be needed and the start/finish dates for the schedule. She adds the information to the to the schedule which is then saved to a shared (cloud-based) proposal/project folder for team members to reference. Then she emails the identified subcontractor representatives a detailed list of the information they must supply for document development, along with submittal deadlines. As she recieves the information from various team members, Martha updates the schedule/checklist by editing the recieved data and adding it to her draft submittal document. Then initial, secondary, and final drafts of the submittal document are sent to identified team members for their own review and input as indicated on the schedule. It is her job to identify any missing/insufficent/conflicting information within the draft documents for reviewers to address, along with incorporating the edits and additions from other teams into subsequent draft/final submittals. She remains in contact with her team members throughout the entire process to ensure that the completed final document is up to industry standards and complies with any and all regulations. See the Document Types section for samples of the schedule and checklist.
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What tools and technologies do you use the most?An interesting thing that Martha has noticed during her career is that technical jobs are primarily based in Microsoft, and academic jobs prefer Apple products and software. A majority of the projects that Martha works on come from the state and federal government, which use Microsoft suites. Proposal writing software is available, but Microsoft is preferred. In addition, she uses PDF writer software and cloud-based systems. Cloud-file sharing is imperative for such a position, because the documents she creates are so large, and this easily allows for simultaneous collaboration. After working under these industry standards for so long, Martha has been able to create templates for the statements and plans that tend to reoccur. This allows for more efficient document creation and faster plan approval overall. She describes the templates as "living, breathing documents" that are sometimes subject to change. It is not often that Martha needs to learn new tools or technologies, but if the need arises she will do her own research to learn about the topic before introducing it into her work.