Get Hyped for This Month’s Meeting!

Get Hyped for This Month’s Meeting!

Writing a Winning Proposal

Nick Ducharme

By: Nick Ducharme
Vice President
Florida Chapter, STC

Friends,

I hope everyone had a happy and healthy holiday season! For me, it’s strange to jump back into the thick of things after enjoying some days off. Nonetheless, it seems the time has come to recalibrate. J

To make this transition easier, STC Florida has decided to start 2019 off with a bang. We’ve picked yet another highly-requested topic category from our summer 2018 survey. Better yet, we’ve selected our very own Dan Voss to present about it for our January chapter meeting.

I’ve known Dan for a while now. He’s one of the most lively and motivated people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting, and he has decades of experience with writing proposals—which is what his presentation will be all about.

Please click here and RSVP for “Writing a Winning Proposal: ‘Near Misses’ Only Count in Horseshoes and Nuclear War.” by Dan Voss. Official presentation and speaker descriptions are below. (I think these will give you a sense of his aforementioned liveliness!)

 

Promotion for Presentation, “Writing a Winning Proposal: ‘Near Misses’ Only Count in Horseshoes and Nuclear War.”

In this dynamic and entertaining presentation, 40-year aerospace proposal writer/manager and STC Fellow Dan Voss presents the basic principles of writing a successful proposal, along with a liberal dose of lurid proposal “war stories” from his long career at Lockheed Martin, where he participated on more than a hundred proposal teams that collectively won over $20 billion in contracts for the company.

Worry not, however, that the presentation is relevant only to fiercely competitive aerospace proposals. Originally presented to a graduate class in technical communication at Mercer University in 2014 and since presented at the University of Central Florida, this presentation focuses on basic principles that apply to a much broader range of proposals in which technical communication practitioners may become involved, including commercial proposals, grant proposals, and internal business proposals within corporations. It also applies to job placement and career development … resumes, portfolios, interviews, strategic career advancement … basically anything that involves “selling” a product or service … which may include YOU, as a technical communication student or practitioner.

The marketing principles presented also apply to scholarship applications, awards applications, even radio and internet contests—indeed, all of these are, at the core, “proposals.” The only proposal these principles can’t promote success on are marriage proposals. Dan is still working on that!

 

 

About the Speaker

Dan Voss

Dan Voss is a “retired” but still active proposal specialist for Lockheed Martin who also provides industry training workshops in business and technical communication. An STC Fellow, Dan is recognized for his publications and presentations on diverse subjects at STC’s international conference and was the recipient of the STC President’s Award for his efforts on student outreach. With Lori Allen, he coauthored Ethics in Technical Communication: Shades of Gray, published in 1998—for which he became the only non-engineer to receive Lockheed Martin’s coveted Author-of-the-Year recognition. He has coauthored four research articles for STC’s Technical Communication as well as four articles for intercom. Dan and now-chapter-president Bethany Aguad, then a student at UCF, co-managed STC International’s student outreach and mentoring initiative from 2012 through 2014 and presented at Leadership Day at two international STC conferences. They also coauthored Chapter 5, “Teaching the Ethics of Intercultural Communication,” in an acclaimed anthology of research articles Teaching and Training for Global Engineering, edited by Kirk St.Amant and Madelyn Flammia and published in 2017.

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