I don’t have any good reason for not blog­ging recently – only excuses. I’ve had sev­eral other things taking my atten­tion and effort. The biggest thing has been my work on my inter­ac­tive travel jounal. The pre­lim­i­nary con­tent pop­u­la­tion is nearly com­plete. I’d say it’s about 85% fin­ished. Once that task is com­plete, I can begin enhancing the con­tent and devel­oping the graphic design.

At work I’ve had a huge number of pro­posals to develop. That’s how it seems, anyway. The economy may be poor, but there is still work out there. Unfor­tu­nately, there is also a larger number of devel­opers com­pleting for the work. I’ve done some work trying to figure out dif­ferent ways of pre­senting our ser­vices and qual­i­fi­ca­tions. I’m learning ways to improve pro­posals not only from the repeated oppor­tu­ni­ties to prac­tice but also from the RFPs them­selves. Seeing what a poten­tial client want in a pro­posal gives me ideas for how to for­mu­late pro­posals for other projects.

In the process of researching infor­ma­tion for my pro­posals, I came across two very inter­esting pieces of infor­ma­tion. First is the name of the person who designed Barack Obama’s logo. The other is the name of the com­pany that devel­oped the community-building tools on the Obama cam­paign web­site. I found these things because the pro­posals I have been preparing are mostly for non-profit orga­ni­za­tions that are involved in fundraising or com­mu­nity building activ­i­ties. I have seen very few cor­po­rate RFPs lately.