When it comes to preparing winning proposals and making the most of your hard work and great ideas, these are some of the most useful sites and tools that you will encounter anywhere on the Web. They will help you to make your graphics more vivid, your text more lucid and alive, your teamwork more streamlined, and your win themes more persuasive and pronounced. If you know that you are the most qualified candidate for the project you are proposing, take advantage of these tools. With their help, your evaluators will know, too.

Visual Thesaurus

The Visual Thesaurus is an extremely useful tool during the proposal preparation process. It is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus which creates word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words. Its innovative display encourages exploration and learning. You'll understand language in a powerful new way. The Visual Thesaurus is available in both the Desktop Edition and Online Edition.

Billion Dollar Graphics - Books, DVD

		Billion Dollar Business Graphics How-to Book Michael T. Parkinson This book was made for busy business, technical, and design professionals like you. No design skill is needed to use these insider secrets to make winning graphics for presentations, proposals, sales and marketing documents, white papers, website, or other business materials that need to make a positive impression.
		Billion Dollar Graphics Spectacular PowerPoint Templates DVD Michael T. Parkinson Make an impression with new, high-end, unique PowerPoint templates. Your next presentation will leave a positive impact because you tailored your template to your audience and your subject matter.

Learn more about proposal writing at www.captureplanning.com - This site offers hundreds of free articles and numerous tutorials, workbooks, and online crash courses covering various aspects of proposal preparation on anything from the executive summary to win theme ideas to proposal sections.

http://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_improve.jsp The ideal proposal will read at approximately an 11th grade level-- intricate enough to articulate a lot of complex ideas, yet simple enough that any evaluator can understand. This free tool will test your proposal section's readability level using a variety of measurements. The program will also let you know which are your most problematic sentences, and will recommend changes accordingly.

Collaborative Tools

Low-budget, recommended for small and medium-size businesses:

GoToMeeting https://www.gotomeeting.com/

GoToMeeting is a popular and award-winning Web conferencing site that will help your business save time and travel costs by holding presentations, demonstrations, and training sessions with people from across the globe from your home, office, or conference room. You can hold unlimited online meetings for one flat fee and there is also a free trial version.

Central Desktop

With Central Desktop you can share all kinds of documents and other information and hold all sorts of conferences all from one centralized platform. Organize, share, and collaborate with employees, customers, and business partners for a fraction of the cost of traditional travel and software.

Learn more about how OST Global Solutions has experienced 30% savings from more efficient proposal management using Central Desktop.
<<OST Global Solutions case study>>

Full-out proposal collaborative tools:

Synchris http://www.synchris.com/products/privia/overview.html

Synchris is a common workspace platform on the web designed to be a virtual extension of a normal workplace environment with a user-friendly interface and little to no user training required. Synchris also features numerous products that facilitate the proposal management and development process, including Privia, which integrates document management, productivity tools, and best-practice workflows into a common workspace that will help companies to develop winning bids for contracts at the federal, state, and local levels.

MS SharePoint http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsserver/sharepoint/default.mspx

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services is a versatile technology that organizations and business units of all sizes can use to increase the efficiency of business processes and improve team productivity. With tools for collaboration that help people stay connected across organizational and geographic boundaries, Windows SharePoint Services gives people access to information they need.


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