What to Put in the Internal Proposal So the Design Budget Gets Approved

I send a quote, and then the person who asked for it spends weeks fighting for it internally and the project dies. This happens often enough that it is worth writing down.

The reason is almost never the amount. It is that whoever signs has not been given anything they can decide on. The person who briefed me knows the problem because they live with it. The approver does not see the operational detail and is deciding from a sheet of paper. If that sheet says "improve the design", there is nothing there to approve.

Here is what separated the projects that got funded from the ones that did not.

What the approver is actually looking at

Three things.

What it costs. This is always there.

What happens if we do not do it. This is almost never there.

When and how we will know whether it worked. Also almost never there.

A proposal with the second and third blank reads, from the approver's chair, as something that can wait a quarter. Not out of indifference. There is nothing to weigh it against, and the same meeting has an item on it that stops a production line.

How to write the do nothing case

Estimates are fine here. Numbers are not optional.

Say the project is an application form. You can write this:

Of the people who reach the form today, what percentage complete it. How many drop out per month. How many of those turn up as a phone enquiry instead, and how many minutes each of those calls takes.

Most companies already hold all three. Analytics, the enquiry log, and one conversation with the team that answers the phone. Nothing new has to be researched.

What changes when you write it is the category of the request. "We want to improve this" becomes "we lose several hundred applications a month and some of that arrives as call handling cost". The first sounds like a matter of taste. The second sounds like operations.

Do not worry that the figures are rough. The approver is not checking your precision. They are checking whether the person asking understands the process numerically.

The single most effective thing: include the option of not doing it

This one genuinely works.

Write three options. Do all of it, do part of it, do none of it. Put a cost and an outcome against each.

Against the third, write zero, and in the outcome column write what continuing as we are means, using the drop out figure from above.

That changes the approver's job from approve or not approve to pick one of three. People can defer the first. The second is much harder to defer, because doing nothing has become something they have to actively choose.

A smaller scope gets approved more easily

People assume the larger proposal is the more persuasive one. It is the opposite.

As the number goes up, the decision moves up a layer, and each layer sits further from anyone who understands the work. What convinces a department head and what convinces a board are not the same document.

Cut the first engagement down to something a department head can sign off. One screen, one process, one form. Something measurable that produces a result inside three months.

Once that result exists as a number, the second budget can be several times the size and still go through. Every engagement I have been part of that grew into something substantial followed that order. I cannot think of one that started large and got approved.

Rewrite the quote for an internal audience

This part is on my side of the table too.

Quotes are written in phases. Research, design, build, validate. That is an accurate description of the work and it is unreadable to an approver, because it does not say what the money buys.

For internal use, rewrite it as outputs.

Not "design, 60 hours" but "a new application form design and the results of testing it". Not "research" but "identifying where people currently drop out".

Ask your agency to rewrite the quote for internal circulation if it helps. Few will refuse. If the project does not get approved, we do not get the work either.

Things not to say

Avoid "redesign". To an approver it sounds like changing the appearance, and changing the appearance gets filed as something whose return cannot be demonstrated.

Avoid "improve the UX" as well. If the company has no shared definition of UX, the phrase carries no information, and you will spend the meeting defining it instead of deciding anything.

Write the numbers that change instead. Completion rate, call volume, handling time. If you can write the whole proposal without using the word design once, that is the version most likely to pass.

When stalling is the correct outcome

One honest note to finish on.

Some of the proposals that die at approval should die. A project with no settled answer to what problem it solves does not produce a result even when it is funded. I have taken work in that state and it went badly for both sides.

Not being able to write the proposal is sometimes not a writing problem. It is a signal that the problem has not been decided yet. When that is the case, a small paid piece of scoping work gets you there faster than another attempt at the document.

You are welcome to bring me in at that stage. In practice it is where most of my work starts.