So the next staged formula is the content formula, and there are four parts to the content formula that are really critical for you to understand. The thing is, the right content that addresses the question wins the most points, wins the tender, etc. And what do I mean by that? The thing about your submission is it actually comes down to what the question is asking, and that’s what determines the content you provide. 

And there are four things that you need to make sure of that you look at, and you need to analyse the question. That’s the key component to this formula is you need to analyse and fully understand the question in order to know what content you provide.

The first one of these is parts. And what I’m saying is how many parts are there to the question? Are there four parts to the question? Is there two parts? Or is it a very simple question, and there’s only one part to the question? Time and time again, I’ve seen submissions that don’t address the whole question. They’ll only address one part, or if it’s a four-part question, they’ll only address two parts. 

And it’s unfortunate because it affects scoring. So if the question’s worth 10 points, there are four parts to the question, you’ve only addressed one part, you can only get a maximum of two-and-a-half points. Wow, that’s how critical this is. So I want you to break down the question. Watch for the word and. The word and indicates it’s another part, or there’s a new context. 

And we’ll talk about context in another unit following, but watch for the word and. I’ll give you an example. Someone might be asking you what’s the need for the project, and how is it identified? Wow, two parts to the question, different context. So that’s how critical it is.

The second part is to understand the subject that the question is asking about. And I’ll give a couple of examples. In a grant, somebody said I’m looking at this question and it’s called what’s your capacity to deliver. The very same question’s actually asked twice, but if you looked at the subject, the subject in that the first section of the grant was about the organisation, and the subject in the, it was the third section of the grant, was about the project team. So the subjects differs. The question might be the same, but the subject differs. So it’s really important to make sure you understand the subject of that question.

The third part is understanding the context of that question, or of that part of the question. So an example I gave earlier was what’s the need for the project, and how has it been identified? Now, what’s the need is quite simply saying this is the need. How it’s been identified is a different context because now it’s asking you what’s the research, the information, have you done focus groups, etc, etc So you can see there are very distinct different contexts. 

I’ll give you another example of the context in a question, and this is a pretty generic one: risk management. So they’ll ask you how do you identify, monitor, and mitigate risks, okay? What’s the subject? Risk. What are the context? How do you identify, monitor, and mitigate? So that means that one question has three different context areas, which means you have to address those three different context areas. Because if you don’t address them, you’ll lose points, because you haven’t told them everything that they’re asking for.

The fourth part to watch is the actions. And what I mean by that is, what action is the question asking you to provide? So, let’s look at a couple of words. And just to note here, I’m not focusing on verbs or action verbs. I’m asking what the action is that the question wants. So for example, what? What is a descriptor. What is giving enough information so that the person can understand. For example, could be a descriptor on what the target users are, who they are, etc. You know, what target uses is this project including? 

Well, that’s a descriptor, isn’t it? So give me enough information about them, so I can actually understand who they are. How question is a process question. So how is, how did you do this? It’s like the steps to it. So how did you understand it? How did you identify? Etc. Another one might be describe. So again describe enough information, so I can paint a picture. Another one is demonstrate. Now demonstrate for many people don’t get demonstrate right. Demonstrate is, it’s okay to tell me. But I need to understand that you can do it that you’ve done it, you can implement it. I need to understand how it works in practise. So with the word demonstrate, use a case study, an example to show that you actually understand and that you can apply what it is the question is asking.