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Before campaign advisors, spin doctors, influencers or ad men, there was the Greek philosopher, Aristotle. His treatise, The Rhetoric, laid out a durable blueprint for creating persuasive arguments and the elements he described are as useful today as they were in 4th century BC Greece. As proposal writers, we sometimes get lost in the weeds of data, logic models, detailed methods and other granular stuff. Preparing persuasive proposals can benefit from reviewing these classical principles.

The concept probably predates Rakesh Sondhi’s Total Strategy but a VMOST analysis is still a useful way of figuring out what your organization wants to accomplish and how it plans to go about it. Assumptions are sand traps when it comes to planning and submitting proposals. Instead of assuming “everybody knows” why we do what we do and how we do it, this is a useful framework for thinking through the hierarchy of intentions and actions for your organization.