Final+report+proposal

TO: Proximity Media Teams FROM: Paul Miers DATE: Jan. 11, 2010 SUBJECT: Final Report Proposal

Your next assignment for this class is to write a proposal (2-3 pp.) for the formal report you will submit at the end of the semester. Here I describe the basic format for the final report, how to develop topics for your report proposal, and finally how to write the proposal itself.


 * F****inal report format**

The final report is a document which can be sent to Proximity clients and/or readers of our blog. You can find the format for the document (and a sample proposal) on the assignments page in this wiki.

The content used in that document is from a standard business strategy report intended to tell clients how they can use dynamic ad placement on cable TV. Your report, as I discuss below, need not be confined to a standard business strategy topic. The critical point to note now is that the report format provides a modular framework which you will customize for your topic. All reports will have a standard cover page, table of contents, executive summary, 5-7 narrative body pages organized by first order topic headings, and a reference page. How many (if any) and what kinds of figures, tables, and attachments you add to your report will depend on your topic. The final version of your report proposal will describe how you expect to organize your report's components.


 * Report topics**

The critical constraint on your report topic is the length of the narrative body. Proximity reports are intended to be //concise// documents which address a specific business issue, present a particular case study, or report specific details of a research project. Each report should cover a topic which is either about or of interest to Gen-Y. These constraints work to your advantage because they both put a limit on how much you write and force you to focus your report's topic. Note, however, that the attachment apparatus can be used, within reason, to append a considerable amount of documentary material to your report.

After you offer a preliminary formulation of your topic in your proposal draft, I will work with you individually to tighten the focus and proposed organization of your report. Here's two kinds of topics you can propose for you report:

I encourage you to pick a topic a topic that you will find interesting to work on and/or that you could include in a portfolio of your work. Don't be constrained by your strategy report topic.
 * **//Business strategy analysis//**//.// This topic category covers any report about a particular player or the use of a particular kind of new media. You can easily develop a proposal by extending your strategy report (or the topic for any other strategy report from you team).
 * **//Social media and Gen-Y trends.//** I am using this category to cover reports which do not fit into the more narrow framework of the conventional business report and may develop a topic which crosses the boundaries defined by your team's media. Since all new media can now be consider "social media," it would not be hard to spin off a topic that fits into this category from one of the strategy reports.


 * Report proposal**

The formal report itself should be a memo addressed to your team organized with the following topic headings.

Most of the sources you will be using for the report are going to come from the Internet, particularly from blogs, rather than conventional print media or journal. The principle sources to use are the ones you may have already used for the strategy report: [|LexisNexis Academic] and Google Alerts
 * __Unheaded introduction__ where you give a brief description of the issue or problem and formally propose to write a report addressing that issue.
 * __Needs statement__ where you explain why some particular segment of Proximity clients and/or blog readers need this report. A needs statement is the most important part of any proposal. To get approval, a proposal must not only sell whatever it is proposing but it must convince decision makers that somebody actually needs the product. Writing a needs statement forces you to spell out what may be for you rather obvious logical connections or implications (e.g. we need a better mouse trap because rodents are a health hazard and current rodent extermination technology is inadequate).
 * __Report contents__ where you project the first order topics to be covered by the report and what sort of additional material you expect to include. You will no doubt make changes to this projection as you work on the report. Describing the content of the report now, however, forces you to think about it in terms of the constraints imposed by the format.
 * __Review of sources__ where you describe the basic sources you expect to use in writing the report. Your source descriptiion for the proposal //must// include an annotated list of at least //five// sources (see [|"Writing Annotated Bibliograhies"]) . Trust me on this requirement. Annotating five sources will not only vastly improve your writing on the proposal but also give you a head start on writing the report itself.

You should create a new report proposal page and post a draft of the first three sections of the report before class on Tuesday, Jan. 12. Hard copy of the proposal is due in class on Wednesday, Jan 13.