One story about the Creative Consultancy, Persuasion Arts & Sciences (PAS), featured in Marketing News (published by the American Marketing Association, AMA) was all it took for an invitation from the prestigious Smithsonian Institution Office of Policy and Analysis in our nation's capitol to extend an RFP offer to the Minneapolis agency, which eventually landed the company a lucrative assignment.

As PAS founder Dion Hughes sees it, "Winning a government contract may seem like a matter of facts, figures, checking the right boxes. But not always. Persuasion Arts & Sciences secured its first government contract, competing against companies that seemed, on paper, to have the advantage – they were larger, more experienced in government work, and they knew how to work within the system."

Having a third-party authority like the AMA story fresh still in the minds of the Smithsonian team readily helped, illustrating the power of just one story to help an agency knock down another win.

"Our proposal centered on more qualitative issues – challenging some of the premises in the original RFP, offering up useful insights, and holding up some of our track record in effective communication in other categories. That we won the bid showed that the government is made up of humans who are trying to make a difference," Hughes notes.

"Appealing on intellectual and emotional levels can be more effective than checking the boxes.”