Best way to format a cover letter with boilerplate into a template?

Jamie Merwin

Hello! How do you incorporate a cover letter into a proposal template? My challenges are:

1. Cover letter will be customized for almost every proposal. There is a boilerplate to start from but we customize it for each proposal.
2. Cover letter must live BEFORE the TOC in the proposal template (and after the cover page).

The format of the cover letter will be the same every time and I know I can use merge tags to pull in the customer's info & project name, etc. Some of our proposals use Q&A pairs and others use Sections. How would you recommend I tackle this?

Robert Cantrell

Hey Jamie! I believe we worked on this with Stella and the team, but to reiterate the steps:

1. Start with a boilerplate cover letter as a Section Template or reusable document element within Responsive. This allows you to maintain a consistent format and easily update the template as needed.
2. For customization, use merge tags within the cover letter template to dynamically pull in customer-specific and project-specific information such as customer name, contact, project name, and other relevant data. Merge tags can be mapped to both project-level and organization-level fields and will be replaced with the correct values upon export.
3. In your proposal template, structure the document so the cover page comes first, followed by the cover letter section, and then the table of contents. Responsive allows you to define the order of sections in your branded response template, ensuring the cover letter appears after the cover page and before the TOC.
4. Whether your proposal uses Q&A pairs or Sections, you can insert the cover letter section at the appropriate place in your template structure. For proposals built with Sections, simply add the cover letter as the first section after the cover page. For Q&A-based proposals, include the cover letter section in the template and ensure it is populated at export.
5. When exporting, select the appropriate branded response template that includes the cover page, cover letter section, and TOC in the desired order. Users can update the TOC to reflect the final document structure after export.

Robbie