Boilerplates, Go-Bys, Narratives
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Boilerplates, go-bys, and narratives are reusable written assets that describe a firm's qualifications, approach, or experience: boilerplates are standardized passages used across many proposals, go-bys are prior submissions repurposed as structural templates, and narratives are the substantive project- or service-specific stories that do the persuasive work in a pursuit.
Why the distinctions matter more than the labels
Most teams use these three terms interchangeably, which is where quality control breaks down. A boilerplate firm overview has a different update cycle and ownership than a project narrative written for a specific SF-330 Section F submission. Go-bys carry structural risk that boilerplates do not: a go-by pulled from a 2019 CMAR submission and dropped into a design-bid-build pursuit can introduce the wrong delivery language, wrong fee framing, and wrong evaluation criteria assumptions before anyone notices. The most experienced proposal managers keep these categories mentally separate even when the file system does not, because the failure modes are completely different.
Where these assets live and why that creates pursuit problems
In most firms under 500 people, boilerplates and go-bys live in a shared drive organized by whoever last touched them, which means freshness and accuracy are unknown at the moment of need. A two-week RFP timeline does not leave room to audit whether the firm overview still reflects current staff counts, office locations, or active licenses before it goes into Section B of the SF-330. Narratives are worse: they often exist only as PDFs of submitted proposals, making them hard to extract, harder to update, and nearly impossible to search by relevant attribute like project size, client type, or delivery method. The version a proposal coordinator pulls on day one may have been accurate for a 2021 shortlist submission and wrong for everything since.
What good asset management actually requires
Maintaining these assets is not an archiving task; it is a continuous editorial task. Boilerplates need assigned owners, a defined review cadence tied to real triggers (a merger, a licensing change, a rebrand), and a visible last-verified date. Go-bys should be tagged with enough context to make their source pursuit legible: client type, delivery method, project size, and whether the firm won. Narratives benefit most from structured metadata because they are the assets most likely to be retrieved under pressure and dropped in without review. Kantiv connects these assets to verified project records and personnel history, so when a narrative surfaces during a pursuit, the team can see what it was originally written for and whether the underlying facts still hold. Treating these three asset types as a single undifferentiated pile is one of the cleaner explanations for why shortlisted firms still submit proposals with stale data.
Related terms