Redaction Skills for Proposal Professionals

Imagine submitting a winning proposal, only to see your company’s trade secrets, your “secret sauce”, exposed to the world due to poor redaction.

Now, your competitor can “ghost” you in future bids, steal your proprietary solutions, or capture your valuable client information. Yikes.

Or worse, a government agency rejects your entire multi-million-dollar proposal because you didn’t follow the RFP’s instructions for the redacted copy, sending months of hard work and revenue potential down the drain.

By mastering redaction skills, you can avoid such costly mistakes and ensure your proprietary proposal content is protected in competitive bidding environments.

What is redaction?

When most people hear “redaction,” they think of government-redacted documents. Thousands of pages with names, sentences, paragraphs, and even entire pages crudely blacked out with a thick marker. But for proposals, don’t go that route. In the procurement arena, redaction requires a bit more finesse.

The goal of proposal redaction is uniquely focused on safeguarding sensitive data like pricing, signatures, trade secrets, and client details. There’s often a variety of documents, involved too, such as word processing files, spreadsheets, and slide presentations.

Redaction of proposal content typically occurs as the result of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by competitors. Also, government Contracting Officers may request redacted proposals from offerors upon submittal, as instructed in RFPs.

Don’t get carried away

Redaction in proposals is a balancing act. Over-redaction, such as blacking out entire pages from top to bottom, is unacceptable, while under-redaction risks exposure of sensitive content. The goal is to redact just enough to protect proprietary data while keeping the document recognizable as a proposal. Consider the “three R’s” of content concealment:

• Redaction: obscures information from the reader’s view, think black bars over text, while preserving the document’s structure and context.
• Removal: deletes content entirely, sometimes leaving gaps that can confuse readers or suggest tampering. (It’s a common misconception that removal equals redaction. Best to avoid removal.)
• Replacement: an option used for replacing text with phrases like <REDACTED> to replace content. This works best when used sparingly for items like names, specific words, dates, or phrases sprinkled throughout the text.

Whichever approach you chose, redacted copies of the proposal should match the original in structure, outline, and length. You don’t want to submit a redacted copy that’s five pages shorter than the original proposal and full of empty spaces and perplexing gaps.

Also note that redacted proposal information must be customarily handled and stored as confidential. It might be difficult to justify the redaction of something as a “trade secret” if everyone in the company has access to it!

Choose redaction tools wisely

Always use secure redaction tools for permanent concealment of sensitive content. Currently, the most affordable and robust redaction tool for in-house users is Adobe Pro. It offers useful features such as customizable redaction marks, text search for redaction, batch processing, and metadata sanitization of files to prevent data recovery.

While it’s possible to redact with word processing software using a black highlighter and overlays, it can be difficult to secure metadata. Best to export the file to a Adobe PDF where redaction can be performed and the file “sanitized.”

There are also cloud-based redaction solutions available, but you may be understandably reluctant (or forbidden) to upload proprietary proposal to an online tool. And it is not an option for redacting classified material of any kind.

If you have hundreds or even thousands of pages to redact, or vast numbers of large documents that need to be redacted regularly, it’s probably worth looking into automated redaction software or companies that specialize in bulk redaction.

Some software presents unique challenges for redaction:

• Spreadsheets: Commonly used in proposals for pricing submissions, they lack secure redaction capabilities. Blackouts and overlays can be undone, so export them to PDF for redaction with Adobe Pro.

• Presentations: Many RFPs include a request for oral presentations, but slides can contain sensitive information. Redaction using blackout and overlays is reversible here as well, so again, export them to PDF for redaction with Adobe Pro.

• Videos: Video redaction is complex due to dynamic content (audio, visuals, subtitles) and metadata. Adobe Premiere Pro, however, offers permanent blurring, audio muting, and other video redaction features.

Corporate counsel

If a government agency or competitor challenges your redactions, it may be time to bring in corporate counsel. As a last resort, it’s possible to file a costly “reverse FOIA” lawsuit to protect your critical information.

Involving corporate counsel is wise for complex state/local requests due to the variety of “sunshine laws” across the nation. Some states mirror FOIA since it’s uniform, but localities may have their own laws for information requests with unique regulations and deadlines.

Also, consider cost. Lawyers are expensive, so reserve them for critical cases and handle routine redactions with trained, in-house staff and secure tools.

Regulatory landscape

To file a FOIA, see FOIA.gov, and to respond to a FOIA request, see the Department of Justice (DOJ) list of 9 FOIA exemptions. Exemption 4, trade secrets, is widely used. Also, it may be necessary to prepare a “Vaughn Index,” as part of a FOIA response, a detailed list describing each item redacted, along with specific FOIA exemptions cited and a justification for why information was withheld.

FOIA requests have a 20-business-day turnaround and FOIA officers on staff. However, state/local requests can have varied response times (e.g., 10 days in California). Be sure to research local laws and seek clarification from agencies that don’t provide guidance upfront.

Redaction best practices

• Use secure tools like Adobe Pro to lock redactions, remove metadata, and ensure redactions can’t be reversed.
• Factor in plenty of time for redaction. It’s a tedious, time-consuming task. Don’t wait until the night before the proposal is due!
• Avoid removals and omissions that change the overall appearance, format, or length of the redacted document.
• Ask agencies for specific redaction instructions. Simply stating, “Provide a redacted copy,” offers no guidance.
• Maintain separate redacted and unredacted files, labeling them clearly. Never redact the original, always use a copy.
• Keep documents with redacted information in a secure location and limit access.
• Maintain an audit trail, keeping a log of who performed redactions, what was redacted, when, and why.

Secure and effective redaction tools are essential for a proposal manager’s toolkit, and a working familiarity with redaction regulations and practices is indispensable when protecting data in a competitive bidding environment. Redaction tools are readily available, but it’s the proposal manager’s job to know what, when, where, and how to redact sensitive and proprietary information.

Claude Bauer is a Proposal Development Manager with AMERICAN SYSTEMS, Corp. (ASC). He has 25+ years’ proposal experience in federal and state/local procurement environments involving proposals of all sizes, many of which required redaction in response to freedom of information requests.  He can be reached at Claude.Bauer@AmericanSystems.com and on LinkedIn here.