The quality of your proposals is set by the quality of your brief. A vague brief attracts vague offers and produces disputes later.
What a good brief contains
- The research question. What are you actually trying to find out?
- What stage you are at. Designing a study, sitting on collected data, revising after review?
- The methodology, if you have one. If you do not, say so. That is itself a thing to hire for.
- The data you hold. Format, size, how it was collected, whether it is anonymised.
- What you want delivered. A cleaned dataset, an analysis with output tables, a written methods section, a full manuscript draft.
- The deadline, and whether it is hard.
- Your budget, as a range if you are unsure.
- Any rule you are bound by: institutional, funder, publisher or ethics committee.
Splitting into milestones
Break the work into phases that each end in something you can look at. "Data cleaned and coded" is a milestone. "Half the analysis" is not.
Milestones limit your exposure: you only ever have one funded at a time.
What you may not post
You may not post work you intend to submit as your own. See the Academic Guidelines for where the line sits, with worked examples.