Request For Proposal Template
This tool will enable you to create a Request for Proposals. It covers the four key areas:
Your industry
Your company
Your business objectives
Your target audience
Details you need to give to your web design supplier about your company
Your detailed response to the following headings will ensure you give a designer the level of detail they need in order to put together a useful response. If you feel that there are questions you cannot answer, make sure you talk to the suppliers about what is possible and the implications of the choices you are considering. At this stage they will help you to identify what it is you think you want and be particularly helpful in your planning.
In what industry sector is your company operating?
What is the background to your company?
Who are your competitors?
You will require some competitor analysis, in order to see the context of your business. This is very likely to influence the eventual functionality and the design.
You may find the Design Councils 'Web/gap analysis tool' useful here. It can be found at http://www.design-council.org.uk/govtool/tools/dev/webgap.html
Where does this project compare to what your competitors are doing?
What are the overall business goals
Describe where you are taking your –the more you inform the designer about what you are now and where you are going, the better the outcome.
Identify your stakeholders
Who are the people you need to involve from your company, your customers, your decision makers and other people with an interest in what you are doing?
They can be involved in the project, giving you advice from their area of interest or specialist advice.
Contact details
Who is involved at this early stage, and who can answer any questions about the project?
Background to the project
Where does this fit into your overall business goals and future strategy?
What are your specific business goals?
Does this project run in parallel to any other events, for example, marketing and promotional events, new product launch, new business section?
Project Objectives
What are the objectives of this project?
These will be the business objectives that can be achieved through the project. Prioritise them in a list that helps you understand the most critical, and those that are less important.
For example you might consider a critical objective could be to increase revenue by 2% over 6 months and a less critical objective could be that you deliver all products within 24 hours (your customers may not require such fast serivce).
It is obviously important that you decide on your own priorities, as what is critical to one business is minor to another. Indicate what future developments you are contemplating and if possible break there down into stages.
Core proposition
What do you want the project to deliver and communicate about your company?
Can you put this into one sentence or proposition?
Audiences
Who are you targeting in this project?
Can you describe them, and what research do you have on them?
What kinds of material do they like to use?
What is the best way of getting their attention?
How are you going to reach them?
Describe the typical person of as many types as you are targeting. They may be customers, clients, partners and suppliers – and people inside the company.
Describe their technical profile, i.e.: type of computer they are using, browser and browser level
Describe how you see them using the site to achieve their specific goalsNM. Do you feel that any people will be using the site in unusual or extreme circumstances?
Measuring the results of your investment
What do you expect the project to achieve?
Are there indicators that would show that this project has been successful? E.g. more customers purchasing your services, or less customer complaints, or less time explaining how the product works.
Initial Functional requirements
Based on your business objectives and your understanding of your target audience, what do you need the site to do at this stage?
These should be broad and flexible - based on yours and your customers needs and not jumping to solutions.
Will you want to sell something over the web?
Which of these are critical, and which are desirable?
What existing IT systems do you have?
Network
Database
Inventory
Shopping cart
Other
Will you need the site to grow, or take on additional capabilities? Can these be phased for development?
Design
Outline any existing corporate identity or logo style, design or brand guidelines you have. You may have such guideline from a design company who created your current corporate identity.
Give the designer an idea of your views on any existing Web sites you have, particularly if the project is to improve that site, or will in some way be connected to it.
Make a record of any web sites you may have a preference for, e.g.: sites you find interesting visually or in the way they work.
Budgets and resources
What finances have you allocated for this project?
Is there an absolute ceiling?
What people resources do you have for the management of this project?
Services
Do you think at this stage that you might need other services? Is the company you are using able to provide all of the elements you might need, for example:
photography
illustration
specialist coding
video conversion
scanning or image processing
branding
data inputting or administrative services
copy writing
Discuss with a supplier if they can identify there any possible hidden costs, e.g.: web hosting, server capacity, copywriting, image licensing or creation, usability testing, project management, site management.
Indicate where if appropriate there is any flexibility in their costs, and indicate the dependencies and when they are needed in the project.
Time
When does the project have to be completed?
Are there smaller deadlines or milestones within this schedule?
Identify any milestones you have in your own business that they should bear in mind.
Are there other dependant events? E.g. marketing activity
Distribution
Will you need to get a product or service to the end user?
How do you currently do this?
What ideas do you have for changing or improving this?
After the launch
Do you expect to maintain the site yourself?
Do you expect to be able to enter details into the site yourself?
Do you want a company that will do this ongoing work for you?
Responses to the RFP
Finally you should indicate by when they should let you know that they intend to respond, and by when they need to deliver the response.
You should also indicate how extensive you would like the response to be (5-6 pages should be reasonable) and what format it should be in (posted, Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat).
Use the points that come out of these considerations to send to at least 3 web design suppliers you have found in your research.
What the designer should deliver in response to your RFP
It is best to involve them in helping you to identify what you are trying to achieve. After your discussions, they should respond with the following:
A method to review your ideas from the technical perspective
Technical questionnaire (questions on proposed technologies and development environments).
An indication of how they will deliver
This may involve a solution delivery questionnaire (methodologies employed, design approaches time frames, etc.).
Availability
They will supply an indication of the supplier's general availability and how flexible this is.
Credentials
The supplier needs to include their credentials including their previous clients and projects, company background, and their approach.
In order to help you to effectively compare like with like it is important to emphasise to the supplier that their response should follow the structure of your RFP, and that all costings should be linked to your cost headings.
This template is a part of Web Design for Business, a tool for managing web design for small and medium sized businesses produced by the Design Council and can be found at http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/webdesignforbusiness.org .
Disclaimer: Whilst the Design Council takes every care to ensure that materials, information and data (together the 'Materials') are accurate and up-to-date, we must emphasise that the materials are provided "as is" and without warranty or guarantee of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory, or whether relating to title, the rights of third parties or otherwise.
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