CopyDiva

In my current incarnation as La Presidente of the Colorado Business Marketing Association, I am leading up the role of a total scrap/re-do of our association website, which has served us well over the past 7 years or so, but has not kept pace with technology advances. No small task for a group that is volunteer led (while expertly managed by our Executive Director). With my able committee members, we just recently reviewed all the proposals sent to us in response to our very detailed RFP.

We spent more than a month on the RFP, because we have very specific needs for the site, as well as goals that we want to achieve with the site. We want the site to last quite a while, so we need it to be flexible, easily updated, database driven - basically, not be difficult for a volunteer organization to manage, update and yank data from. So, the requirements we put together were extensive.

With that in mind, I thought that the responses would be similar in terms of addressing each of the stated needs and goals. This was not necessarily the case. We did come up with three that did meet that standard, and these are the companies we are interviewing. But, many of these RFP’s were just littered with extraneous crap that I did not want to read, including:

• All the services the firm offers that I didn’t ask for: This was an RFP after all, not an agency review.
• Unrelated boilerplate services: The purpose of a boilerplate is to have a constant resource for consistency in presentation. That’s great, but please, if my RFP doesn’t ask about SEM, don’t give me 3 paragraphs on your philosophy plus the bio of your SM expert. It just makes your presentation longer and less helpful.
• “What you SHOULD do…”: A few of the proposals spent pages explaining that we need to make sure of X when we are building a site for SEO (as an example). Please don’t preach, just give me what I asked for!
• Management of un-asked for services: Please don’t tell me your copywriting process when, specifically in the RFP, it said that we would provide 100% of the copy.
• Spend lots of time on a minor piece of the RFP: Our RFP had very limited design needs - we are working within design standards, and are looking for a very basic, clean design that we are going to lead. This was made clear in the RFP, yet a number of the responses provided long narratives about design, images/photos. It made us feel that these firms didn’t read the RFP carefully.

The companies we ended up picking to interview directly addressed each of the major points of the RFP and didn’t focus time on things it was clear we didn’t care about.

Remember, an RFP is different than an agency review. RFP responses should:

• directly address each requirement
• limit the self-promotion
• steer clear of add-on services