The standard RFP process

In a typical RFP process, you send out your project brief document to a list of agencies, give them two or three weeks to respond, and evaluate their proposals. The agency that writes the most compelling proposal document tends to move forward. Their proposal seems to understand your needs, uses your language, and presents a polished project vision.

In essence, you’ve received a marketing and sales document. It might not be very detailed, but it is compellingly confident. After all, it needed to be created quickly to meet your submission deadline. And there wasn’t much time for having project evaluation and discovery conversations.

You know that project management and communication styles matter. Maybe you even asked for information about these process aspects to be included in agency proposals. But you haven’t had a chance to see whether the participating agencies walk the walk or just talk the talk. So you have to take their word for it. Considering that an average website design process will see you working with an agency for anywhere between six months to a year or longer, that’s a rather big benefit of the doubt to give.

What’s missing

Look, we know that most nonprofit teams are already stretched beyond capacity. Finding time for pre-proposal conversations with multiple agencies can feel like a big ask. Narrowing down the candidates first, then having fewer conversations, certainly has its appeal. But if you’re narrowing down the candidates based on their proposals without any initial conversations, then you’re not getting the full picture. And agencies are also not getting a full picture of your project if they don’t have pre-proposal conversations with you.

What about having conversations via email? Going this route might feel like your team’s time is still protected, and you might expect to get more thorough, thoughtful, and detailed proposals while getting a feel for agency culture. But in reality, sending and answering questions via email isn’t the same as having a conversation. In the interest of turning a call into an email, what’s missing is depth. In a conversation, follow-up questions bring up more nuanced perspectives and uncover the true problems underneath the symptoms your website is exhibiting. In a conversation, you also get to see how an agency’s team shows up in real-time.

This means that the proposals you’ll receive will reflect a much deeper understanding of your unique situation. They will include more accurate scopes and more realistic timelines. They’ll create a lot less risk of a misaligned expectation or underestimated complexity making it into the contract and coming up mid-project to throw this off the tracks.

And you get an idea of how an agency’s team thinks, how they communicate on the spot, and how they might handle a delicate conversation. All the things that are going to matter a lot more than a polished sales document once the RFP process is over and your collaboration starts.

Getting a glimpse at that early on is worth making the effort for. If an agency is just not engaging with curiosity, thoughtful questions, and strategic thinking or if you’re already feeling like just a line item this early in the process, you don’t have to invite them to submit a proposal. This is time saved for them having to put one together, and time saved for you having to read it.

How to make it work

Simply adding more pre-proposal conversations might, indeed, overwhelm your staff. The first step in making sure it doesn’t is limiting the number of agencies you engage in this process. Three to four is usually plenty. More than that, and your staff (or the selection team/committee) will run into bandwidth issues, which is likely to affect the quality of conversations they’ll be able to have. Now you’re right back to making your decision based on the proposal. Being selective from the start will allow you to focus on engaging with agencies you’re truly interested in working with and honour your staff’s true capacity.

Secondly, including pre-proposal conversations means you need to set aside enough time for them to take place. We recommend at least a month between the initial outreach and proposal due date. This helps to ensure that there’s time to align schedules and have truly meaningful conversations. This also gives agencies enough time to come up with proposals that thoughtfully address your unique challenges and goals.

Finally, rather than leading this process for agencies, we recommend that you let the agencies lead the process. Think about it, your staff is likely sending out a website redesign RFP once every few years (maybe once a decade) at most, while agencies are constantly in the project evaluation and discovery process. An experienced agency will have its own preferred process that works well because it’s been optimized over many years, with many projects and clients. Letting them run this process means you get the best they can offer. This might include a few conversations, maybe a questionnaire or some other form of “client homework”. Every agency will have a slightly different process because every agency is unique. Rather than asking them to fit a mould you’ve set out, let them be the experts that they ought to be in order to deliver great results for your project.

Final thoughts

In the end, the RFP process can be run as an audition or as a partnership. If what you’re looking for is an agency that’s the right fit for your project and your team, and if what you’re looking for in the working relationship is a partnership, then running this process as a partnership will create much better outcomes.