RFPs are usually a memorable experience for the wrong reasons. They can be a pain in the neck to write, answer, evaluate, and everything in between. They suck up time from everybody’s calendars with numerous meetings and presentations. And then right at the end of it Procurement might still try to make a case for a solution that gets 5*’s for affordability but 1* for everything else.

If the above is relatable, there has to be a better way of doing RFPs. Yes, many buying decisions require an RFP process and there’s no way around it. But surely they don’t have to be as painful – neither for you nor the participating vendors!

Don’t blend RFIs with RFPs. 

RFPs aren’t meant for broad market studies and collecting general information about potential solutions to a problem you have at hand. The narrower the scope of an RFP, the more likely you are to get the proposal you’re looking for – and breaking the process into several steps helps you get there. 

For illustrative purposes let’s say your conversion rate hasn’t been on par with your competitors, and you need to better personalize the donor experience on your website. That can be solved, partially and differently, by four different options: an A/B testing platform, a complete redesign of your existing web properties, an outsourced donation form provider, and a content management system with automation functionality. 

Running a complete RFP across the above four options and allowing tech companies and resellers to apply for the A/B testing and CMS categories will leave you thousands of pages to consume. 

A targeted RFI into 2-3 companies in each category you’ve found on the first page of Google search results, asking them for no more than five pages in response and covering topics such as prominent use cases, pricing models, and case studies from the nonprofit vertical, will allow you to select the correct category of the solution – with much less time wasted.

Do the prep work. 

Most RFPs fail to live up to what they’re meant to be – a match-making tool between a problem that you have and the vendor or solution provider that can solve it most effectively – because of one of these four things:

1. The goals of the RFP are unclear to the vendors participating. 
2. The RFP is too broad and should be broken into several different ones to avoid compromises. 
3. The selection criteria are wrong. 
4. The right partner doesn’t participate in the process. 

Let’s break each of these down.

1. Set clear goals upfront.

It’s obvious – but not as simple as it sounds. I’ve spoken about setting objectives for a new tool based on the Donor Lifecycle in SPN #36 – check it out if you haven’t yet. It’s important to note here that the goals of the RFP will differ from those of the solution you choose to implement. 

Are you running an RFP to rubber-stamp a renewal with the incumbent? Selecting the best-price reseller for a tool you’ve already chosen? Looking for more handholding than is usually expected? 

Don’t hide the “why” in the process. The more transparent you are about what you’re looking for, the more tailored proposals you’ll get, as opposed to long reads full of marketing fluff with little substance.

In the above example for illustrative purposes, if you’re looking to replace an outgoing platform – and you haven’t done it in advance of releasing the RFP – you’re likely looking for three elements. 1) The platform that suits your needs. 2) An implementation partner. 3) Somebody who will ensure you get the results from it – whether by training your existing in-house team or by providing managed services for some time.

2. Compromises kill RFPs. 

Very few agencies or companies can do all three above, and a generic “Donor Conversion Rate Improvement” RFP will attract compromised solutions missing out in at least one of the areas above – before even getting to the price component.

If your fundraising/marketing team has the capacity, it’s much more effective to split the process into three subsequent selections, speeding up the timeline of every one of them. 

Your in-house technical team is your best ally when selecting the right platform for the job. They can help you limit the consideration set by filtering out the solutions that won’t work with tools you already have in the mix. For others, you can directly reach out to those tech providers. 

I’m a big fan of using Gartner quadrants for this (even if the providers are too expensive, the quadrants themselves are thought-provoking enough) and limiting the total number of participants to no more than five.

The RFP itself shouldn’t focus on whether the tool can do the job. Usually, all of them can and all of them have similar feature sets that mostly mirror one another. Spend time discussing the forward-looking aspects that only the company developing the features would know. For example, a roadmap for evolving the tool, unique features that their competitors and yours don’t offer, and the pricing models they employ. 

I strongly recommend only approaching tech companies for implementation proposals if you have a competent in-house team that has experience working hands-on with the tools in the recent past.

Implementation services provided by tech companies are usually focused on implementing the tool according to the best practices of the tool – not on achieving the best results for your organization. Service-only companies tend to do better. 

3. Build the proper selection criteria. 

It’s less important for the tool selection but vital for the implementation and management partners. Most of them fill out multiple RFPs per month – it’s the least desirable new business channel with the lowest win rate for these companies, and most proposals are reusable marketing materials. 

Cookie-cutter selection criteria based on the overview of capabilities, team composition, and past success stories end up being an exercise in creative writing done by marketing departments much more than a representation of the results they can drive for your organization. 

In my experience, the most successful RFPs include some live cases. If we’re trying to select an A/B tool implementation vendor, an example would be to share your existing donor journey data with participating vendors. Then ask them to suggest a roadmap for experiments over the first three months of the work, as well as a mockup for the reports they’d use to share the results back with you. 

Regarding the financial part of the RFP, leave it for the selected set of vendors that technically qualify later in the process. Instead focus the initial questions around pricing models and how the partner would ensure alignment between their incentives and the performance the organization is getting. 

In building the proper selection criteria it also helps keep anybody wearing a procurement hat at peace, since you’d only need their involvement at later stages of the RFP for a limited subset of 2-3 vendors that made it to the presentation round.   

4. Get the right partner to bid. 

Don’t make your gut decision in advance and use the RFP process to rubber-stamp it later. Your process shouldn’t discourage qualified vendors from bidding. Long-form RFPs with just a list of standard requirements, or the ones asking for too much free work upfront with no communication, are examples of a process that discourages a qualified vendor. Here are a few tactics you can deploy: 

a) Curate the list of participants – ask your existing partners for referrals, source a list of companies working for competitor organization’s, promote publicly the invitation for qualified vendors to participate.

b) Both in the RFP itself – and in the bidder conference – explicitly ask for no marketing fluff and to focus on showcasing their abilities to solve your problem at hand. This will likely be a fresh tone for most participating vendors. 

c) Keep the written RFP short, leaving the most non-essential questions for the presentation round. This will help you hear teams doing the work speak on their feet and leave you plenty of information to disqualify most participants before the presentation. 

5. Leverage an external search firm.

The final consideration I have here is to consider hiring an external search firm to conduct an RFP on your behalf, at least for the implementation services. If your budget is limited, you can employ them only to promote the RFP within their roster – widening your reach.