From Gayle Carney and Kate Purcell, co-founders of Pulse Forward
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| Gayle Carney | Kate Purcell |
You know in your heart that it’s time to update your association’s website, or maybe your organization’s logo or tagline is uninspired and you’d love it to sing. New leadership, growing membership, more member benefits, a large upcoming event – or sheer embarrassment – are all common motivations for a professional association to redesign its website. Time to write a request for proposals (RFP).
We’ve seen a bazillion association website RFPs, and they all run along the same lines: “Our old website doesn’t represent who we are today. We want a site that is clean and modern, attracts funders and new members and provides resources for our existing members. Make sure it’s easy to update and, oh yeah, have it done in three months.”
But those desires just skim the surface. What you really want is a website that reflects your association’s deeply held mission and gives your logo meaning. These aspects rarely come across in an RFP — perhaps because they require a readiness to dig deep.
Dive-In with Five Questions
- Have you updated your association’s strategic plan? If so, you are more likely to build a website that stays relevant as your membership grows.
- Are your logic models strong? What you choose to say and not say on your website shows how you think you make your members’ lives better. Your visitors will pick up on weaknesses and uncertainty.
- How healthy is your internal culture? Internal issues around decision-making and inclusiveness surface during a website development project. You can use the process to strengthen relationships or increase dissention.
- Do you have data to back up your claims of success? Good design and writing alone won’t grab your members’ attention. Infographics are compelling because users pay attention to images that carry information and ignore purely decorative ones.
- What strategies do you use to recruit and retain members? It’s vital to weave your online and offline strategies into your site. For example, if you plan to draw in millennials, make sure you have a clear strategy for courting them after they request information on your website.
The Power of Going Deep
Associations exert enormous influence over their industry niche. They create communities, ignite innovation, and influence policy. And when associations do great work, it’s incumbent upon them to ensure it is reflected in their brands. To get to the heart of what makes you unique, you must look inside, figure out what you really want to say and then say it well. You’ll reaffirm your purpose and your new website is likely to engage the people who visit.
Pulse Forward partners with social change-makers to help them tell their stories and garner support for their causes through branding, design, and organizational strategy.
This touches on a mistake that many organizations make when engaging in these types of projects. An RFP for a custom web presence is rarely effective. The problem lies in the nature of the project. These projects are often very nuanced and clearly defining the scope is a component of project planning, which is part of the project itself. Because of this, typically these RFPs end up with one of two major flaws –
1) The organization provides very detailed information about what their web presence should include. This is problematic because guiding those strategies and decisions should be a service that a professional marketing/web agency provides. By precluding your vendor from providing that service as part of the project, you are likely limiting the value of that vendor as a whole, and/or missing opportunities to maximize your web presence.
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2) The organization provides very vague and general project requirements and ends up with proposals for wildly different project scopes, which negates the ability to make an apples to apples comparison of vendors – the goal of RFPs in general. This is an inefficient way to select a vendor.
A better process that will provide a more meaningful and successful vendor vetting process, as well as much better final project is to select a few vendors that have a good reputation and seem to provide the level of service that you are looking for. This will give the vendors to have more in-depth discussions about organizational goals, brand values, strategic vision, etc. and will allow them to provide a proposal that is a more accurate representation of the project that is best suited for your needs. Often times in these discussions opportunities come up that hadn’t yet been uncovered. More accurate proposals and estimates benefit everybody.