Community RFP Template - Sep2008

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Confidential Company Name -- Page 1

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__________Community RFP September 2008

Request for Proposal (RFP) to Set Up,Host and Manage Our Community

September 2008

[Most of this is from the actual RFP I used in September 2006 to solicitvendors for what ultimately became the Catalyze Community. I have

eliminated all pertinent company information and have made a couple

of modifications.Feel free to adapt it for your own use and drop me a note at

thumbarger at yahoo.com if you use the template or have any

questions.]


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1. General Information

This section summarizes the General Information for the _________ Communities and

is summarized into the following categories:

Purpose of the RFP RFP communications

RFP timeline

RFP preparation

Vendor responses

Effective dates of pricing

Evaluation criteria

Right to reject RFP responses

1.1 Purpose of the RFP

The purpose of this Request for Proposal (RFP) is to establish the functional, technicaland operational requirements for a hosted community platform and management

solution for _________. Additional background for the planned communities has beenexcerpted from the _________ Community Business Plan document.

The contents of this RFP are proprietary and are not to be disclosed to third partieswithout the express permission of _________.

Creating growing and active communities will be essential to

promoting the _________ brand, engaging with our user baseand driving overall revenue

The planned _________ community will be a combination of:

Primary

o

o

Secondary

o

o

When we talk about building a community, _________ is providing the infrastructure

or playpen and the initial spark for the community to get started. While we can

nurture and guide the communities to a certain degree, it would be a mistake toassume that we can single-handedly ignite a community on our own. We have to have

the patience and conviction to let the communities grow and evolve in whateverdirection the users want them to grow. Both communities will be accessible from our

website, but they will have an identity, name and style that are different from the_________ website and brand.

The potential for relevant communities is well over 1 million users. While the

_________ customer component will be an important part of our community, it is justa small slice of the total addressable audience.


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One of the most important parts to becoming successful with the community will be tocontinually provide fresh and new content. The expectation is that much of the

content will ultimately come from the community.

Finally, building communities will take a significant commitment and dedicated

resources to manage and develop content for, and host guests on the site. Another

important point to make is that the community will evolve over time from both acontent and membership standpoint. The core infrastructure and initial content need

to be in place for the launch, but it takes time to build trust in the community, and toget members to begin contributing and actively participating in the community.

We acknowledge that building the _________ community will be a multi-year project.

At a high level, the types of content information planned for our communities include:

Hot off the press Content (relatively short shelf-life days or weeks)

o Industry and other topical news

o Blogs and columns

o Discussion groups and forums (threaded conversations)

o User editable wikis

o Newsletterso Events and calendars of interest to the members

o Alerts and RSS news or blog feeds

o Daily/weekly digest of new content/discussions

Library-Type Content (longer shelf-life months or years)

o Articles and whitepapers by _________ or contributed

o Analyst reports

o Webinars real-time and archived

o Podcasts and video

o Vendor assessments

o Links to other relevant content

Ideally, we want our communities to become a destination site where our members

come for valuable and topical content and to share insights with other members.

1.2 RFP Communications

Please direct all communications and correspondence regarding this RFP to:

Name

Title Address

Email address -Phone number

1.3 Timeline

RFP submission date - ____Vendor proposal due date - ____

Vendor selection - ____Vendor contract process - ____

_________ detailed plan with vendor - ____Launch communities - ____


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1.4 RFP Preparation

All costs incurred in the preparation and presentation of a RFP will be absorbed by the

prospective vendors. In the event that modifications or additions to the RFP becomenecessary, prospective vendors will be notified in writing. All supporting materials

submitted with the Proposal will become the property of _________ unless otherwise

requested by the prospective vendors at time of submission.

1.5 Vendor Responses

Prospective vendors are required to submit their proposals no later than________.All supporting materials and documentation must be included with the Proposal.

Proposals should be sent or emailed to ________. We may ask vendors to present

their proposals in person or by webcast to the _________ evaluation team.

1.6 Effective Dates of Pricing

Prospective vendors should state in writing that all furnished information, including

pricing, will remain valid and applicable for a minimum of one-hundred and twenty

(120) days from the date their Proposal is received by _________ and should submittheir best and final offers.

1.7 Evaluation Criteria

Prospective vendor Proposals will be evaluated using the following general criteria:

Ability to satisfy functional business requirements

Ability to satisfy technical and integration requirements

Strategic partnering potential

Cost

1.8 Right to Reject

_________ reserves the right to:

Accept or reject any and/or all submitted proposals

Request additional information from all prospective vendors at any time

Negotiate a contract with the selected vendor(s)

Include the vendor's RFP response in whole or by reference in the final contract

Accept the proposal of any vendor at any time during the process and other

vendors may or may not be awarded the opportunity to further discuss their

proposals or demonstrate their solutions to the _________ team.

Therefore your response should include all information necessary for _________ to

evaluate your solution, pricing and contract terms.


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2.0 Requirements

This section summarizes the key requirements for the _________ Communities and is

summarized into the following categories:

Community strategy Infrastructure requirements

Functionality requirements

Ongoing management requirements

Technology requirements

Other requirements

Cost requirements

2.1 Community Strategy

We believe that getting the community strategy right is an integral part of building our

community. As part of your proposal, we would like you to include a description of

how you will help us strategize our community and approach. This may be part of abundled package or priced separately. It is important to make sure that you areexplicit in terms how you can help us, a description of your qualifications and an

estimate of the time/cost necessary to help us finalize our strategy.

2.2 Infrastructure Requirements

The key infrastructure requirements include:

Platform

o Provide a robust, fully encrypted, and hosted platform that provides

room to grow the community and meets the other requirements detailed

belowo Establish single sign-on and permissions rules

o Implement and manage legal and intellectual property agreements for

access to content, member privacy

o Establish service level agreements that are acceptable to _________

o Document and train _________ personnel in administration and

management of siteo Provide periodic training to _________ personnel as updates are made

to the platform or as new _________ personnel get involved with siteadministration

Strategy and planning

o Drive completion of community strategy plan

o Create a comprehensive project plan

o Develop a customized look and feel

o Build a membership recruitment plan

o Design a launch plan (for marketing and PR)

o Generate an ROI measurement plan

o Develop community rules for participation, posting, etc.


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Multiple sites

o Support up to ___ community sites

o Separate URLS for each community site

o Separate look-and-feel for each community site

Members

o Support different levels of members (i.e. guest, registered, customer)with different permissions/privileges and access to content

o Support _____ members

o Support up to ___ concurrent users

o Support different restrictions for members (ranging from total blocking

to full access)o Support social networking (i.e. professional profile, my favorite

files/links, photo, etc.)o Support for member rating

2.3 Functionality Requirements

The key functionality requirements include:

Content types we need to support the following content capabilities

o Document and content libraries

o Multimedia libraries for videos, podcasts and other multimedia

o Discussion forums

o Blogs

o Wikis

o Newsletters

o Webcasts

o Podcasts

o Vlogs (video blogs)

o Events and Calendarso Links

o Realtime polls and surveys

o Live hosted chat events


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Available metrics we want to be able to measure the following metrics.

The metrics should be available in standard reports and in user definable

reports. The reports should be available online and printed or exported ifnecessary:

o Unique visitors by date and date range

o Page views by date and date range

o Session time by date and date range

o Community click-through (what percentage of visitors to the home page

click through to a community program)

o Registered members and join date

o Postings per day/week/month (in member-to member interaction

programs)

o Read-to-post ratio (in member-to-member interaction programs)

o Page additions (in member-generated content programs)

o Page revisions (in member-generated content programs)

o Peak number of concurrent users (in live events)

o Total number of users (in live events)

o Audience penetration (if the total size of the target population is known)

o Repeat visits and Frequent visitors

Other functionality requirements

o Ability to charge and collect a member fee for access to premium

content

o Ratings - ability to rate content

o RSS feeds RSS feeds for news, blogs and other content

o Alerts - alerts for content (users can set alerts for libraries, discussions,

blogs and other content)

o Subscriptions ability for members to subscribe to any content on a

daily, weekly or other time basis of their choosing

o Search ability to search content by title and within documents or

discussions (Google-like search capabilities)

o Chat with other members set up separate chat rooms and live chat

between the community manager

o Email Posting - Ability to post to blogs and discussion groups by email

o Polls - Ability to develop and show polls and surveys, and their results

o Whats new easy way to find new content or discussions

o Automatic word filtering and suppression for discussion forums

o Talkback ability to add comments on content, etc.

o Social sharing one-click ability to share any content via email and

other social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, de.lic.ious, etc.o Widgetizable components ability to turn community elements into

widgets that can be displayed anywhere, such as embedded in otherwebsites

o Community manager administration ability for our community

manager to perform most routine administrative tasks such as setting

permissions, running reports, making modifications to most pages, etc.


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o Member information

# of members online and in total

Whos online

Member profiles and ability to search profiles

Ability to rank members by their submissions

Ability to contact members even when their emails is not

provided (anonymous contact)

Ability to create a list of current members and their registrationinformation (.xls format)

Ad Serving similar to Google adwords

o We want the capability to monetize the site by providing targeted

advertisements when people conduct searches within the community orads that may appear in a side bar or banner location

2.4 Ongoing Management Requirements

The key ongoing management requirements include:

Management

o Provide a dedicated moderator to the communities to manage

conversations and actively enhance member experience with the goalof growing the communities and keeping the community active and

vibrant (based on activity and new members/partners added)o Maintain and regularly check physical and virtual links

o Manage and summarize user feedback and incorporate feedback into

improving the site

o Provide continuous programming and membership moderation

o Provide community training and demos to new/prospective members

o Generate detailed community reports and analysis of results

Marketing

o Identify potential members. partners and user groups to target,including obtaining of email addresses

o Invite potential users to join

o Get people to join driving awareness and attention

o Encourage people to stay active and contribute

o Manage the membership and partnerships

o Create regular and periodic marketing campaigns to generate traffic,

awareness of community and member/partner growth

Content creation

o Source new content (the majority of content must be from non-

_________ to give it an aura of impartiality)o Build links to related sites, blogs, etc. (the onus of research and effort

for this task will be on the vendor to be augmented over time by_________ employees)

Content management

o Keep the content fresh

o Prune and cull old or out-of-date content

o Coordinate, kick start and prime discussions

o Edit, review, upload and censor materials and discussions, as

necessary


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Content Moderation

o We do not know if we need moderation services at this time, but please

provide an overview of your moderation services (if any) and the

various pricing options

2.5 Technology Requirements

The key technology requirements include:

Provide us with information that cover these technical details:

Uptime and availability

Backups

Bandwidth

Support access

Privacy of members and data

2.6 Other RequirementsAre the any requirements that we missed? Please include ideas / topics / suggestions

that we may have missed that you believe would greatly enhance a community

experience and/or be an area where you could provide significant value to the

members of the community and/or _________ as the community sponsor.

2.7 Cost Requirements

The initial proposal should outline a price quote and all pricing options available to

support the requirements identified in the RFP. The price quote should address a plan

for developing a community and launching before the end of _____.

The price quote should include the amount and timing of the following:

Upfront costs

o How much?

o What is included in the upfront costs?

o How many hours/days are covered in the upfront costs?

o What is the final deliverable?

o What flexibility is available in pricing?

Annual costs

o What are the annual costs?

o What is included in the annual costs?

o How many hours/days per week are covered by this pricing?

o What flexibility is available in pricing?o What ROI metrics can we expect?

Payment options

o Monthly, quarterly, etc.


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2.8 Other

Vendors should provide pricing data for any services not included as part of the

software or support purchase. These may include training, implementation support,

moderation, ongoing consultation, etc. This should include detailed rates for the

different levels and experience of consultants that may be needed on this

engagement.

Vendors should also be prepared to provide us with a list of reference-able customers

with similar background as our community. You may include information about

reference-able customers in your response or include them in your presentation

Community RFP Template - Sep2008

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Transcript of Community RFP Template - Sep2008