Ideas for Writing Your RFP

As the director of business development for mStoner, I do a lot of different things, but the most important part of every day is spent reading and responding to RFPs—sometimes a quick note from a friend or past client, sometimes a 45 page fire drill from a university that we’re just getting to know.

I know that writing an RFP can be a daunting process (just like responding to them), and from time to time, my colleagues and I are asked for advice on how to get started. Every institution is different (a small independent school has both different needs and different legal requirements than a major state-supported university, for example), but here are a few words of advice from our side of the fence.

Tell us a little about yourself. 
We’ll do a lot of research about your institution before responding to an RFP, but it’s still interesting to hear how you describe your institution and the opportunity at hand. If you can share information about the history of the specific publication, project or website that you’re working on now, even better. You’re looking for a partner who represents the right fit for your team and in all honesty, so are we. Being transparent about how you work will give the firms you’re contacting an early idea of whether this is a partnership that might work, and we’ll certainly try to provide you with the same courtesy in return. 


Be clear about what you know you want.
 I know this one seems obviously, but sometimes it is difficult to tell what people are really expecting to come away with at the end of a project. A great design that your in-house IT staff will implement? Or a live, functioning website? The best result of any selection process is that you will be able to sit down and compare apples to apples to make a smart decision about the best partner for your institution. In order to do that, you need to be sure that everyone is proposing the same scope of work. If you have timeframes or budgets in mind, share.


Be equally clear about what you’re not sure of. 
Maybe you know that your website isn’t quite where it should be, but you’re not sure where to start or how much help you’ll be able to afford. Or maybe your viewbook is dated, but you’re not sure where you want to take it next. If your RFP makes it clear that you’re looking for some help with strategy and scope definition, you should be able to expect some interesting suggestions from the proposals you receive. It’s not a bad way to learn how your prospective partners would approach your opportunity, and may help you narrow the field.


If you really want to compare apples to apples, ask vendors to be specific. 
You probably have a sense of how you’ll judge prospective partners for your project. Maybe you know that past experience is particularly important to you, or that you’re looking for precision in the project management process, or that you want someone whose design philosophy meshes with yours. Asking people like us to answer specific questions will allow you to make straightforward comparisons and the best final decision for your institution. It also makes it easy for someone like me to give you exactly the information you need.

Think of this as the beginning of a conversation. 
I can’t speak for my peers at other firms like mStoner, but I’d like to invite you to think of the proposal I send you as the beginning of a conversation between you and I. Not negotiation: conversation! Every project is a little bit different, and one of the things we like about this business is that we learn something new with every engagement. What will we learn together? Well, that’s what we want to start to explore. We can tailor our recommendations (and pricing) a little bit more every time we talk to you about your institution and the work you’re considering. 


And for those of you who want to skip this advice and get straight to the nuts and bolts of the matter, here’s a list of the items that are provided in most of the RFPs that I receive:

History of the institution
Overview/scope of the project
List of project deliverables
List of expected proposal elements
Expectations for timeline and budget

And here’s a list of the things that we’re usually asked for:

Firm contact information and history
Team bios
Process overview
Samples of Work
References
Timeline
Pricing

Look forward to hearing from you!

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
Additional Posts (95)
Categories:

Discuss this article (2)

Online Viewbooks at the Rhode Island School of Design

Whether trying to make the most of a limited budget or adjusting to a changing landscape in communications, many institutions are taking a close look at the balance between print and web. The Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, R.I., is successfully tipping the scales “webward,” with online viewbooks that provide a holistic and dynamic look at the programs and student work that make RISD unique.

Making the call…

When Becky Bermont, vice president of RISD’s media + partners team, came to RISD in 2008, a review of the printed viewbook was already underway. The RISD team had completed some research with Maguire Associates, and was starting to rethink how prospective students use both print and web. The time was right to consider a new paradigm to reach those who might be a good fit for RISD.

Knowing that students today are increasingly likely to rely on the web when forming impressions of colleges and universities, and that a growing number actually apply without having any prior contact with an institution, Becky and her team decided to rely more heavily on the web to provide critical information about the departments and programs at the School, with a printed viewbook used more as an overview with reference to the website. Becky notes that the nature of the institution also supported this decision: “It’s important for us to showcase the work that the students produce. It’s highly visual, and that lends itself to the web.”

Building consensus…

With plans and ideas in hand, Becky’s next step was to conduct an internal road show for RISD faculty and staff. She and her team understood that this idea was radical in some ways, and wanted to ensure that the community was invested. Response was positive from the beginning: “It’s so much more worth it for us to spend that time up front and have people really invested than just plowing forward and ended up with something that doesn’t really represent the institution.”

Since the current RISD website did not provide the design or infrastructure needed for the planned viewbooks, they were created as stand-alone sites for the undergraduate (http://www.risd.edu/undergraduate) and graduate (http://www.risd.edu/graduate) programs. Each department page showcases student work and provides detail about the programs available, and video is used effectively throughout. In the end, the departments did all the writing and selected all the images for both the undergraduate and graduate viewbooks.

Results…

The sites launched in late 2008 to acclaim both inside and outside the RISD community. Both the undergraduate and graduate viewbooks were honorees in the 2008 Webby Awards competition, but perhaps more importantly, questions to the admissions team about department offerings have gone way down, indicating that prospective students are finding what they’re looking for online. And printing costs were reduced by 20%.

Beyond their obvious benefits of providing critical information to prospective students, these online viewbooks do an incredible of creating a sense of place. Video and images work seamlessly with text to create a very vivid picture of what it’s like to work (and play) at RISD. Honestly, after ten minutes looking at the sites, I was ready to apply.

If you’re thinking about trying this…

“The Rhode Island School of Design is nontraditional by nature, and there’s a real respect for the visual,” says Becky. “But in many ways our process is just like any other institution’s. Kids are kids, and most of them are shopping for school online.”

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
Additional Posts (95)
Categories:

Discuss this article (0)

UB: report from the front, week nine

I believe that Amy Grant’s music, much like rose wine, is much maligned. There’s a line in one of her songs, for instance ”... how do you argue with a feeling in your bones about what is and what isn’t meant to be.” Makes me think of the UB project.

Let me explain, and sorry-by the way-for not keeping up with my posts on this initiative, it’s been a bit of a whirlwind set of weeks.

Last I reported, we were beginning interviews for our mental models. Five different audience segments, 70 individual conversations. Three interviews in, both Rebecca and I sensed that something was amiss. We couldn’t quite articulate what wasn’t working, but we knew that we weren’t getting the information we needed. Part of the issue, we thought, was not having the right people to interview. But there was more to the issue than that, we knew. She and I talked, decided to sleep on it; when we met the next day, we found that we’d arrived at the same solution by different routes. The answer: re-engage mental models mastermind Indi Young to help us revise our scope statements, re-write our prompts, and lead one model interview for each of the audience segments we were studying. And that’s exactly what she did, and it’s exactly what we needed. (And Indi, if you’re reading this, you’re my hero!)

Toggling like this cost us some effort-it meant rescreening and rescheduling a number of people. It cost us money. It cost us time. And it also cost us some comfort-I had to learn a different and new way of interviewing. But it was exactly the right thing to do for the project, and it also led to some really terrific outcomes:

1. We learned that we didn’t need to interview as many people as we originally intended. In fact, we were able to cut the list by over 30%.
2. We found a new audience segment—people we call pathfinders, that fall between matchseekers and solution seekers.
3. We found that our six audience segments divide into two clusters, or clouds, or continuums, if you will—each cloud having a number of shared characteristics.

The interviews are rocking and rolling now (go, UB scheduling team!); we’re slated to finish them up in the next week or so. And in the meantime, we’re going to start combing through each of the completed interviews for behaviors, feelings, philosophies, intents, and motivations. How fun is that!

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
Additional Posts (95)
Categories:

Discuss this article (0)

The UB Project Report: Week Five

End of week five, Buffalo. Last week, we completed a fairly intense daylong workshop with Indi Young and Eric Fain, devoted mostly to the principles of non-leading interviews and the process of combing through transcripts for the tasks that will eventually be the building blocks for our mental models.

I’ve come to two conclusions:

First, the best interviewers for this process are the ones who have:

a) gone through several years of therapy and/or have a parent in the counseling profession
b) done a good deal of teaching in some sort of setting
c) led an awful lot of intake meetings over time

As Jeremiah put it, it’s a hard thing to pull back from “tell me what you want and need, oh my wonderful client” to allowing the conversation to go where it needs to go. Indi likens it in her book to the kind of conversation you’d likely have with someone at a cocktail party. (Funny, but those are the hardest to remember through the martini haze.)

The second conclusion is that parsing human behavior is a hard, hard, hard thing to do. One of the things that I really love about Indi’s mental models framework is that it provides a fairly granular and scientific methodology for understanding your users’ expectations and needs. It’s time- and labor-intensive (and it also requires a great deal of discipline in consistently dissecting from interview to interview), but it’s thorough and the resulting IA is imminently defensible.

Our project team spent most of this week laying the technical groundwork for scheduling, recording, and processing phone interviews—Google Apps, Skype and plugins, Garageband, and Quicktime, oh my. Next up, 66 one-hour calls over three weeks. We’ve got four interviewers and four audio-transcript combers prepping for the breakneck effort. Let the wild rumpus start!

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
Additional Posts (95)
Categories:

Discuss this article (0)

All the Pretty Little Rows and Columns

I will resist doing it my way, I will resist doing it my way, I will resist doing it my way.

Week three of the Buffalo project (see my intro post), and things have gotten really interesting. I was telling Rebecca yesterday that I had originally wanted to develop the information architecture offline using mStoner’s standard process, just to see how similar it would be to the structures we’re developing using Indi Young’s mental models process. But I decided that the temptation (conscious or subconscious) would be too great to match the results of our work together to my super-secret preliminary efforts.

So we list and group and nest and cluster and play Tetris, just a little bit.

Let me explain.

Normally when I create information architecture, I start with my clients’ primary target audiences: usually, prospective students and their influencers, and prospective donors. For each of those audiences, I list key tasks and critical paths to accomplishing those tasks, and I flex the site structure to make finding that information and completing those tasks as quick and intuitive as possible. Harder than it sounds, but that’s a post for a different occasion.

With this process, we dial back even further, and we use a spreadsheet (or in my case, an Omnioutliner file) to:

1. Create a laundry list, row by row, of all the tasks (which include general information and services) that people would want to accomplish on the UB site. We then sort and group those tasks to eliminate redundancies.
2. List the different people who might perform these tasks in different columns.
3. Mark x’s in the cells for performers who might complete those tasks.
4. Visually move the columns and rows around until we start to see visual patterns and clusters (see, just like Tetris).
5. Name those clusters with descriptive labels.

And at the end of the exercise, we don’t have prospective students, current faculty, alumni, per se. Instead, we’ve found match seekers, solution seekers, prideful belongers, pulsetakers, and active supporters. Rebecca shopped these groupings around to some internal stakeholders, and eureka!, they make sense.

Next up, training next week with Indi and her colleague Eric, and then we begin a slew of one-on-one interviews to validate out hypotheses about their needs and expectations and to flesh out the task list. Stay tuned, same bat time, same bat channel.

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
Additional Posts (95)
Categories:

Discuss this article (0)

I Get to Be Batman

I love all of the work we do, but I’m especially stoked about our newest new business. Earlier this week we kicked off a project with Rebecca Bernstein and her team at University at Buffalo. An aggressive, five-month timeline of what I call extreme IA, as we develop, test, and refine structures for eight websites. It’s a special treat for me in three ways:

First, the project gives us the opportunity to really explore how the needs, expectations, and behaviors of site visitors have changed over the years. I’ve been producing university sites way before mStoner was founded in 2001 (Mosaic and NetObjects Fusion, anyone?), and I’ve learned a lot. This project gives me the opportunity to validate some of what I’ve come to expect, but also hopefully to flex and adapt my understanding to new trends and possibilities.

Secondly, this work allows me to use a new way to develop information architecture. We’ll be using Indi Young’s Mental Models as our framework—I’ve been a fan of her work for years, and this project provides time and budget to do justice to Indi’s process.

Finally, the expert-on-expert factor. I don’t know anyone who’s won more awards for eWork in higher education than Rebecca, and she’s got an incredibly bright, talented team by her side at UB. The chance to come to the table with them and share ideas, debate, discuss, push, pull and hopefully arrive at moments of collective brilliance … very cool. Rebecca and I were talked yesterday, and she commented that it didn’t feel like she’d hired a vendor—it was more like she expanded her team. Or, to riff on our lunchtime discussion during immersion earlier this week, it’s like the Justice League of America. Each of us a superhero in our own right (or own mind), bringing a special skill, talent, and approach to the task-at-hand.

I get to be Batman. Why? Consider the character: incredibly wealthy and handsome man, strength and brawn and fighting skills beyond belief and bolstered by cool gadgets and immense technological resources, haunted by a tragic past, only slightly to the right of the villains he pursues, and looks great in form-fitting latex and a cape. The parallels between us are staggering.

We’ll be sharing what we learn by blog, so stay tuned for some exciting stuff. Same bat time, same bat channel …

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
Additional Posts (95)
Categories: Strategy

Discuss this article (0)

Respecting the Site Visitor and the Medium

This week, workshop madness! I just completed a series of four of them for a local client-they had selected four pilot units within the college to go live with new sites for their specific areas at the same time that the main, public site launches later this year. In a three-hour format, we reviewed the principles of visitor-centered design, information architecture, writing for the web, and navigation development and then wrapped up with a chalkboarding exercise in which we started to wireframe the new homepage for that unit, based on principles that we’ve discussed earlier in the day.

The goal: to help pilot units understand how and why we’ve created the information architecture and navigation for the main college site and to help them flex that model to their specific needs. In one workshop, someone asked me if the goal was to design to the lowest common denominator. In another, one participant asked if the goal was to design for a 20-year-old (the reason he asked was that he, as a seasoned academic, had come to expect text-dense, very long, and formally worded prose). Both questions really caught my attention and made me think. And in both cases, the answer was "no, not really." I personally think that the goal is to serve your site visitors well by respecting both them and the medium.

Steve Krug’s book "Don’t Make Me Think" was published in 2005 (eons ago, in the web world), but it remains a touchstone for me in all of the planning and training that we do. Its main premise: that websites should be so intuitive that people don’t need to question "where will I find this" or "how do I accomplish that?"

Business school taught me to think in threesthe top three principles I cover in our workshops: 1. Sites should be designed with your site visitors in mind. And those site visitors don’t think in terms of organizational charts or industry jargon (in one workshop, someone explained to me that course articulation translated into "will I get credit for this course;" who knew?). 2. Some site visitors self-identify. Some wayfind from topic to topic and link to link. Some search. Some think in terms of tasks or "I want tos…" Most will do all four, depending on the information they’re looking for. 3. People skim pages more often than they read. When you based site design on these principles you inevitably gravitate toward labels that are simple and straightforward and clear. You also offer multiple entry points to accommodate the different mental models that people use for parsing information. And you write with ruthless journalistic discipline-being as compelling and concise as possible.

I’d argue that sites designed in this way actually broaden your reach and appeal, and that’s a good thing.

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
Additional Posts (95)
Categories: Content and writing

Discuss this article (1)

This Electric Life: BSG Lives Forever as a Lesson to Us All

Or, lessons. I’m home, sick, sucking on cough drops and green tea laced with manuka honey. What better time to catch up on the roughly 800 new articles in my RSS queue. My favorite:

10 Business Lessons from Battlestar Galactica

Starbuck, where are you? Starbuck! STARBUUUUUUUCK!

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
Additional Posts (95)
Categories:

Discuss this article (0)

Usability Testing Notes

After all these years of building sites, I still breathe a quiet sigh of relief at the end of usability testing. Indeed, after awhile one develops a sense of what will and won’t work for various sites, but it’s always nice to know find that one has planned and executed well.

One of our clients just launched a resource site for parents in Illinois—a project for which we’d built in both wireframe testing and post-launch testing. Yesterday, we sat down individually with nine participants and had them complete various tasks and comment on the site as whole. Some good feedback fell under “things people are always happy about,” like “the bright and crisp photographs of people” and “clear and consistent navigation.” My favorite takeaways from this particular round of testing:

1. Interactive doesn’t always equal added value. Early in our planning, the client asked about creating an interactive map for all of the counties in Illinois-flashy rollovers and animation and such. I’d remembered that for another projectone involving countries and continents-we found that some people were hard-pressed to locate places like, uhm, Europe. That in mind, I wondered whether most people could rightly recognize their county. It seemed that the expense of programming that map outweighed its actual value, and the client agreed. I knew when one of the testing participants located Lake Michigan and Chicago on the left side of the state that we’d made the right decision. Sometimes, a low-fi alpha list just makes more sense.

2. Except, when it does equal added value. People’s appetite for video-and their tolerance for lower production-quality stuff-has increased so dramatically. I was astounded and impressed with the requests for additional multimedia on the site.

3. If you think it may be a little confusing, it’s really confusing. Both the client and I thought that certain acronyms-even with explanatory text around them-wouldn’t make sense to people outside the organization. We were right. Duh.

4. Paper prototype testing still has value. Four years ago, I had client take me to task for recommending that we test wireframes—”SO late 90s,” she said. Well, now it’s late 00s and I still find wireframing has a lot of value. We tested wireframes for this site early on and came to clarity (at a fairly low cost) on the sorts of titles and site structures that would make the most sense to target users. As a result, the list of changes we need to make post-launch are few and mostly simple—nothing that requires a fundamental restructuring of the site. Paper prototyping, it’s a good thing.

P.S. We’ve used MORAE software for years, but for those of us craving mac-native testing software, Silverback is wonderful. Give it a try if you haven’t seen it in action already.

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
Additional Posts (95)
Categories: Design and usability

Discuss this article (2)

This Electric Life: Bearing Bad News

“That’s the thing. Danny wants to be liked, and that gets tricky.”

She was speaking about a man who had just been drowned in a huge pot of gazpacho. Midsomer Murders, Season Three, brilliant!

The scene reminded me of something that one of my high-school professors once said. Fr. Hal Stanger told me “If you want to be liked by everyone, you’re going to be an unhappy little cowboy.” Tricky advice, for a consultant. Got me thinking about some of the bad news I’ve had to deliver lately …

“No one reads your welcome message.”

“Everyone has small classes, professors who know your name, opportunities for leadership, and a strong alumni network.”

“I don’t think the library belongs on the homepage.”

“That’s a tagline, not a brand.”

“That’s a wonderful idea … and totally out of scope.”

“Senior cabinet shouldn’t be choosing the design direction for the site.”

“Your timeline is optimistic to the point of impossible.”

“People don’t understand or care about how your division is structured organizationally.”

“This is a process, not a project—the work doesn’t end when the site launches.”

“Migration hurts.”

I often joke with our clients about how part of our fees are purely hazard pay, but there’s a ring of truth to that. The hardest work oftentimes isn’t the design or content or testing or programming—it’s successfully swaying people’s opinions in a different direction, helping them not to make bad decisions out of good intentions, and setting reasonable expectations not only for our work, but for what people will expect of the internal team that will have to support what we put into place together.

P.S. Off to sunny L.A. for a few days of R and R. Have a terrific week!

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
Additional Posts (95)
Categories: This Electric Life

Discuss this article (3)