One of the social marketing practitioners I most admire is Maggie Fox, whose Social Media Group was a pioneer in creating new-media campaigns long before it was fashionable.
About a year ago, Social Media Group published a comprehensive and intelligent template for creating requests for proposal (RFPs) for social marketing campaigns. Now they’ve followed it up with a second version that includes an “RFP Bill of Rights” that “will hopefully help provide guidance on how to do an RFP right and fairly,” Maggie says.
The Bill of Rights makes for interesting reading. It provides guidance for marketers to consider in publishing RFPs that are fair to the bidding agencies. With advice like “I will not issue an RFP ‘Cattle Call’”, “I will do my own homework and “I will give you feedback,” it covers the tactics that (intentionally or not) often poison the client-agency relationship. I get the sense that this guidance is born of some painful experience, which makes its teachings all the more relevant.
You can download the RFP template here or find it on the Social Media Group site.
Hey Paul – thank you so much for your kind words!
We revamped the template primarily because of what we saw coming back to us and also, importantly, based on feedback from our peers. Clients who didn’t know what they wanted or needed were simply cutting and pasting the whole thing, and it was a lengthy nightmare. To address that, we divided the template into two sets of questions: RFP and in-person presentations. Hopefully this will help provide more guidance!
In addition, the inclusion of the RFP “Bill of Rights” was also based on experience – the RFP you *knew* was being sent out to 25 people, and the frustration of not having some kind of feedback when you put a lot of work into a proposal that went nowhere (a common issue for anyone who is regularly invited to respond). We very much hope that v2.0 of the template will make the process easier for both clients and respondees, and we welcome additional feedback!
Wishing you all the best for the New Year!