RFPs GOOD. Fixed Bids BAD.

It occurs to me that my signature rant these days is not clearly posted on my own blog. Let’s fix that!

As I’ve mentioned before. Requests for Proposals (RFP’s) are controversial in the nonprofit sector. Vendors hate them. Nonprofits struggle with developing them. I’ve been on a multi-year mission to educate and encourage the community to rethink RFPs, as opposed to throwing them out. In particular, nonprofits need to break away from fixed bid requests when hiring web developers, programmers, and people who implement CRMs. Here’s why:

Done correctly, RFP’s are an excellent practice. A good RFP informs potential vendors about the organization, their current condition, and their project goals. A questionnaire can focus on vetting the expertise of the consultant, examples of prior work, stability of the company, etc. All good things to know before investing serious time in the relationship. The RFP can also request billing rates and the like, but, in my experience, the cheaper rates don’t always correlate with ultimate project cost. Some higher hourly consultants do the work in half the time of some moderately priced ones.

The problem is that many nonprofits want to get that fixed bid and then hire the lowest bidder. But, for a web design or CRM project, the odds that the nonprofit knows how many hours the project is going to take are practically nil and, what’s more, they absolutely shouldn’t know. With a good consultant, you’re going to learn a lot in the process about what you should be doing. With a wild guess-based fixed bid, you are likely to suffer from one of two problems:

• The project will be seriously underbid (very likely) and the vendor relationship will get worse and worse as they keep expending more hours without being compensated;
• Or the vendor will finish up in half or two thirds of the hours and there you’ll be, donating to their charity.

You can vet the fiscal competence of a consultant.  Check their references and ask good questions like:

• “Did the project come in at or under budget?”
• “Was the vendor able to scale the project to your budget?”
• “Can you tell me about a time that you had a billing disagreement with them, and how well it was resolved?”

Also, check their reputation in the nonprofit sector, because we have lots of mailing lists and forums where you can do that.

I hire consultants based on their expertise, reputation, and compatibility with my organization’s goals and work style. I stress that vendor interviews should be with the staff that I will most likely be working with. I’ll often break a project into two phases, one for discovery and then another for implementation. With the great consultants that I work with, this does not result in over-budget implementation bids. Instead, it helps us define what we can do and stay within budget. Because this is all about taking away the guess work.

So, RFPs are good things, as long as they are making realistic requests of the vendors. The crisis with them in our sector is based simply on the fact that most of our RFPs ask questions that can not, and should not, be answered, such as “how much will you charge me to do this undetermined amount of work?”