The tender is alive!

After lots of visions and revisions me and Sara have finally finished and published the Invitation to Tender for the website redevelopment.

(Btw an ITT is pretty much identical to an RFP – request for proposal – except it’s normally more government-y and a bit more bossy).

We made sure the tender document had enough detail in their about the scope of the project to prevent too many random responses, but we also didn’t want to close out creative responses altogether, so we’ve left some bits out.

I think the key to a good web RFP/ITT is to put as much detail in there as possible without closing down creative responses altogether.

We started with our 3 overall aims for the project – these are measurable objectives that can be assessed after you’ve stripped out all the bells and whistles:

1. Increase unique visitors by 25%.
2. Increase social interaction by 25% (comments, shares, referrals)
3. Increase newsletter subscribers by 25%.

Then we listed our core requirements. These are the must-haves for our project which we need for it to be seen and felt to be a success. Lots of people use the MOSCOW shorthand to assess requirements like this (Things we Must have, things we Should have, things we Could have, then a final Wishlist which will probably never get done. Here’s a bit more about the MOSCOW method.)

1. Design a site for our users, not our organisation
2. Give all staff publishing rights
3. Give all staff access to own analytics
4. Give the site more personality, with staff profiles, staff twitter accounts and staff content updates given far more prominence, not just on an “About Us” page, but integrated with the actual projects they run.
5. Give teams the tools to analyse their own pages
6. Fully integrate social media for commenting and sharing
7. Create a space for our projects to develop online, with static URLs, progress bars that survive the whole project, and ability to bolt on different content at different phases
8. Build a more powerful search that can deliver accurate results, using filters and tags to display our information in more than one way.
9. Promote links to all Nesta sub-sites from the homepage and within programme-related pages (e.g. Open Workshop, Digital Makers, Innovation in Giving, Digital RnD Fund)
10. Connect email sign-up process to the CRM

We’re happy with how the tender’s come out. It should give all those mustard-keen white-hot code-munching digital agencies out there something to get their teeth into.

You can see the finished website ITT on our website. The deadline’s November 23, so if you’re interested in applying, sharpen your nibs and get scribing!