Agency – Eastern Municipal Water District (EMWD) - https://emwd.org/ 

Interviewee – April Coady (public affairs) and Chris Teague (contracts)

Interview Date – 12/19/2016

Outcome – Lost

Proposal Bid – $58,205

RSM - John Redfern

Proposal - originally dated October 2016

Background

• EMWD is a current Vision customer, but the design is a couple of years old
  • The Vision support team has had regular contact with the customer, and the relationship was deemed to be good with no major issues
• EMWD knew they needed to redesign their website, and had heard from their customers that the site wasn't meeting their needs
  • So, they issued an RFP in October seeking proposals for redesigning their public website and intranet
  • They specifically called out the importance of the Discovery Phase of the project to clarify and document the scope, system design, schedule and budget for the implementation phase of the project
  • Focus was on what research would get EMWD to better understand their customers, what services they want and how they want them delivered

• 12 companies responded to the RFP which were scored by an evaluation team of 4 from across the organization
  • Criteria included strength of team, proposed methodologies and proposed technologies - 60%; service, support, price, quality of response, experience - 40%
  • Vision came in 7th out 12 in scoring; we used our standard proposal template and did not customize it to address their focus on the Discover phase or mention their RFP in our response
  • Urban Insight (https://www.urbaninsight.com/) was the top vendor by a lot ("the clear #1") in their evaluation scoring, and was the only vendor selected to come in for a short-list interview

Why did we lose?

• Urban Insight did a better job of selling their discovery activities in their 80-page proposal
  • 90% of their proposal focused on the discovery
  • They went in depth into what they would do
  • Focus groups, very detailed analytics and a lot of other analyses were mentioned in their proposal
  • Urban Insight is a consulting firm specializing in web strategy, design and development using Drupal
  • They have done projects for the City of Los Angeles, USC, Planetizen, several museums - but they do not have any mentions for developing the website for an entire city or county
  • Based in LA, Urban Insight has about 20 employees
• EMWD thought we were light on what we do in the Discovery phase and that they didn't want a full redesign proposal (which we provided)
  • The Project Visioning page (UX Analysis) in our proposal covers just one page
  • Based on the interview, it sounded like they didn't really understand our approach or UX/analytic focus because we only covered it briefly in the response 
  • Our proposal cost included the UX research, design and development of a site - which was more than what they were asking for - they wanted the "Fee Proposal (Exhibit D) – Pricing and the number of hours for the Discovery Phase (Task Groups 1 & 2)" and we provided the costs for the development plus the next 5 years 

What could we improve?

• We could have used our position as incumbent to reach out to customer and get an inside track on what was really important to them, and incorporate that information into the proposal 
• We need to more carefully review RFPs that are a non-standard and make sure we're addressing what is being asked - this proposal was just asking for how we would approach the UX/Discovery phase of a project
• We could have done a better job of customizing the cover letter and UX part of the proposal to let them know that we were paying attention to their RFP, and delivering what they wanted to in the Discovery Phase
• We could have provided some excerpts of a detailed UX report to show them how we use internal and external surveys, UX analysis, user testing and analytics to develop recommendations for design 
• We could consider adding in another layer of review to match key points of RFP to our actual proposal response

Other points

• EMWD may use another vendor for the implementation phase and mentioned that specifically in the RFP too
• EMWD mentioned that the project will take time and will be with Vision for at least the next year

Takeaways

• We should use the Customer Success team to stay in contact with customer during their transition period to let them know that we're still interested in maintaining their business and to keep tabs on the Urban Insight project; perhaps they should regularly send April links to blog posts and other helpful information
• Since Urban Insight is a Drupal-based shop, the design, development and ongoing costs are probably much more than what we would propose