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Mendocino County, CA

Agency – Mendocino County, CA

Interviewee – Chris Shaver, Deputy Chief Executive Officer

Interview Date – 7/20/16

Outcome – Won

Proposal Bid – $58,340

RSM - Reed

Proposal - originally dated March 2016

Background

  • Their current website is hosted internally and is not user friendly; CMS updating process is complicated
  • Goal was to get a visually appealing site, easy for the public to find what they want, modern-looking and easy for end users to update
  • They didn't go to an RFP, but decided to look at vendors in the government space where they could piggyback off their purchasing process
  • Chris looked at a lot of county websites and Monterey County popped up high on his radar
  • Chris also talked with CivicPlus, and invited Vision and CivicPlus to give presentations; Vision presented via webex and CivicPlus sent a team of 3 people to present live
  • Chris mentioned that the webinar was more than sufficient for Vision to get our idea across
  • Lot of similarities in our platforms

Why did we win?

  • Chris was sold after he had seen Monterey County's website
  • Chris liked our UX and his assistant also liked our content strategy consulting package
  • Vision's collaborative process and engaging stakeholders was also key
  • The IT person at Monterey County provided a good reference for us
  • In addition, Chris liked Reed's low pressure approach and that Reed understood that it was a process; Reed was pleasant to deal with and low pressure

What could we improve?

  • One minor nitpick was that they would have liked to see more county example websites during the sales process - "because we are different from cities"

Other points

  • CivicPlus team demo'ed in person with a 3-person team (and Mendocino County is not easy to get 
  • However, CivicPlus was too aggressive and high pressure which turned Chris off on them

Takeaways

  • UX and content strategy resonate with counties too
  • We need to make sure that we show county examples 
  • Aggressive sales tactics are a turnoff for agencies
  • CivicPlus put on a full-court press in this deal by sending a 3-person team to Mendocino; is this a sign of desperation or a trend in their sales approach? we don't have enough data yet.