Agency – Port of Seattle

Interviewee – Liz Fulton, Senior Buyer

Interview Date – 1/10/17

Outcome – Lost

Proposal Bid – $244,315

RSM - Deb

Proposal - originally dated November 2016

Background

• Received 16 responses to their RFQ
• RFQ had a 5-year budget of $1 million
• RFQ also mentioned that Drupal was preferred, but the door was left open for other content management systems
• Responses were scored on 4 evaluation points - Company Experience=60 points, Implementation Process=30, Small Business Certification=10 points and Price/Hourly Rate sheet=0 points
• Each proposal was scored with a range of 35 to 95, and Vision was about in the middle
• The finalists were Meeks, Ameex, iFactory and Civic Resources Group 
• And the winning bid went to Civic Resources Group (just changed their name to CivicConnect)
• CivicConnect was just named to the GovTech100 and is based in Santa Monica

Why did we lose?

• The Port was leaning towards Drupal as their CMS, and that was hard to overcome
• They asked for an hourly rate sheet, but we just included a project estimate
• Price wasn't really a factor - and the winning proposal was in the same range as our proposal of $244,000

What could we improve?

• We missed out on 10 points because we didn't send in documentation for the small business section
• Follow the instructions better (they asked for an hourly rate sheet)
• Make it easy for them to find answers to their RFQ (they felt they had to hunt through our proposal to find the answers instead of us directly responding - and they couldn't find some items in our proposal)

Other points

• Our strengths were that we had deep public agency experience and they liked our research-driven approach using analytics and heatmaps
• They didn't understand the concept of our site improvement credits
• With a proprietary CMS, some of the questions they asked didn't perrtain to us

Takeaways

• This project was a long shot from the beginning, especially with the preference for Drupal
• Make sure we are following instructions and provide the information in the format they request - label each question and response
• We should follow-up and complete our small business certification, and submit it when appropriate on future deals (after further investigation with Ryan, we appear to qualify for small business status by having less than 500 employees or less than $30mm in sales)