Departments » Marketing » Win-Loss Summaries

Rowan County, NC

Agency –Rowan County, NC

Interviewee –Randy Cress, CIO

Interview Date – 7/22/16

Outcome – Lost to CivicPlus

Proposal Bid – $54,765

RSM - Tricia

Proposal - originally dated 3/10/16

Background

  • Current site is Dot Net Nuke
  • Issued an RFP and received 14 respondents
  • Had a large decentralized working group of 15-20 people
  • Have unique needs and wanted different look and feel for departments
  • Narrowed to 5 and invited each to provide more info 
  • Finalists were CivicPlus and Vision - where they analyzed the costing breakdown and different customer sites

Why did we lose?

  • Group decision - matter of overall preference
  • Pricing - our model for departmental pages wasn't in alignment, and after running the numbers, we would have cost more 
  • Designs - more of the working group leaned toward CivicPlus
  • CMS - felt more comfortable with CivicPlus as it was more similar to Dot Net Nuke
  • Extras - CivicPlus included intranet for no extra priced and they are going to get CivicMobile as part of implementation; liked the CP Newsletter module too
  • Annual costs - we were higher on annual costs

What could we improve?

  • Simplify our pricing, especially for departmental pages 

Other points

  • Tricia - Randy said that Tricia did a good job in the sales process and with the demo/presentation
  • CMS - feature parity, but our page templates looked harder to use than CivicPlus; with CP, you layout pages with modules on them; with Vision, you layout templates with modules and then create a page with that template; liked CP newsletter component too
  • Positive comments
    • Our UX process was well received by some of the working team, others were not so impressed
    • Our design layouts were also well-received
    • References - no negative comments from our references (Durham County, Greenville)
  • User support community - liked the idea of a user support community with CP University
  • Jesse James - they were also impressed with this vendor even though they didn't make the final cut; Randy liked how they took the time to understand their structure and articulate what they could do differently and personalize

Takeaways

  • Simplify pricing - too many tiers to figure out what pricing and what package to get an apples to apples comparison; also departmental pricing adds up quickly
  • Large working team dynamics - our UX/usability message is harder to sell to a large group