Agency – Springdale, AR

Interviewee – Melissa Reeves, Director of Communications

Interview Date –11/8/2016

Outcome – Lost

Proposal Bid – $36,070 ($7,200 annual)

RSM - Carrie (Greg)

Proposal - originally dated May 2016

Background

• Springdale is the 4th largest city in Arkansas with a population of 80,000
• Melissa looked at websites she liked and contacted vendors directly for quotes
• There was not an RFP, and no RFP is required if the price is below the city's threshold
• Current vendor is Revize and Melissa says that they were in the market for a redesign because their website is "hideous"
• Requested quotes from CivicPlus, Revize, Vision and a couple of others
• Revize wasn't selected even though they are incumbent
  • designs are not very good
  • their backend hasn't been updated very much and it's cumbersome to use
• Vision
  • really liked our designs (mentioned San Marcos and Ames)
  • UX process was different
  • liked our calendar function
  • We were Melissa's favorites, but our price pricing was 2-3x more than anyone else - and Melisssa didn't understand how our pricing could be so different
  • In addition, everyone else offered unlimited content migration and ours was limited - "no other company had a limited on amount of content migration
• Both Vision and CivicPlus had generally beautiful designs on the frontend and ease of use on the backend

Why did we lose?

• Price - we were "astronomically higher than anyone else"
• We were the favorite vendor, but CivicPlus was the most afforable solution
• Per contract, CivicPlus came in at $6,327 for 3 years ($18,981) plus another $12,225 for 3 days of onsight training and 3 days of project launch consulting; 36 month basic redesign
• It appears that CivicPlus really undercut their usual pricing on this deal

What could we improve?

• Need to explain our data migration strategy better - Melissa thought it was a negative that we wouldn't migrate unlimited pages
  • She is updating content on current site and they will migrate the updated pages to the new site

Other points

• For a city of 80,000, Springdale appears to be on the very frugal side

Takeaways

• Explain data migration story better
• Need to explain our value better when our pricing is so far off