Cottage Grove, WI

Agency – Village of Cottage Grove, WI

Interviewee – Reese MacAskill, Recreation Supervisor

Interview Date – 2/16/16

Outcome – Loss

Proposal Bid - $27,030

Proposal Date – 10/1/2015

Winner – CivicPlus

Why did we lose?

We didn’t make the shortlist because we referred to them as the “Village of Cotton Grove” instead of the “Village of Cottage Grove” twice in the cover letter to the proposal and two other times in the proposal
Reese noted that this made us look like we didn’t have the attention to detail they were expecting from a website vendor
Other competitors in the mix were CivicPlus, Revize and GovOffice
We were the most expensive option with CivicPlus and Revize being slightly less expensive but price was not one of their key considerations and wouldn’t have knocked us out
CivicPlus and Revize were shortlisted; Revize was a no-show for the onsite demo so CivicPlus won by default

Good reference

The City of Janesville, WI gave us a very good reference
There is another nearby city that uses CivicPlus and Reese was able to get a hands-on demo from that city

Other points

While we were the most expensive, Reese commented that it looked like some of the options were add-on expenses which looked like they were included in other proposals
Reese ended up with the project as she was one of the main persons updating the old website, and commented to management about how archaic it was and how hard it was to update

Takeaways
We need to be super diligent with checking for errors in proposals, especially important items like prospect names or the person we’re sending the proposal to; I talked to David L. and Ryan, and they now more stringent Pre-Bid Check Sheet checklist when preparing proposals so the likelihood of this error occurring again is mitigated by the checklist; this checklist was not in place in October 2015
Having local references and letting them see our solution from a 3^rd party can be very persuasive