Thoughts

What a Good Web RFP Actually Asks For

Author

Joe Kepley

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Your RFP is your resume to the agencies you want to hire. Here's what a good web RFP should ask for, and how to spot the gaps before you send it out.

A good RFP is not measured by its length. It’s not measured by the number of bullet points or sections or references requested. A good RFP is not vague, nor is it over-detailed. A good RFP might be short, or it might be long. But one thing is true: RFPs are hard to write, and the best ones ask a handful of questions that get to the core of the new project.

I know this because I’ve talked to a lot of our clients about how they selected Blend as an agency, and the story is almost always the same. They talk about how uneasy they felt in selecting the right vendor, and the feeling that they lucked out by selecting Blend and got an agency that actually cares about their project and outcomes. 

But this shouldn’t come down to luck. There’s a right way and a wrong way to select a vendor, and a good RFP can make all the difference.

How do I know what goes into a good RFP?

The problem is that very few organizations know how to write a good RFP. Most companies only do this every five to ten years, and by then the industry has changed, the internal team has turned over, and the people writing the RFP have probably never written one before. Meanwhile, on the vendor side, we’re trying to figure out whether we can give you an honest estimate and whether we’re even the right fit. We can only do that if the RFP tells us a few specific things.

If this is you, you are in luck: we have created a solution that will help guide your thinking through this process: the RFP Advisor, an AI agent that will review your RFP from the perspective of an agency, handing you a readiness score and guidance on what works and what you could improve to get better responses. You can use the tool to examine your RFP before sending it out, so that you can get an idea of what your vendors might be missing and how they might respond.

But, before we get into the tool, what exactly does a good RFP ask for? Looking past the boilerplate, this is a set of answers that change (and improve) the quality of every response you’ll get back.

Strategic clarity: tell us why you’re doing this.

Are you telling your potential partners why you’re pursuing this project? Do you know what success looks like?

Before anything else, a strong RFP explains why the project exists and what success looks like. This is not a list of features, but an honest reasoning about what’s broken today and what you’re trying to fix — and how you’ll know it worked.

Leaving agencies guessing at your reasoning can make things more confusing, leading to more generic responses. Your responses will be sharper when teams understand the business drivers behind your project. (And, if you’re still working out how to frame the business case, our piece on the investment lifecycle of a website is a good place to start.)

An example:

Too vague: “We’re seeking a partner to redesign our website.”
Better: “Prospective students can’t start an application on our current site, so we lose them to schools that can. We want a site that turns more visitors into application submissions.”

Budget transparency: tell us what you’re willing to spend.

I understand the instinct to leave the budget off; you don’t want every agency to respond that they’ll happily take the whole thing! But sharing even a range does more good than harm. It signals how much the project matters to you, and it lets agencies propose a solution that fits what you plan to spend instead of guessing high or low and missing either way.

A number with no range gets you proposals that don’t compare to each other. A range gets you proposals you can actually line up side by side. If you’re not sure what’s reasonable, we wrote about making the most of a project budget — and, the RFP Advisor will suggest a range based on your scope and your organization.

An example:

Too vague: “Please provide your best and most competitive pricing.”
Better: “Our budget for design and development is $190,000 to $230,000. Hosting and ongoing support are part of a separate budget. We're open to phasing the work if that helps us stay in range.”

Get expert feedback on your web RFP.

Upload your RFP and our AI advisor — trained on web agency expertise — will analyze it for gaps, missing sections, and opportunities to attract stronger vendor proposals.

 

Check Your RFP

Scope definition: tell us what’s in — and what’s out.

A good RFP makes clear what kind of work you're after: strategy, design, development, content, or some mix. Just as important, it says what's not in scope. Are there things you’ll be doing internally? Content you’ll migrate yourselves? Design that’s already done?

You might assume the agency is writing the content while they assume YOU will write the content, which may lead to expensive change requests and timeline crunch. A properly defined scope names both the work and the boundaries, leading to realistic estimates and far fewer surprises down the road. 

What’s more, websites can become their own ecosystem of sub-sites, external links, and completely separate properties, not to mention sections of the site that aren’t visible without a login. The scope should be clear about what is covered and not covered — and even explicitly described if it cannot otherwise be accessed without a member login.

An example:

Too vague: “Redesign and rebuild our website.”
Better: “In scope: information architecture, visual design, and front-end build for about 60 pages. Out of scope: we will handle writing the content and integration of our donation system, which stays exactly as it is and needs to keep working. This project covers the following three URLs, but does not cover anything beyond the core domain name.”

Technical requirements: tell us what it needs to work with.

So much of the planning for your solution comes down to making it work within your environment. Which systems are you running now? What things need to connect to each other? Is there a CMS you are keeping, a CRM you are feeding, or a single sign-on you can’t break?

By specifying your current systems and how they will need to integrate, you get estimates that hold up. Leaving it vague and you’ll get a number that balloons the moment real constraints surface, leading to costly change requests down the road.

An example:

Too vague: “Here's a list of the systems we're using and how we need them to interact with the website.”
Better: “The new site will continue to use Umbraco, and must continue to pull current rates from the banking system we already use. Member login will need to work exactly as it does today.”

Evaluation criteria and process: how will you choose a vendor?

It’s important to communicate how you’ll be scoring vendors and by what rules you’ll be making decisions. If you really want to compare apples to apples, it helps when all of your responses are playing by the same rules.

There’s a second benefit here as well — when you tell vendors what matters to you, they spend their response on those things instead of padding it with everything they can do. This steers every response toward the parts of the project you actually care about.

Deane Barker and Corey Vilhauer wrote about this in The Web Project Guide, in the chapter on selecting a vendor: “The Short List and Request for Proposal (RFP).”

An example:

Too vague: “We will select the proposal that best meets our needs.”
Better: “We'll score proposals on relevant experience (30%), strategic approach (30%), price (25%), and timeline (15%). We'll invite three firms to interview the week of March 10 and make a decision by March 28.”

Timeline: when do you need it?

Finally, a good RFP gives agencies a realistic timeline — that is, enough room to deliver something good — and offers reasoning behind that timeline. It also provides room for vendors to suggest alternatives. An impossible timeline tells a strong agency one of two things: either you don’t understand the work, or you do and you’re hoping someone will overpromise. Neither gets you the response you want.

A realistic timeline tells agencies you’ve thought it through, and it lets them plan honestly instead of padding for risk.

An example:

Too vague: “We need this completed as soon as possible.”
Better: “We want to launch before our fall open enrollment in September, which means choosing a partner by January and starting in February. If that's not realistic for this scope, let us know what an acceptable timeline would look like.”

Your RFP is a resume, too.

Marketing teams tend to think about agency responses as resumes — documents that help you decide who to hire. And they are. However, the part that’s easy to miss is that your RFP is your resume to those agencies. 

A poor or incomplete RFP can cost you your best prospects. When a strong agency reads a poor RFP and senses you haven’t set the project up to succeed, they may simply pass on the opportunity.

By putting the right information in your RFP, you’re able to get better responses that are more aligned with what you care about, making sure that you can select the best agency for the job.

See what your RFP is missing.

Reading about these six questions is one thing — knowing whether your current RFP meets expectations is another. The RFP Advisor is ready to take you on the next step: simply upload your draft and you’ll get a readiness score, a plain-English gap analysis of what’s missing, and a prioritized list of fixes sorted into must-do, should-do, and nice-to-have.

Run it before you send your RFP out, and you'll see exactly what your future agency will see — while you still have time to fix it.

Related work.

We’ve done a lot of great things for a lot of great clients — including strategic planning, from interviews and user experience to roadmapping and staff planning. Check out more projects similar to this one.