September 2008
[Most of this is from the actual RFP I used in September 2006 to solicit
vendors for what ultimately became the Catalyze Community. I have
eliminated all pertinent company information and have made a couple
of modifications.
Feel free to adapt it for your own use and drop me a note at
thumbarger at yahoo.com if you use the template or have any
questions.]
1. General Information
This section summarizes the General Information for the _________ Communities and
is summarized into the following categories:
The contents of this RFP are proprietary and are not to be disclosed to third parties
without the express permission of _________.
The potential for relevant communities is well over 1 million users. While the
_________ customer component will be an important part of our community, it is just
a small slice of the total addressable audience.
At a high level, the types of content information planned for our communities include:
• “Hot off the press” Content (relatively short shelf-life – days or weeks)
o Industry and other topical news
o Blogs and columns
o Discussion groups and forums (threaded conversations)
o User editable wikis
o Newsletters
o Events and calendars of interest to the members
o Alerts and RSS news or blog feeds
o Daily/weekly digest of new content/discussions
• “Library-Type” Content (longer shelf-life – months or years)
o Articles and whitepapers – by _________ or contributed
o Analyst reports
o Webinars – real-time and archived
o Podcasts and video
o Vendor assessments
o Links to other relevant content
Ideally, we want our communities to become a destination site where our members
come for valuable and topical content and to share insights with other members.
Name –
Title –
Address –
Email address -
Phone number –
1.3 Timeline
RFP submission date - ____
Vendor proposal due date - ____
Vendor selection - ____
Vendor contract process - ____
_________ detailed plan with vendor - ____
Launch communities - ____
Therefore your response should include all information necessary for _________ to
evaluate your solution, pricing and contract terms.
2.0 Requirements
This section summarizes the key requirements for the _________ Communities and is
summarized into the following categories:
• Community strategy
• Infrastructure requirements
• Functionality requirements
• Ongoing management requirements
• Technology requirements
• Other requirements
• Cost requirements
• Multiple sites
o Support up to ___ community sites
o Separate URLS for each community site
o Separate look-and-feel for each community site
• Members
o Support different levels of members (i.e. guest, registered, customer)
with different permissions/privileges and access to content
o Support _____ members
o Support up to ___ concurrent users
o Support different restrictions for members (ranging from total blocking
to full access)
o Support social networking (i.e. professional profile, my favorite
files/links, photo, etc.)
o Support for member rating
• Marketing
o Identify potential members. partners and user groups to target,
including obtaining of email addresses
o Invite potential users to join
o Get people to join – driving awareness and attention
o Encourage people to stay active and contribute
o Manage the membership and partnerships
o Create regular and periodic marketing campaigns to generate traffic,
awareness of community and member/partner growth
• Content creation
o Source new content (the majority of content must be from non-
_________ to give it an aura of impartiality)
o Build links to related sites, blogs, etc. (the onus of research and effort
for this task will be on the vendor – to be augmented over time by
_________ employees)
• Content management
o Keep the content fresh
o Prune and cull old or out-of-date content
o Coordinate, kick start and prime discussions
o Edit, review, upload and ‘censor’ materials and discussions, as
necessary
• Content Moderation
o We do not know if we need moderation services at this time, but please
provide an overview of your moderation services (if any) and the
various pricing options