Your university’s website is often the very first impression prospective students and stakeholders have of your institution, and likely also serves as a way to research academic programs, communicate with faculty, connect with alumni, and more.
EdTech company Anthology reports that, when asked to select their primary sources of information about an institution or its academic programs, 66% of prospective students selected “internet search” and 63% chose “university website.” Clearly, the importance of a well-designed website for higher education institutions cannot be overstated.
Whether you’re looking to enhance your institution’s online presence or completely redesign your website, you may be required to write a request for proposal (RFP) and submit it to web design and development agencies to find one that’s a great fir for your project.
Writing and issuing an RFP is no small task. Get it wrong, and you risk getting poor-quality responses, or none at all. So let’s get into some best practices and tips for creating the ideal higher education RFP, one that will generate in-depth, thoughtful responses from promising agency partners.
What Is a University Website RFP?
A request for proposal (RFP) for a university website is a structured document that outlines your institution’s requirements, expectations, and criteria for selecting an agency partner to design, develop, and potentially maintain your website. An RFP is intended to solicit responses from qualified agencies interested in undertaking the project.
The document itself typically includes details such as the university’s goals and objectives for the website, technical specifications, desired features, timeline, budget constraints, and evaluation criteria. It’s also a chance to ask questions about vendors’ process, approach, capabilities, timeline, or experience.
By issuing an RFP, you can ensure transparency, fairness, and competitiveness in the selection process, ultimately leading to a website solution that aligns with its strategic objectives and meets the needs of its stakeholders.
Should Your Higher Education Institution Submit a Website RFP?
The short answer is: You may have to. If an RFP is required by your institution before you can contract with a website agency, there’s no way around it.
If it’s not a requirement, here’s some food for thought:
Regardless of the industry, RFPs can be a drag to respond to. Especially if your RFP isn’t well-written or well-structured, you might end up with no responses from agencies you’d like to work with. Even if you do an awesome job with your RFP, it takes significant time and effort to review and craft a thoughtful university website proposal. Some agencies never respond to RFPs. You’ll get a better response rate if you send your RFP to agencies with specific experience in higher education website development.
If you have a set-in-stone vision for what your university’s website needs to look like, or what the design and build process should be, an RFP is not the way to go. Overly prescriptive RFPs limit creativity, so issuing a set of demands with extremely rigid parameters will elicit an immediate “no” from most agencies. Obviously, if you possess the in-house expertise to develop the website and have the resources available to complete the project internally, then writing an RFP is unnecessary.
Also, don’t issue an RFP without doing your research! Identify a handful of agencies with experience in building websites for universities and tailor your request to the services they offer.
Finally, an RFP is not a request for pricing. If you want to know how much different agencies charge for comparable projects, just ask them. Don’t go through all the trouble of crafting an RFP — and make agencies go through the trouble of reading and responding to yours — only to learn that they are out of your price range.
Top 10 Benefits of Submitting an RFP for a University Website Design and Development Project
Maybe this goes without saying, but it’s in your university’s best interest to submit an RFP to multiple agencies. Doing so enables you to:
- Get to know different agencies before you. work with them and determine whether they’d be a good culture fit for your university
- Be sure
that potential partners understand the scope of the project and what is required to meet your objectives. - Compare agencies to each other and see their relative strengths, weaknesses, and capabilities.
- Exhibit transparency in the selection process.
- Make more informed, data-driven decisions.
- Employ more leverage when negotiating terms, pricing, and deliverables.
- Mitigate risk by providing alternative options to explore should your initial agency fail to meet expectations or encounter unforeseen challenges.
- Weigh proposals from a diverse range of agencies and see how each one responds to different challenges and opportunities.
- Hold vendors accountable for meeting project milestones and delivering satisfactory results.
- Issuing an RFP can protect your university from potential disputes or misunderstandings with agencies by establishing clear expectations from the outset.
What to Include in Your Higher Education Website RFP
There’s a fine line between comprehensive and overkill when it comes to RFPs. Since responding to them can be a hefty task, you don’t want your RFP to be so long that a potential partner bails before getting to the good stuff. That said, every RFP should include the following key information to elicit a comprehensive response.
- Website history and current status.
When was the last time your site had an upgrade? Is the branding up to date? Does your content governance structure or backend interface drive you insane? Who currently handles any updates or changes to the site? - Redesign priorities.
It’s helpful to list priorities in order of importance so potential agency partners can tell right away if their capabilities are aligned with your needs. - Website goals.
You don’t necessarily need to know how these goals can be accomplished — that’s an agency’s job! List them all, from boosting enrollment to establishing better content governance to improving website accessibility. - Launch goal.
When do you absolutely need to go live? Keep in mind that a web build can take anywhere from 18 weeks to a year and a half, so set your own expectations accordingly. - Core functionalities (required and optional).
Do you need your new site to integrate with an existing third-party platform? Do students need to be able to sign up for courses or make tuition payments on the site? Think about all your current integrations and all the functions you’re unable to perform well (or at all). - Market research, enrollment studies, and engagement data.
Demonstrate that you’ve done your own performance analysis and understand what metrics you need to improve. - Current CMS (and intentions to switch or upgrade).
WordPress, Drupal, Cascade — any higher education web development agency has likely seen them all. Be open to changes though, as there might be a strong case to be made for switching platforms. Trust the experts. - Open-ended questions for designers and developers.
You don’t know what you don’t know, and that’s okay! Ask any clarifying questions regarding functionality, user experience, and design, so the agency can answer them in their response. - Budget.
Be honest — if you know your university can’t afford a quarter-million-dollar project, you’ll automatically weed out the agencies with higher price tags and will only receive responses from those who won’t bait-and-switch you (hopefully). - Points of contact and project managers.
Who will the agency be communicating with throughout the project? - Contact information.
This seems obvious, but it’s easy to forget! - Proposal / formatting requirements.
How do you want to receive and review proposals? Establish a standard structure or formatting requirements so it’s easier to review proposals side-by-side.
How to Structure Your University Website RFP
Take the information from the previous section and organize it into the following 10-point structure:
- Introduction/Project Overview: Outline the project request and give a brief overview of the purpose of the RFP. Provide crucial details such as budget and response deadline to engage (or weed out) potential vendors from the outset.
- University Overview: Introduce your university. Keep it concise, giving pertinent information about your mission and offerings without overwhelming the reader. Think snapshot, not slideshow.
- Target Audience: Describe your ideal website users, including prospective students, faculty, stakeholders, parents and caregivers, etc. This helps designers and developers know what kinds of UX functionality is required. If you have buyer personas, include them here.
- Website Objectives: Define your primary, secondary, and tertiary objectives, such as enhancing student engagement or streamlining administrative processes, so vendors can align their proposals with your goals.
- Current Website Assessment: Provide an honest assessment of your existing website’s deficiencies and flaws to highlight specific areas for improvement. (Don’t worry, you won’t be judged on past choices.)
- Functionality Requirements: List the functionalities that are essential for the new website’s success. Even if you don’t know the names of specific solutions, or even if they exist, try to describe the need in as much detail as possible.
- Wishlist Features: This is, of course, contingent on budget and timeline considerations, but include the “nice-to-haves” along with your “need-to-haves,” differentiating between the two to clarify priorities.
- Budget Specifications: Reiterate budgetary constraints and provide any pertinent details, such as payment schedules, to ensure alignment with vendor proposals.
- Proposal Guidelines: Clearly outline expectations for vendor responses and include the criteria by which you will be judging the proposals.
- Project Timeline: Reinforce the RFP deadline and communicate the timeline for response review, finalist selection, and project milestones. Be sure your dates are realistic — research comparable projects so you have a clear idea of what to expect.
It may help to follow a standard RFP template to establish an intuitive flow and keep all your information organized. Download your university website RFP template here.
How to Improve Your Higher Education Website RFP
Submitting an RFP is a lot like interviewing for a job — you’re demonstrating why you might be a good fit for the vendor, but you’re also assessing whether you would like to work with them. You want to be sure that your RFP will elicit the desired response so you have a pool of quality, viable agencies to choose from.
To find the best fit for your university website project, your RFP needs to:
- Show off your personality: Even if you see your university as the most straight-laced institution out there, every school has a personality. Don’t be afraid to let that come through.
- Encourage creativity: Agencies don’t like to be boxed in! Make sure you’re asking open-ended questions and leaving room for creativity as you explain your vision.
- Ask the right questions: For example, rather than asking something like, “Which WordPress plugin do you recommend for auto-posting our latest newsletter to the site?” ask instead, “How would you recommend integrating our current digital marketing efforts with the new website?” This gives the agency more freedom to propose new tools and tactics you may not have thought of yet.
- Keep it simple: Your RFP should contain the appropriate amount of detail about your goals, but don’t get too granular. It’s the agency’s job to fill in the nitty gritty stuff.
- Make it easy for agencies to follow up: Include your contact’s name and information and the deadline for responses in a prominent place.
- Allow for flexible proposal formats: You should state your preferred response format to keep it standardized, but leave some room for flexibility. For example, you can require that responses be submitted in a digital format, but whether agencies respond with a written document or a slide deck is up to them.
[ Ready for the Higher Education Website RFP Template? Download It Here > ]
By giving agencies plenty to react to, you increase your chances of garnering responses from potential partners who represent the best fit.
10 Best University Website RFP Examples
We tracked down ten great examples of website RFPs from higher education institutions to help inspire you. Keep in mind, these RFPs are publically available, which generally means the institutions are required to post them. Because of that, although they’re great examples, they are also a bit formal and legalistic. If your higher ed institution isn’t bound to the same standards, you can probably reduce the word count and make things more readable.
Here they are, in alphabetical order:
1. College of the Desert Website Redesign RFP
Why we like it: This RFP provides detailed information about the objectives of the website redesign, along with the functionality and content requirements.
What could be better: It reads like it was written by a lawyer (maybe it was), which makes it a bit daunting to get through. Showing some personality in your writing style goes a long way.
2. Illinois Valley Community College Website Redesign RFP
Why we like it: The project overview is clear about what needs to be improved in the website redesign.
What could be better: There’s a lot of boilerplate to get through before the meat of the RFP, and they didn’t include a table of contents.
3. Indiana Commission for Higher Education Website Development RFP
Why we like it: It includes a simple list of “desired project outcomes,” followed by the tangible benefits they hope to see as a result of the site rebuild. They also do a great job identifying what’s wrong with their current site and what their top priority improvement is.
What could be better: It’s a bit prescriptive in terms of process, laying out the phases they expect to go through to get to the endpoint. While it’s great to go in with some ideas around this, it’s important to be open to how experienced higher education website agencies structure their process. To attract the best agencies, a collaborative spirit is a must.
4. Maine Community College System Website Redesign RFP
Why we like it: This RFP gets right to business, with a brief summary, an overview of the college system, and a project overview starting on page one. Plus their “Expectations” section is a great conversation starter about roles and responsibilities. And, their list of questions in “Requested Information” are all great things to ask.
What could be better: Actually, not much. This one is a gem.
5. SUNY Fredonia Website Redesign RFP
Why we like it: Well, it’s very detailed.
What could be better: Like #3 on our list, this RFP is…bossy. It specifies a phased process to be followed down to a to-the-day timeline. It’s great to come prepared with ideas and expectations, but too much rigidity is likely to attract only order-takers who don’t bring much to the table in terms of expertise, creativity, and problem-solving.
6. Tillamook Bay Community College Website Redesign RFP
Why we like it: The “Outcome” statement on page one is crystal clear about what the new website needs to accomplish.
What could be better: It’s vague about who will be responsible for content creation and copyediting, which in our experience is the number one threat to website timelines.
7. University of Arkansas at Little Rock Website Design RFP
Why we like it: This is a pretty middle-of-the-road RFP. Not much stands out as great, but it’s worth a look to see how they structured the document.
What could be better: This is an RFP for website design only. No wireframing, information architecture, development, etc. are required. This, of course, is fine, but it takes a good bit of reading to uncover that crucial information. We’d recommend putting a clear scope of work statement close to the top of the RFP.
8. University of Chicago Website Design, Development, and Maintenance RFP
Why we like it: They include a “Requirements Questionnaire” in an appendix, and they ask all the right questions — except for the one about the hourly rates of each team member. Until discovery happens, agencies won’t be able to determine the best team members to assign to the project.
What could be better: See above regarding the hourly rate question. Also, the proposal invitation, background and scope section at the beginning is a solid page and a half of italics. We admit we need our reading glasses, but a more user-friendly font would be great.
9. University of Missouri Website Redesign RFP
Why we like it: It clearly lays out the website improvements they want.
What could be better: Holy legalese, Batman! We could hardly find that list of website redesign requirements buried under all the fine print. More importantly, like a few other RFPs, they’re overly specific about process. If you’re looking for an extra set of hands for your internal team to manage, that’s fine — but experienced web agencies will have a defined process already in place, so be open to collaboration here.
10. West Liberty University Website Redesign RFP
Why we like it: Overall this is a very nice, clean RFP. The Scope of Services is clear and includes the right level of detail.
What could be better: It’s missing details about what’s not working with the current site.
How and Where to Submit Your University Website RFP
Crafting an RFP for a university website takes effort, but following the best practices offered in this guide can help you get organized, crystallize your thoughts, and elicit responses from the right kind of agency partners.
Here’s how you can get the most out of the RFP process:
- Be selective about who you submit your RFP to: Don’t just toss your RFP into the wind and hope it lands at the right agency’s door. Do your research first and only send RFPs to agencies you think would best meet your needs. Then it’s up to them to either decline or prove you right.
- Take advantage of the Q&A period: You want your RFP to generate a dialogue, so give respondents time to ask you their own set of questions. Doing so can help both you and the agency further clarify whether you’d make a good team.
- Ask around about agencies’ reputations: Social validation is a powerful thing. Ask marketing teams at similar institutions if they have an agency they recommend, and also what they’ve heard about other agencies out there.
- Don’t treat it as a pricing comparison: As stated earlier, the RFP process is not for comparing prices. You can find out pricing info simply by asking agencies for their rates, then weed out the ones you know you can’t afford.
- Focus on fit, not just features: You want to know not only what an agency can do for you, but whether your teams will work well together. You may be able to gauge fit from an agency’s response, but it’s more likely that you’ll find this out during the Q&A stage. If it doesn’t feel like a comfortable match, move on.
- Consider long-term relationship potential: While it may seem like a website development project is a one-and-done deal, a savvy agency is a great asset to have on hand. Consider opening up your criteria to include agencies that can also handle higher education digital marketing or long-term maintenance long after the website is built.
Get The Higher-Ed RFP Template
Fill out the form below to download this template so you can write the best RFP ever.
You. Are. Welcome.
