Ensure your RFP
returns ROI.

We hold a number of strong opinions within this agency, and here’s one of them: too many people enter into the RFP process unnecessarily. At their absolute best, RFPs are a bloated project brief. At their worst, they serve as bureaucratic beasts that grind the process of choosing a partner and getting mission critical work started to a crawl. And while it’s true that, for some campuses, RFPs are unavoidable, there are alternative pathways to finding the right partner in less time if you’re willing to collaborate with your peers in procurement.

Between drafting your document, collecting responses, evaluating options, and finalizing contracts, completing an RFP process can take anywhere from three to 12 months, depending on the complexity of your project and the required stakeholders needed. That’s a lot of time that could otherwise be spent tackling the challenges that prompted your RFP in the first place.

The RFP process may feel like an unavoidable bureaucratic rite of passage, but for many colleges and universities, it’s not the only path forward. If your goal is to get mission-critical marketing initiatives off the ground without wading through months of red tape, these alternative pathways are worth exploring. After all, the faster you can start solving problems, the sooner you’ll see results. 

Sole Source Justification: Let’s start with the alternative pathway you’ve most likely heard of. Sole source justification becomes attainable if you can prove that only one agency or company can reasonably provide the required services, hence no comparable alternative existing. Your ability to clear this bar is often dependent on how willing a partner you have in procurement. If you’re unsure of how likely this is, ask the potential agencies you’d like to work with if they have had historical success with sole source justification. At SimpsonScarborough, for example, we’ve successfully used our higher education industry benchmarks as a way to gain sole source approval on market research projects, in particular.  

Use Pre-Approved Contracts: This one may be less known, but depending on where your campus is located, it may be your best bet for avoiding an RFP. Currently, 16 states participate in what are known as cooperative purchasing agreements, allowing you to use pre-negotiated contracts without issuing an RFP. This not only speeds up the purchasing process, it does so while satisfying the desire for competitive pricing that often incentivizes procurement offices to encourage the RFP route in the first place, making it a win-win scenario.  

Piggybacking on Existing Contracts
Piggybacking on an existing contract is slightly different than cooperative purchasing agreements in that the landscape for usable contracts is more focused on your campus or state system, depending on the type of campus you work at.  

For example, many campuses maintain lists of “approved vendors” that can be hired without needing to issue an RFP. In many cases, this doesn’t require you to use these partners, but it can significantly speed up the process. If your campus doesn’t maintain such a directory, they still may maintain active agreements with one or a small number of agencies, which can be used in this purpose. Finally, for public institutions that are part of a state system, it’s worth understanding which agencies, if any, have system-level agreements that you can piggyback on.  

Utilizing Small Purchase Thresholds
Finally, it may seem obvious, but make sure you understand your purchasing threshold on campus. Many campuses allow simplified purchasing processes for contracts under a certain dollar threshold. In some cases, these thresholds may allow you to directly hire an agency without the need to seek a competitive bid, while in other cases, informal quotes may be sufficient.