For Bid Issuers: How the RFP Process Works

You write an RFP in six stages: establish what the organization actually needs, secure stakeholder alignment and a real budget, research the market so you know who can do the work and roughly what it costs, draft the document and get legal and finance sign-off, publish it and answer bidder questions in writing, then evaluate against criteria you published in advance. Most first-time issuers underestimate the first two stages and overestimate the fourth. The writing is not the hard part - the agreeing is.

What Are the Stages of Issuing an RFP?

1. Discover the need. Interview the departments who will live with the result. Ask about business, technical, functional, financial, legal and communications requirements separately, and write down the answers - you will be quoting them back later.
2. Align the stakeholders. Get scope, timeline and budget agreed in one room, with executive buy-in and an allocated budget. Alignment reached after the RFP is published costs an amendment; alignment reached after award costs a change order.
3. Research the market. Find out how many vendors can do this work and what it typically costs before you write a requirement no one can meet.
4. Draft and review. Write the scope of work, the submission requirements and the evaluation criteria, then route the draft through finance and legal.
5. Publish and answer questions. Post it where your rules require, run a question period, and answer every question in writing to every bidder at once.
6. Evaluate and award. Score against the published criteria, shortlist if useful, award, and tell the losing bidders why.

Who Needs to Be Involved Before You Write Anything?

More people than you want, and earlier than is comfortable. The failure mode is a project lead who writes the whole document alone, circulates it for comment a week before release, and then discovers that finance never approved the budget or that legal requires insurance terms no one costed. Each function owns a different part of the document, and each one can stop the process if brought in late.

How Do You Research the Market Before Writing?

Ask, formally. If you do not know who supplies this service or what it costs, issue a Request for Information first. An RFI is a low-commitment way to learn what solutions exist, how vendors would approach the problem and roughly what the market charges, without obligating you to buy anything or obligating them to bid. It also tells you something useful about demand: if an RFI draws three responses, a full RFP will not draw thirty. Informal research counts too - read what comparable organizations recently awarded, and look at their published solicitations for language you can borrow.

How Long Should Bidders Get to Respond?

Long enough that a good vendor can say yes. Public entities usually have a statutory floor, and treating that floor as the target is a common self-inflicted wound: a three-week window on a complex scope filters for vendors with idle capacity rather than vendors with the best team. Build in a question deadline roughly halfway through, publish the answers to all bidders simultaneously, and if the answers materially change the requirement, extend the deadline rather than pretending they did not.

What Has to Be Approved Before You Publish?

Three things, and they are the three most often skipped. Finance confirms the budget exists and the pricing structure you are asking for is one they can actually evaluate and pay against. Legal confirms the terms, insurance requirements and any statutory procurement rules are met - for public entities this includes where and for how long you must advertise. Procurement or your equivalent confirms the document is internally consistent: that the evaluation criteria match the scope, the submission requirements match the evaluation criteria, and the page limits allow a bidder to answer everything you asked.

What Happens After the Bids Arrive?

You score them against the criteria you published, and only against those. This is the point where an RFP process either holds up or falls apart, and it is worth reading our guide to the RFP evaluation process before the first bid lands, not after. It is also worth knowing what your bidders are being told on the other side: the mistakes that get responses rejected are largely caused by ambiguity in the solicitation, so reading that list as an issuer is a free edit pass on your own document.

See How Other Issuers Write Theirs

The fastest way to improve your own solicitation is to read live ones from organizations like yours. Federal, state and local notices sit in one searchable place. Browse open solicitations on Bid Banana.