Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Go do the hard work for me…
The reference to the McDonald’s website on their packaging, discussed in my recent post, was a further source of frustration with their packaging. I mean, obviously, all of their diners have internet access whilst eating their meals - don’t they?
The appearance of URLs in proposals is often the result of similarly illogical thinking. Evaluators hide away in all sorts of locations where they can find peace and quiet to concentrate on the proposals they’ve received: conference rooms, borrowed offices, peaceful corners of the staff restaurant, on trains, working from home. Precisely the locations where they’re least likely to be hooked up to the internet, in fact.
And even if they did have web access whilst reviewing the document, do you think they’d bother – or would they stay with the flow of the document, whilst forming a sub-conscious view that the bidder was just a tad lazy to leave the customer to do the hard work?
I’d propose that most buyers are likely to ignore the material at these URLs during their first pass, and only check the links much later for the top couple of bidders. So if you really do have to include a URL in your proposal, at the very least provide a synopsis (probably illustrated with screen shots), on the basis that the buyer won’t go there during their initial marking.
The same holds true for other external references – policy papers, brochures, corporate procedures. The evaluators may not read them in full (or at all) when the score your proposal, so give them enough of a summary to ensure that they give you as high a score as possible even if they don’t bother turning to the attachment concerned.
Or maybe, just maybe, in this case the McDonald’s designers were being deliberately obstructive – perhaps they don’t actually want us to see the explanations, but by providing an unusable URL have created the pretence that they do. In which case I’m even less impressed than if I was when I merely thought of them as being a shade incompetent.
Another time saver for the reviewer is to include all contact information and URLs on the front cover instead of the text body. No one likes to hunt through an RFP to find the contact for the file transfer protocol, accounting, etc.
I also do an extensive clickable table of contents that includes each question in the questionnaire.
I think it depends on the company and the individual. I know professionals who will only work off their computer screen. Many companies now include wireless in their offices to allow laptops to roam. I’m also finding more and more companies are asking for electronic submissions only. So we design those proposals to be viewed on a computer screen and make full use of links, URLS, other tags, and even video. We also will include a link to print the document. So again it boils down to knowing your client in deciding which way to go.
Like Jeannette, 98% of our proposals are submitted electronically. However, I would not assume that the evaluator is reviewing the document online or even on a computer. Since most of my clients are international I think they understand that electronic (i.e., email) is the quickest, most efficient way to receive material. Also, I hear more and more clients are utilizing electronic pre-screening tools and require the electronic file to run through their pre-screening program.
I appreciate the reminder to include a summary of what information is available at the URL or in the attachment — a detail quite often overlooked.
Great debate!
I run workshops for purchasing folks fairly regularly, and asked a group recently about what they actually do with the electronic copies of proposals that they receive from bidders - mainly in PDF form. Without exception, they printed them off and read them from paper copies. They found it easier to read, and the paper versions allow them to scribble notes and comments in the margins - for future reference, and for debate in the evaluation team’s meetings.
As ever, the golden rule of “know thy customer” absolutely applies. So if you’re 100% confident that all of the evaluators will review online (and will be comfortable doing so) - or they’re using e-sourcing tools that force them to go down this route - then you may fundamentally change the design approach for your proposal. Even there, though, the “keep the answer complete in and of itself, and include a synopsis of any external links” still holds true, rather than abandoning the readers to go and do the hard work themselves!