I haven’t done much in the way of work based on RFP’s (Request for Proposal).  Are they all crazy like the one I’m looking at? 

The document doesn’t really detail out the site - just including a few specific functions it needs to have.  And it breaks the project out into a discovery phase and a production phase, so they expect some time to be spent doing audience confirmation, needs analysis, user/stakeholder interviews, determining required functionality, etc.

Yet - they want a budget that covers both the discovery and production.  A fixed fee, even.

So - we don’t know what we want, we want your help in figuring that out, but you need to tell us how much the whole thing will cost beforehand.

Do web development companies actually do this?

And the questions!  They stop just short of asking about your childhood and what situations from it might benefit the building of their site…

Oh - and gotta love this jewel:

The price is commensurate with the value offered by the candidate. As a non-profit institution, the _______ is able to to accept pro-bono service and recognize the provider to the full extent allowed by the Internal Revenue Service, including naming the provider within the web site and other collateral as an _______ supporter and partner.

So, if you build us a free site we’d let you put your name on it.

Wow.  Such a deal.

I’d be interested in hearing about other experiences in reading and responding to web site RFP’s....I’m betting there are some interesting ones out there.

And yes, if I end up taking part in a response to this RFP, you can expect this blog post to go away...if I end up passing on it I’ll post more snippets - there are quite a few good ones.