Penticton Peach Festival – RFP – New Website
Background/introduction
The Penticton Peach Festival is a free, family-friendly, five day festival held every August in Penticton, B.C., since 1947. The festival, which includes two parades, musical and entertainment acts, a Kid’s Zone and several other events, is overseen by a board of directors. The festival creates a sizable economic impact for the city from out-of-town attendees, with approximately 80,000 people taking in some aspect of the festival over the five days. Roughly two-thirds of those are visitors (according to a recent survey from the City of Penticton).
The festival is in need of a refreshed website and platform and is accepting proposals in response to this Request for Proposal (RFP) in order to find a qualified source for this.
Project Goals and Scope of Services
The Penticton Peach Festival is seeking the services of a web designer/developer to create a comprehensive website for the event and moving away from their current platform (Concrete 5) to a more user-friendly platform that is easy for visitors to navigate and find information about Peach Festival. The website, (peachfest.com) built in 2017, is outdated in appearance, structure, and in the presentation of content. For reference, the current website has all the up-to-date information that will need to be migrated to our new design.
The winning bidder must leverage the right tools and technology to engage our visitors and sponsors. We are looking for a bidder that will bring creative ideas and technical knowledge to build a modern, bright and creative website that represents our brand and event well. All content, coding and graphics will become the sole property of Penticton Peach Festival. The site will be maintained with in-house resources, therefore must be easy to maintain (without directly accessing source code) and the winning bidder will provide lessons on how to manage the back-end of the website after the initial launch. While price is a factor, other criteria will form the basis of our award decision, as more fully described in the evaluation factors section of this RFP.
Tasks include, but may not be limited to, the following:
• Migrating information/photos from the current website to the new platform
• Designing a user-friendly, day-by-day schedule on the Peach Festival website that is clean and works on both mobile devices and on desktops/laptops.
• Creating a visually pleasing, safe and secure, quick to load and operate, web accessible site.
• Search engine optimization
• Lessons on how to manage the website functions on the back end
• Working closely with the Board of Directors (communications director) to build and develop the website
• Features should include but not limited to: blog/news, pages for each individual event as needed, FAQ’s page, schedule, sponsor recognition areas, ability to post video, forms for entry for some parades, registration and events, and the ability to embed content from our social channels to our blogs and possibly other areas of the website, an addition of an email sign-up for updates/newsletter.
Anticipated Selection Schedule
The request for proposal timeline is as follows: Request for RFP: July 7, 2020 Selection of top bidders/notification to unsuccessful bidders: August 15, 2020 Start of negotiation: August 28, 2020 Contract award notification to successful and the unsuccessful bidders: September 7, 2020
Time and Place of Submission Proposals
The RFP will be posted on our website, peachfestival.com as of July 7, 2020.
Respondents to this RFP must submit before midnight (PST) July 31, 2020. Respondents should be clearly marked RFP-Penticton Peach Festival website and emailed to [email protected].
Elements of Proposal
A submission must, at minimum, include the following elements:
• Examples of event-based websites that your company has produced, or website that best reflect your work and relevancy to this project. The URL should be submitted. Only sites that are live will qualify during evaluation.
• A one page narrative outlining your company’s strengths and distinguishing capabilities, as they might relate to building a website for the Penticton Peach Festival. This should also include a brief explanation of what platform and technologies you will be suggesting for the festival website.
• Three to five references of former or current clients.
• Timeline for completion.
• The price you quote should be inclusive of all fees and charges (with breakdown, if possible).
• If the execution of work to be performed by your company requires the hiring of sub- contractors, you must clearly state this in your proposal.
Evaluation Criteria The successful respondent will:
• Have a proven successful track-record of building professional websites, preferences to those that are event-based.
• Competitive cost of services
• Suitability of proposal – the proposed solution meets the needs and criteria set forth in the RFP.
• Education, experience, knowledge, skills and qualifications for building strong websites.
• Operations in the Okanagan, not mandatory, but preferred.
• Fall with the festivals $10,000 budget – open to negotiating sponsorship recognition in return for work if it goes beyond budget.
