How to write a request for proposal for your next credit union project

Selecting a partner for building a new branch or workplace can be a pain. It’s not fun like actually designing your cool new building, and for bigger projects the outcome can be career-defining for good or bad. It’s a lot of work and there is significant uncertainty and risk.

After reading, responding to, and helping to write many, many Requests for Proposals (RFP), we decided to develop a standardized RFP tool kit. Over the years we’ve refined it based on feedback from credit unions across the country, and we’ve made it freely available to anyone who wants to use it.

Let’s walk through the steps of creating a great RFP.

Step 1: Create a short list

This may seem obvious to some, but there’s a good reason for doing this. In creating a short list of 3-5 potential partners, you have to do some homework and so some research to better understand the firms. This will help you narrow down the field to those which match your specific needs and makes the process more efficient for everyone involved.

Don’t forget to call on your peers for recommendations!

Step 2: Open a dialog

This is a very underrated step, and if you only take one piece of advice from this article this is it.

You don’t want to send an RFP out of the blue.

Set up a meeting with each firm involved. It doesn’t have to be a long meeting, just half an hour or so is enough to introduce your credit union and describe your project, and for you and the interviewee to each ask questions to clarify the details.

This helps the facilities partner write a more relevant proposal if they choose to respond, and it makes reading and comparing the resulting proposals much easier for your team.

It also gives your team insights into how your teams will communicate and work together.

Step 3: Develop the RFP

Finally, we’re writing the RFP! You want to put some thought into this process, but don’t overthink it.

Sit down with the project stakeholders and brainstorm what information you plan to make a decision on. Gathering too much information can make the proposal comparison process more complicated for your team and result in decision paralysis, but you also don’t want to miss out on critical requirements or what you are looking for to differentiate one firm from another.

Here are the critical pieces of information that we recommend writing your questions around, but keep in mind that these may not be the most relevant questions for your credit union or project:

• Capability to deliver
• Design skill
• Strategic thinking
• Construction skill
• Risk profile
• Working relationship and ease of delivery
• Cost information / structure
• Ability to fulfill particular specialties or needs for this project
• The proposed scope of services for delivering the project

(You don’t have to start from scratch, we have a Word doc with a sample credit union specific RFP that you can edit down or copy questions from here.)

Step 4: Call the references

Most people don’t call the references on a proposal. We recommend doing this if only to gather an outside perspective on what it looks like to do business with these firms.

Step 5: Conduct interviews

Set up a meeting with each responding firm for them to present their proposal and for you to ask questions. This meeting should last around an hour and a half, but plan for longer if you have many questions. Take detailed notes not just about the proposal itself and the answers, but also on the interactions between your team and theirs to get an idea what the working relationship and communication will be like.

Step 6: Make a value-based selection

This is the most challenging aspect of the process. We recommend never making a purely cost-based decision. Instead, look at the value given per dollar spent.

Keep in mind that you and the responding firm will only know what the pre-design and pre-construction phase will cost up front. An estimate of the construction phase of the process will be created based on decisions made during the design phase. Decisions made during this phase can dramatically impact construction costs, especially if more premium materials or complicated design elements are introduced. And free work up-front will always be paid for on the back-end.

The first phase of a project will usually be performed for a fixed fee, while the second phase will be done for a percentage of the value of the project. We recommend cost of the work plus a guaranteed maximum price (cost-plus with a GMP) because it shifts risk to the builder, but there are many good options.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to follow up with the responding firms with questions! It’s better to spend more time communicating at this stage and take more time to make a decision than to start a working relationship based on misunderstanding.

More information and RFP template

The full Partner Selection Guide (17 page PDF expanding on the topic here) along with a Word document RFP template and an Excel weighted value-based selection scorecard (both editable and re-brandable by your credit union) are available on our website at https://momentumbuilds.com/guide-how-to-write-a-credit-union-facilities-rfp/.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out via the form below.