I have, over the course of my career, been on both sides of the RFP equation. As a sender of RFPs, I have been dismayed by the lack of attention vendors have paid to the questions we wanted answered, opting instead to push their own agenda. On the recipient side, I’ve been bemused by the widely varying approaches companies take to issuing RFPs, from inconsistent questions to irrelevant queries to those RFPs you find out have gone to 25 or 30 vendors. I’ve also been surprised when I hear of companies appropriating ideas developed for a losing RFP without paying for them.

The Request for Proposal process is imperfect, to say the least. Nearly two years ago, Forrester Research’s Augie Ray wrote eloquently about the shortcomings of the RFP process.

Early this year, The Social Media Group stepped in to try to ease our pain. Undoubtedly born of frustration over repeated bad RFP experiences, Maggie Fox’s consultancy issued a template for RFPs designed to identify a company’s best option for social media services. Back in January I interviewed Maggie for my podcast on the introduction of the template.

Since then, The Social Media Group has received feedback on the template, prompting a modest overhaul. The improvements requested by the communicaty included shortening the template by reducing the number of questions and somehow discouraging organizations from cutting-and-pasting the content without tailoring it to meet address their own unique situations.

The new template was released recently and, if companies use it intelligently, it can ease the whole RFP process. Heaven knows something is needed. As maggie points out, the number of search results on “social media RFP’ numbered in the dozens in early 2010. The search I just ran on the phrase produced over 93,000. (The Social Media Group’s template topped the results; a good bit of SEO on their part.)

The template includes a “bill of rights,” which (unsurprisingly) reads like a vendor’s appeal to prospective clients, an effort to avoid some of the more common experiences, like asking for a completed proposal tomorrow and an in-person presentation, on the other side of the country, in three days. The meat of the template, though, is in the questions companies are advised to ask of prospective vendors.

In addition to the usual vendor qualifications, the template includes questions based on the nature of the project: strategic planning, reputation management, training, marketing, and influencer outreach. The template also asks the right questions about the approach an agency takes to client services and project management.

I would have liked to see a question on how the agency plans to demonstrate that it has achieved the project goal and whether the client expects performance guarantees. One of the more frustrating experiences I had on the client side was agencies that didn’t disclose relationships with vendors, locking us in to this printer or that software platform. Disclosing such relationships would also be a great addition to the template. Finally, if the template is going to feature a bill of rights, I wish it included an amendment ensuring that clients won’t use ideas from RFPs unless they either hire that company or negotiate an appropriate fee. Developing RFPs is time-consuming and agencies aren’t in the business of giving away their best ideas.

(A colleague of mine, when working as an independent, started charging companies $5,000 for proposals because he was tired of prospects praising his ideas, then telling him they had a less-expensive vendor who could implement them.)

But overall, The Social Media Group’s template is worth keeping handy when you’re issuing an RFP. And for agencies and consultancies responding to bad RFPs, infusing the proposal with answers to the questions presented here can give you an edge over the competition, as long as you don’t forget to address all the points raised in the bad RFP.

Special thanks are due Maggie and The Social Media Group, which could have just made this available to clients and prospects. The culture of sharing—and the knowledge that a rising tide lifts all boats—prompted the desire to make the tempalte available to everybody.

If only everybody would use it.

The Social Media Group’s RFP Template