Montgomery College Issues Media Monitoring RFP

Montgomery College has issued an RFP for a company capable of providing media monitoring and reporting services. Services requested include, monitoring news and social media coverage, using social media analytics and analyzing news content, and compiling and providing reports.

Montgomery College is Maryland’s second oldest community college. The College serves more than 60,000 students each year, through credit and noncredit programs, at nonresidential campuses located in Germantown, Rockville, and Takoma Park/Silver Spring and at off-campus sites throughout Montgomery County. To support students’ academic and professional goals, the College employs more than 3,100 faculty, administrators, and staff.

The Communications Office, which is part of the larger Advancement and Community Engagement Office, supports the mission of the College by fostering continual communications internally and externally through all media to keep stakeholders informed and by helping to shape the College’s image among appropriate constituencies.

The Media Relations unit within Communications will be the primary user of services procured under a contract for media monitoring and reporting services. Media Relations supports the College mission by:

• Creating and maintaining a positive image that positions the College as a nationally and regionally recognized educational institution.
• Positioning the College as an outstanding community and business resource.
• Developing and cultivating strong, positive relationships among the College’s opinion leaders and key stakeholders.
• Creating high-quality products that raise positive awareness and increase utilization of College resources.
• Utilizing a variety of promotional tools ─ media, advertising, promotional materials, and community involvement ─ to position the College as an intellectual force and outstanding economic resource for Montgomery County.

Scope of Services

The College is seeking proven solutions to meeting its business parameters for strategic communications, and this Request for Proposal is for a solution-oriented, secure, externally hosted, Cloud or online system for media monitoring and reporting services, for listening, measuring, analyzing, reporting, and engaging across traditional broadcast, web, and social media channels, in accordance with the terms, conditions, and specifications listed herein. Services requested include, , monitoring and gathering broadcast, web, and social media content; monitoring news and social media coverage, including reader comments, blogs, and discussion boards; developing, sharing with the College and utilizing appropriate industry metrics; analyzing news content; and compiling and providing reports.

Specifications

Implementation and Consulting:  Contractor shall:

1. Work with the College to customize media monitoring services to fit the communications needs of the College, including setting up news monitoring search terms, identifying meaningful media metrics to use and statistics to track, and reporting to help the College and its stakeholders understand and validate its market visibility and viability.
2. Customize system templates, categories, and data. Contractor shall ensure that it works with Media Relations to receive all recently redesigned and launched branding materials and that such logos, artwork, graphics, etc. are appropriately formatted and displayed for their intended use.
3. Provide customized online and in-person training that fits Montgomery College’s needs and training objectives during implementation of the contract.
4. Provide 24/7 telephone and e-mail support during implementation of the contract.
5. Adhere to the agreed-upon timeline for implementation of the system and services.

News Monitoring and Analysis:  Contractor’s services and system shall continuously:

1. Monitor news 24/7 to ensure that the College receives its mentions in the press, social media, blogs, message boards, and broadcasts. Mentions should be for this Montgomery College, regardless of the size of the media markets, rather than other similarly named institutions.
2. Monitor social media, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, Digg, WordPress and other blog platforms, and Technorati and other Internet search engines for searching blogs.
3. Monitor any other news, online, or social media sources that the College requests at no additional charge. Describe in specifics how the College’s competitors would be monitored.
4. Have the ability to pull in any other third-party content for monitoring and analysis, which would supplement any media or news not monitored by the Contractor.
5. Clips:
6. Automatically capture and store College news clips; video clips are required.
7. Provide unlimited clips at no additional charge.
8. Provide instantaneous access to clips as they appear and report analytics, in both real time and archives, without a login prompt.
9. Have the ability to compile and distribute clip books through e-mail.
10. Have the ability to set up and send daily clips through e-mail.
11. Provide integrated news archiving.
12. Provide unlimited key word searches.
13. Analyze news results and generate reports with charts and graphs.
14. Provide analysis to include advertisement equivalency rates, positive/negative coverage, media outlets, etc.
15. Set up and allow for news analysis to be performed by College staff when needed (self- generated reports).

Proposal due by September 25 to:

Office of Procurement

900 Hungerford Drive, Suite 110

Rockville, MD 20850

Contact: Sena Wiles, Purchasing Agent sena.wiles@montgomerycollege.edu