Website RFP Issued By Appalachian Regional Commission
The purpose of this RFP is for ARC to solicit proposals from qualified Contractors to provide upgraded Website Design, Development, Content Migration, Deployment and Hosting Strategy services for www.arc.gov. Following receipt of Offerors’ responses, ARC anticipates selecting a Contractor, for the design, development and execution phase of the above-referenced Project. ARC anticipates promptly opening exclusive negotiations with the selected Contractor in the expectation of reaching an agreement.
Background:
ARC’s mission is to innovate, partner, and invest to build community capacity and strengthen economic growth in Appalachia.
The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) is a regional economic development agency that represents a partnership of federal, state, and local government. Established by an act of Congress in 1965, ARC is composed of the governors of the 13 Appalachian states and a federal co-chair, who is appointed by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Local participation is provided through multi-county local development districts. ARC invests in activities that address the five goals identified in the Commission’s strategic plan:
1. Economic Opportunities: Invest in entrepreneurial and business development strategies that strengthen Appalachia’s economy.
2. Ready Workforce: Increase the education, knowledge, skills, and health of residents to work and succeed in Appalachia.
3. Critical Infrastructure: Invest in critical infrastructure—especially broadband; transportation, including the Appalachian Development Highway System; and water/wastewater systems.
4. Natural and Cultural Assets: Strengthen Appalachia’s community and economic development potential by leveraging the Region’s natural and cultural heritage assets.
5. Leadership and Community Capacity: Build the capacity and skills of current and next-generation leaders and organizations to innovate, collaborate, and advance community and economic development.
Each year ARC provides funding for several hundred investments in the Appalachian Region, in areas such as business development, education and job training, telecommunications, infrastructure, community development, recovery-to-work initiatives, and transportation. These projects create thousands of new jobs; improve local water and sewer systems; increase school readiness; expand access to health care; assist local communities with strategic planning; and provide technical and managerial assistance to emerging businesses.
Scope of Work:
ARC is seeking a proposal to rebuild arc.gov on a modern, scalable content management system (CMS). The CMS must include the following specifications:
● Provide publishing workflows that support ARC’s content approval, versioning, staging, and editing processes.
● Provide publishing tools that let ARC content creators produce structured and relatable content, with flexible layouts and simple tools for enriching ARC content with images, videos, etc.
● Follow security and search engine optimization best practices
● The technical architecture must be built for various integrations ARC requires, and have the ability to connect to third-party systems via well-established APIs.
● Provide flexible functionality through the CMS so ARC staff can more efficiently grow and interact with ARC’s audiences.
Selected firms will be required to provide Website Design and Development Services reflecting ARC’s scope of work request, inclusive of the following:
1. Initial meeting & project design review: Introduce the respective teams and to discuss scope, budget and confirm schedule.
2. Hosting of collaborative workshops: Develop goals, objectives and key measures of success for the website and a plan for how the targets are to be achieved.
3. Audience Research, Analytics, and Content Modeling: to include an Analytics Audit, Audience Analysis, Content Audit & Modeling, Technology and Architecture Planning, Quality Assurance Planning and the development of a shared Vision Statement for the project.
4. UX and Design Direction: To incorporate Technical Architecture and design elements of the homepage and subpages.
5. Provide context to external technology partners: How to apply the new ARC design and branding to their digital resources. This context includes HTML code for headers and footers, as well as style guidelines to change fonts and colors on these websites:
o LinkedIn
o Twitter
o Facebook
o YouTube
o Mailchimp
o Cvent
o JazzHR
o Formstack
o SurveyMonkey
6. Content Migration & Loading:
● Define a content migration plan, approach, and development schedule for the ARC team. Full content migration, SEO, Taxonomy will be performed by the vendor. Staff will be available to consult on the relevance of the content.
7. Provide Analytics Setup and Configuration Assistance, including:
● Developing a comprehensive analytics reporting roadmap, including identifying and configuring on-site analytics enhancements, establishing a reporting timeline for ongoing analysis, and selecting and setting up applicable reporting tools.
● Creating and configuring performance reporting dashboards based on previously established definitions of ARC’s KPIs and specific measures of success in line with
● Providing guidance and training to ARC staff on the day-to-day use of analytics and reporting tools.
8. Delivery of the project to include: Site Development, Quality Assurance, Content Migration & Loading, Analytics Setup & Configuration, Website Management Training, Acceptance Testing & Launch Planning, Main Website Launch, and Site Rollout.
● Define a content migration and development schedule for the ARC team.
● Define with ARC what content to keep (i.e. migrate), or leave behind (not migrate), and plan for tracking.
● Governance planning, to help guide the future governance planning discussions and define and set up the roles within the CMS that give access and permissions to different users according to the governance plan.
● The vendor will work with ARC’s SMEs and staff to identify relevant content for Vendor to assisting with tweaking and be responsible for loading to the new site.
● Continually test and refine site functionality as it is completed.
● Conduct testing as features is completed and check against site requirements and design. Work with the ARC team as they accept requirements as they are completed
● Conduct cross-browser compatibility testing, assuming compliance with the latest two versions of web, tablet, and mobile browsers.
● Conduct accessibility testing to confirm compliance with industry accessibility standards.
9. Managed Website Hosting and System Administration: Please include a hosting recommendation to host this website in a Cloud-based environment. This should include a fully managed hosting support package and monthly system administration services and website monitoring 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including the following:
● Robust, faceted search capabilities, with the ability to weight items, create synonyms and adapt to misspelled or approximate query terms.
Due Date:
September 11, 2019
Address:
Marc Hutzell, IT Director, mhutzell@arc.gov
Relevant agencies include MWWPR and Hunter PR.
