This RFP is for design and development services for the Society for Conservation GIS (SCGIS) website. The current version of this website is at www.scgis.org . The Society seeks design and development services for a new website that includes existing and new functionality.
Background:
The mission of the Society for Conservation GIS (SCGIS) is to build community, provide knowledge, and support individuals using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and science for the conservation of natural resources and cultural heritage. The Society assists conservation practitioners worldwide in using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with efforts focused on communication, networking, scholarships, and training. Membership is open to anyone looking to engage in a GIS community to help them achieve their personal or organizational conservation goals. The Society operates one conference each year and also coordinates smaller regional events. Founded in 1997, SCGIS is as an all-volunteer 501(c)3 organization with 0% overhead.
Our primary audience includes SCGIS members who are by nature conservation GIS practitioners living all over the world. Our membership includes students and practitioners that work in higher education, non-profit conservation organizations, government agencies, private firms, and more. An additional audience includes donors and other potential supporters of SCGIS. The SCGIS website is the public “face” of SCGIS, and plays an enormous role in our communication and outreach to both SCGIS members and to the general public. We feature both public content and members-only content that is accessible from behind a paywall.
The website should showcase our identity as the only organization that directly serves conservation GIS practitioners with scholarships, training, networking events, and knowledge sharing opportunities.Our website should promote confidence in our ability to achieve our mission. It should be technically and graphically inspiring, and contain sufficient information to entice non-members to learn more about the provide granular control over both public-facing content and content that is available only to members.
Our website should convey the “brand” of SCGIS. We have begun a re-branding strategy to better define certain attributes of the SCGIS brand, including core identity concepts and phrases, a new logo, an approved color palette, a mock-up graphic of website concepts, and more. All materials from this effort will be provided to the Contractor, who will be asked to incorporate and further develop into a functional and elegant website that best conveys the SCGIS brand. Our desired layout and design should be attractive to people who work in and love natural settings and may feature a combination of images of nature and depictions of ecologists working in wild landscapes and with wildlife species globally.
Scope of Work:
Our website’s top objective is to share resources that inform, educate, and engage conservation GIS practitioners (both SCGIS members and non-members). Our website aims to position SCGIS as a thought leader in conservation GIS by providing resources and training content including webinars and educational videos. Other objectives include: sharing timely information about SCGIS events; providing the ability for individual members to share professional information, interests and projects; providing the capacity to execute and track financial transactions for event registration, membership, and donations; and providing capacity to display videos through Vimeo or a similar platform.
The website must effectively maintain a comprehensive back-end database that includes, but is not limited to, information about members, financial transactions, events (conferences, webinars and other social events), chapters, and jobs. This database currently exists but may need to be optimized for better data retrieval and links.
The website must allow open content for public consumption, but must also have the ability for members to login to access member-only resources. It should also allow financial and other private information to be stored securely, allowing tiered administrator access rights.
The website should be optimized to display effectively on both desktop and mobile platforms. The website should include intuitive navigation for members and nonmembers to access relevant information. The website requires an effective content management system that allows for easy updates without new technical development requirements. While SCGIS will pursue an ongoing contract for development work and updates to maintain the completed website, we seek an up-front solution that will limit the amount of required future maintenance.
New Website Functionality Requests : We would like to have the following in our new website, depending on how these elements would impact the timeline and/or budget. Please include these as optional services and identify costs separately.
● Ability to send emails to the entire active membership, which requires an automatic removal of expired memberships.
● Social media integration, including share buttons, and the ability to embed social media content on the website.
● Calendar overview of upcoming events and Google/iCal integration.
● Capacity for embedded videos, some of which are public-facing and some that are accessible only to members who are logged in to the website. We do not need the capacity to store videos; however, we need the ability for members to be able to access our private video channels directly from the website.
● Integration of ArcGIS Online content and web maps.
Due Date:
April 30th, 2019.
Address:
Agencies with relevant experience include Hunter PR and Kaplow PR Communications.