Immunize Colorado is seeking a vendor partner to help us redesign a new website for our organization at www.immunizecolorado.org. The following website redesign RFP includes a background of our organization and describes the purpose of the redesign and new website, its desired functionality, and specific requests relating to the proposal. We recognize that these details may change upon vendor recommendation and / or research of more optimal solutions. We hope that our vendor will serve as a thought partner and we aim to establish a collaborative relationship—welcoming new ideas to help reach our goals; please feel free to suggest creative alternatives or other solutions to any elements included within this request in your proposal. Please Note: Should we establish a positive working relationship during our work on this web project, the vendor selected for this redesign project may have competitive advantage to be selected to assist with an additional project currently in our organization’s pipeline. This project will include redesigning our parent information campaign website, www.ImmunizeForGood.com, and it’s Spanish-language counterpart, www.VacunalosPorSuBien.com.
Background:
Immunize Colorado (IC) is Colorado’s statewide, non-profit 501(c)3 immunization coalition, first formed in 1991 by concerned pediatricians and stakeholders concerned about the state’s poor childhood immunization rates. In 2020, Immunize Colorado changed our name from the Colorado Children’s Immunization Coalition and expanded our mission to focus on vaccines across the lifespan and not just for children, as had been our mission since our organization’s inception. With the help of our partners – healthcare providers, parents, community organizations, public health agencies, businesses and policymakers – we strive to identify and advance solutions to challenges facing Colorado families and communities and ensure that everyone in our state is protected from vaccine-preventable diseases. Our mission is to protect Colorado families, schools and communities from vaccine-preventable diseases. To advance this mission, we focus on six core program areas: coalition and partnership building, provider education, vaccine data translation and action, community outreach and awareness, no- and low-cost vaccines, and public policy. Our tagline is “Keeping Colorado Communities Healthy.”
Scope of Work:
Immunize Colorado is looking for a partner to help us redesign our website, www.immunizecolorado.org. Our current website was last rebuilt in 2014 (as the Colorado Children’s Immunization Coalition) and it has become outdated and difficult to manage through its custom-built but customization-limited Content Management System (CMS). As we’ve grown our organization’s staff size and influence, the website has not been able to keep up. Our goals for this project are to modernize the website and bring it up to current website best practice standards while considering future sustainability as these standards change; improve our users’ experience and make it easier to navigate the website through a simpler, more optimized and organized site map; and migrate to a new CMS that allows for increased customization, ease of use and flexibility as our organization continues to grow and our website needs become more complex. The new website will keep the www.immunizecolorado.org domain.
Our Audience
Immunize Colorado serves a broad audience of people interested in advancing immunization delivery, demand, and access across Colorado including elected officials, immunization advocates, healthcare providers, public health partners, parents and families, community members, philanthropic partners and funders, members of the media and more. Our main audiences are outlined below:
Primary Audiences:
• Healthcare Providers and Public Health Officials – One of our primary audiences is Colorado healthcare providers and professionals who look to Immunize Colorado to provide important resources and services to help them stay up-to-date on current issues related to vaccine deliver, access, research and development, communication, policy and vaccine safety. Our monthly online Education Series educates 1,000 health care professionals yearly with pertinent information on clinical guidelines, data, vaccine research and more. It is critical that this audience has access to tools and resources so that they can accurate and confidently discuss vaccination with patients and make strong recommendations for vaccination. Health professionals are the backbone of vaccination in Colorado.
• Parents, Families & Community Members – Another primary audience is Colorado parents, families and community members, including older adults; this includes anyone who has questions and seeks reliable, fact-based information on vaccination when they are considering vaccination for themselves or their families. It is important that they be able to find answers to questions about where to get vaccines, what school or work requirements for vaccination exist in Colorado, and information about recommended vaccines for all ages from Immunize Colorado. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have focused increasingly on vaccine disparities in our state and dedicated much of our organizational capacity to promoting equitable access to and information about vaccinations, especially in highly impacted communities.
• School and Childcare Administrators & Staff – Our final primary audience is Colorado school and childcare administrators, including school nurses and other health staff who are responsible for educating families about school-required vaccinations and for annually reporting their institution’s vaccination and exemption data to the state health department. Immunize Colorado provides this audience with educational opportunities to assist with the data reporting process in addition to resources to help them understand and improve their school or districtlevel vaccination rates. It is important that this audience be able to easily access these resources on our website.
Secondary Audiences:
• Donors (current and future) – These organizations and individuals are or wish to become vaccination supporters and help Immunize Colorado advance our mission through financial contributions to our organization. They range from individual one-time or recurring donors to foundations that provide large grants or companies that provide event sponsorships. It is important that these donors can easily access information about our organization, the benefit we provide to the community, why they should support us and how they can contribute financially on our website.
• Advocates – These individuals are active supporters of vaccination; they care deeply about ensuring our state has the infrastructure and policies in place to sustain and expand access, delivery and demand for vaccinations. They are involved in pro-vaccine advocacy on a personal and/or policy level, and participate in activities like contacting elected officials through action alerts, participating on our organization’s Policy Committee, testifying at legislative hearings, sharing vaccine information on social media, etc. They often also contribute to our organization by making donations or volunteering. Our website is just one of the ways we communicate digitally with our audiences. Immunize Colorado also has a blog and social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We have approximately 1,700 followers on Facebook, 3,000 followers on Twitter and 90 followers on LinkedIn. Our blog averages about 2,000 views per month. Our website sees between 2,000 and 30,000 users each month (note: this large range is explained by an increase in monthly views when a media campaign that drives to a page on our website is in market).
CURRENT WEBSITE
Our current website, www.immunizecolorado.org, is almost seven years old and does not serve us well anymore. While the design still effectively reflects our brand, the navigation is a bit clunky and users often have trouble finding what they are looking for. Additionally, and most problematically, the custom CMS does not allow us to expand beyond its current functionalities and features, making it hard to customize the website as our organization and our website needs grow. Specific challenges include:
• CMS
o Our current events calendar does not auto-populate entries; our staff must go into the CMS and manually add them to the homepage calendar. The calendar also does not auto-populate them in order of date; staff must manually order events by date.
o Our CMS does not allow us to change or update any of the graphics or buttons on the website; we must go through an outside web developer who does this for us.
o The CMS severely limits our flexibility to add creative features or elements to any given page. For instance, we do not have the ability to add buttons to secondary page content (for example: we cannot add buttons with a call to action like “register” to direct folks to sign up for an event; rather, we are limited to providing the link in-text).
o The CMS severely limits our flexibility to customize font, text placement, etc.
o Our CMS does not allow us to easily create anchor links (“page jumps”) within pages.
• Website
o Our current website does not feature drop-down options in the main navigation, forcing a user to click on one of the selections to determine what next step to take or if it led them to the right information. Additionally, each secondary page on the website includes a side-navigation bar that takes up nearly one third of the page. This distracts from the content of the pages themselves and could be solved by a main navigation that includes drop down options and/or quick links on each page. Overall, we are struggling to find ways to incorporate the ever-growing volume of content that we want to share in a way that ensures users will easily find it.
o The current homepage has a very stagnant layout and limits our ability to post dynamic content; it feels outdated.
▪ The homepage is also missing an immediate picture of how Immunize Colorado is serving our members, partners, and communities across the state—our impact. There are features and functions of our current website that we find useful and would like to incorporate into our new website (see Website Technical & Functionality Requirements section below for details).
These include:
• Recent vaccine news (auto sorted by date) that is organized and easy to locate on the homepage
• Upcoming events that are featured and easy to locate on the homepage
• Resources that are compiled into a single library or “hub”
• Our mission statement featured prominently on the homepage
NEW WEBSITE GOALS AND REQUIREMENTS
Objectives for New Website
1. The main objective for our new website is to make vaccine resources, information, news and educational opportunities accessible and engaging for our visitors.
2. The second objective is to engage visitors and inspire them to take action on our website by signing up for our newsletter, registering for an event, making a donation, signing up to volunteer, completing an action alert, connecting to more information on site, joining our coalition, sponsoring our annual fundraising event, joining a committee, and/or ordering educational resources.
3. The third objective is to communicate Immunize Colorado’s mission, value proposition and programs effectively and creatively. Indicators of success for meeting these objectives include visitors’ ease of use and actions taken on the website. Visitors’ ease of use will be measured by users’ time spent on the website and web pages (including bounce rate and session duration) and navigability indicators like link clicks and pageviews for content that is not directly linked on the home page. Actions taken on site will be measured by the number of email newsletter sign-ups, donations, event registrations, sent action alerts, resources downloaded or accessed, store orders, etc. We would like to see increases of at least 10% for both indicators. Website Technical & Functionality Requirements
• Customizable & Easy CMS – We need an easy-to-use and easy-to-customize CMS that’s built to last without need for coding experts for minor (or even major) edits. We need our staff to be able to easily update the website daily with new content and add new functionalities (buttons, pages, etc.) with ease.
• Ability to Post Content in One Place and Auto-Feed to Other Locations – We have a lot of content that falls under multiple categories. Our current website makes it easy to add an entry to multiple sections of the website, and we would like to keep this feature.
• Intuitive Design / Navigation – We need our website to follow usability best practices and allow users to navigate easily without getting lost. We need the content to be easy to find without requiring users to click through multiple different pages or scroll endlessly on a single page to get where they want to go. We’d prefer a main navigation that includes drop down options so that users can navigate easily without unnecessary clicks.
o Modern Aesthetic – We want the website to look clean and contemporary, but approachable. See “Initial Design Direction,” below.
o Search Bar – We would like to incorporate a search bar into the website so users can easily search for specific resources and information.
• Responsive Design / Mobile Compatible – We need the website to have a responsive design to be able to look good and function well on different devices. We require the website be mobile compatible and easy to use and navigate from a smartphone.
• Blog Integration – We need our Team Vaccine blog (currently hosted on WordPress) to be either prominently featured or fully integrated into our website; we are open to migrating the blog to the new website CMS for ease.
• CRM Integration – We need our Customer Relationship Management platform (currently Neon CRM, but please note that IC is open to alternative CRM options—highly qualified vendors should be able to provide expertise and advice on other platforms) integrate into the new website. We currently host contact forms linking to Neon on our webpage; these include our donation form, event registration forms, volunteer sign-up form, and online store where customers can place orders for our resources.
• Social Media Integration – We would like people to easily connect with our social media platforms via share buttons, follow buttons, and a post feed if aligned with best practices.
• Clear Paths to Action – We need to prominently feature our donation button on the main navigation page, as well as on secondary pages, and make it easy for folks to take action regarding other ways to get involved with us.
Due Date:
March 24, 2021
Address:
Emily Clancy, Communications Director: Emily.Clancy@childrenscolorado.org or 303-653-1125
Agencies to consider include MWWPR and Edelman PR.