How to Write an RFP for a Nonprofit Website (Without Wasting Three Months)
A good RFP attracts good partners and weeds out the wrong ones. A bad one attracts a pile of guesses you cannot compare. Here is how to write one that works.
If your organization needs a new website and the budget is grant-funded or board-approved, you will probably write a Request for Proposal. Done well, an RFP gets you comparable bids from partners who understand the work. Done poorly, it gets you ten wildly different numbers you cannot line up against each other, and three months of back and forth.
You do not need a procurement department to write a good one. You need clarity about what you are buying and what a good answer looks like. Here is the structure we wish every nonprofit used.
When you actually need an RFP
An RFP is worth the effort when the project is large enough that you want competitive bids, when a funder or board requires a documented selection process, or when you genuinely do not yet know who the right partner is. For a small, well-understood project with a partner you trust, a scoped proposal is faster and just as defensible.
What every website RFP should include
- Who you are, in two paragraphs. Mission, who you serve, and why the site matters now. Vendors price risk, and context lowers it.
- The problem, not just the request. "Our donation flow loses people on mobile" tells a partner more than "we need a new website."
- Must-haves vs. nice-to-haves. Separate the two explicitly. It is the single biggest lever on price.
- Accessibility and compliance requirements. State the standard (WCAG 2.1 AA is the common one) so it is priced in, not discovered later.
- Integrations. Your CRM, donation platform, email tool, event system. Name them.
- Timeline and any hard deadlines. Especially if a grant cycle or event drives the date.
- Budget or a range. Yes, share it. More on this below.
- How you will decide. The criteria and their weights, so vendors answer what you actually care about.
The mistakes that cost you the most time
- Asking for a fixed price on a fuzzy scope. If the requirements are vague, every bid is a guess, and the cheapest guess usually wins for the wrong reasons.
- Requesting free spec work or full mockups. Good partners will decline, so you filter out the best and keep the desperate.
- Scoring on price alone. Weight value, accessibility, support, and fit. The cheapest site is rarely the one that performs.
- No named point of contact. Give vendors one person and a way to ask questions. The quality of their questions tells you a lot.
How to make vendors compete on value, not just price
Publish your evaluation criteria with weights. For example: approach and understanding 30%, accessibility and quality 20%, relevant experience 20%, support and maintenance 15%, price 15%. When vendors can see that price is one factor among several, the strong ones invest in a real answer instead of racing to the bottom.
Then give them room to push back. The best partners will tell you when something in your RFP is a bad idea. That conversation is worth more than a perfectly formatted bid.
The goal of an RFP is not the lowest number. It is the clearest match between what you need and who can deliver it, documented well enough to defend.
A shortcut if you are short on time
If you would rather not build the document from scratch, send us what you have, even a rough outline, and we will tell you straight whether an RFP is the right move and what it should ask for. We respond to government and grant-funded RFPs as a core part of our work, so we know what a strong one looks like from both sides of the table.