Years ago, I received a Request-for-Proposal (RFP) request from an old PR friend who was on the board of a nonprofit. He pestered me into responding to it when I allowed a certain amount of time to pass without responding. In my experience, if you’re not given some indication that the creator of the RFP really wants you to put your hat in the ring, it’s a waste of time. The game usually is rigged.
I told this to my friend when he called me to get me to participate. He responded by saying this would be worth my time. I took that as an indication that at the very least I’d be given a fair shot. So, with that in mind, I pulled out all stops. I conducted come original research and included some well-informed strategic recommendations in my proposal. This is something that could have waited until after they hired me. I didn’t need to do that, but I did so in good faith.
The RFP process was structured so that any questions my competition and I would ask during the research phase would be answered, and those answers would be shared with all other competitors. In other words, the weakest competitor gets to benefit from the curiosity of the strongest competitor simply by getting information it wasn’t even curious enough to request.
I had the chance to meet the other finalist when we did a group on-site meeting with the prospective client. She was a fellow adjunct professor at the same college as my colleague. I started to get an uneasy feeling about all of this, especially when she came into the meeting without even knowing who the nonprofit’s board members were, asking them their names and what they did for a living.
For comparison, before this meeting, I knew all of the board members’ names and their professional affiliations making it easier to strike up meaningful conversations in front of my competitor, who benefited from observing their interactions with me.
By the end of that meeting, I could tell she knew little about the organization, and her thinking on the kind of PR that was needed here was uninspiring and cookie-cutter. At this point, I myself could sense my proposal was much better, comprehensive, thorough, and would actually achieve the change the nonprofit said it wanted in the RFP.
All of those in that meeting, including the prospective client’s paid staff, gave me a strong indication that my team was the front-runner in this process. It was so obvious, I actually started to feel a little bad for my competitor who could see this, too.
But then it got weird. After that meeting, the prospect when silent for a bit, and I was the one who had to call my colleague for updates. He was very cryptic, and before you knew it, they announced that my colleague’s fellow professor had won the business.
Having seen her and her team in action and hearing of her reputation in the field, I knew without question the nonprofit did not choose the best proposal or the best firm. At the very least, my trusted colleague played politics with his fellow board members so that he could boost his own standing on the college campus where he taught. In hindsight, this all became clear as day to me.
My colleague is now gone, but over the years since that RFP, I’d run into him from time to time at the same gym where he worked out and I swam. I never brought any of this up to him because, what’s the point? Our conversations were professionally cordial. But I never could forget the shell game he played with me, using me to make him look better on his college campus.
After that RFP experience, it just became my policy. No more RFPs, no matter what.