Catch a bigger fish with a better RFP.

First let me say for the record, I have no qualms about RFPs being used to solicit proposals from public relations firms.  We welcome them and look forward to responding!

What I do have an issue with is the broadly disseminated, publicly announced, general RFP that goes to everyone “and their grandmother.”  I don’t see the point.  The responses to such an RFP will be poor in quality, short on detail, and long on boilerplate language that does nothing to help the issuing party dissect the qualified public relations firms from the non-qualified. 

General RFPs announced via the Web or some other means also leaves public relations firms and the issuing party in a quandary…

For the public relations firm– they were never qualified, and the RFP provides no means to help them qualify themselves, so what kind of substantive response can they possibly provide and how much time and effort should they spend responding?  These days, every public relations firm feels the pressure to go after these RFPs—even when the odds of making it to the next round are the slimmest—so they are bound to spend an inordinate amount of time, effort and resources on some new client they don’t have a chance of winning.

And for the company issuing the RFP, it can literally drown in poor, unqualified RFP responses that in the end tell them nothing about what firm they want to hire.  Maybe a few agencies will rise to the top, but couldn’t that objective have been achieved through some less painful way?

Do us a favor if you are looking to issue a RFP for public relations:  Qualify the potential recipients before issuing the RFP—either on experience, geography, size of agency or some other factor.  The result will be a better, more refined RFP response and a more reasonable number of responses to review.  Both parties will be all the better for it.

You know there is one possible reason that companies do issue these widely disseminated, blind RFPs for PR services—they are looking for creative ideas—the intellectual property of the firms they are supposedly going to hire.  But that is another blog for another day…

Further you get a good sense of the respondent’s style, capabilities, experience and culture when it is articulated in black and white.  And what good is a PR firm if they can’t communicate their value to you through the written word?

I say keep RFPs in your process when looking for a public relations partner–it serves the discovery and match-making process well and in the end makes for a better agency-client partnership.  But one caveat:  Give your prospective PR partners a resonable time to respond.