Where can I submit a Request for Proposal to get competitive bids?

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, did it make a sound?

Organizations, whether they are non-profits, corporations or municipal governments, often spend a lot of time defining a project's requirements, crafting a detailed 100 page Request for Proposals (RFP), and then they announce the project on their website, or possibly advertise in a local newspaper, and set a 3 week deadline for submissions. They then sit back and wait for the proposals to come rolling in.

This strategy requires that the issuing organization have a site that gets enough visits that word of the project gets out, or that the site places high enough in a Google search to attract attention. Often what happens is that a small group of vendors known by individuals within the organization are notified of the RFP.

While the process started out with good intentions of an impartial competitive bidding process, the process is essentially derailed by the inability to promote unsolicited bids.

Procurement officers, whether official or unofficial, need to understand that advertising their RFP and getting a number of unsolicited competitive bids is an essential element to the success of their bidding process.

Publicizing your RFP doesn't need to cost money or be time consuming. A quick way to advertise your RFP is to publish it on the Request for Proposal Database, you can list it on your local Craig's List site, or you could set up a project blog using sites such as Blogger or Wordpress. Since these sites get higher search engine placement and have good content distribution, announcing your RFP through these venues will likely significantly increase the number of competitive bids that you receive.