Sep 01, 2026 • Collaboration & Partnership • 8 Min Read
Great RFPs will lead to Great Proposals. Great proposals are clear about the problem, the organization, the timeline, the scope, the expectations
Consider how your RFP will be read by someone who is not as familiar with your organization as you are.
Also, consider what you will want in a response that will help you decide on the winning agency.
Follow these best practices to stay focused on what matters when writing an RFP that will get you the responses you want.
Remember when you were a kid and you’d get a birthday gift from your grandparents? It could sometimes make you feel, well, conflicted. On one hand, you love the idea of presents; could it be a new toy? A bike? A video game? But you’re separated from your grandparents by maybe 5 or 6 decades and they definitely don’t know what toys, bikes or video games you’d want. Or worse, what if it’s clothes?
Receiving an RFP is a lot like that. It’s exciting to receive, but as we open it up, we often have doubts that it’s going to be the gift we want it to be.
But like that feeling when a gift you give is well received, RFPs can (and really should) benefit both parties – the giver and the receiver. For the agency receiving a good RFP, they have the information they need to identify a thoughtful solution and craft the perfect response. For the company that puts together a good RFP, they reap the benefit of thorough proposals that can be more easily compared.
If you’re going through an agency selection process and you don’t provide those agencies with the right information, you won’t get what you really need to make a confident decision. And isn’t that the goal when you send out a Request for Proposal?
As someone who has been responding to RFPs for the last 25 years, here’s what helps an agency give you what you need:
Make Every Word Count
Who, What, Why, Where, When & How Are Never a Bad Place to Start
Proclaim What You Know; Admit What You Don’t Know
Don’t Define the Structure of Responses Unless it Benefits You
Be Realistic with Timing
Use AI Responsibly
The Hot Take: Don’t Include Evaluation Criteria
Let’s dig in.
The true goal of the RFP you’re writing is to provide a clear picture to another organization. And there are a lot of different things in that picture that all need to be as clear as you can make them. So any word, sentence, or paragraph that’s not providing clarity is only providing confusion. Be specific; avoid generalities. Elaborate; don’t make assumptions. Write like a human; avoid buzzwords and jargon since those are general by nature.
For example, don’t say “Improve overall experience” because those three words easily lead to three questions (What do you mean by “improve”, by “overall” and by “experience”). Instead, consider what you’re trying to achieve, for what reason, and how you’ll measure it, saying something like “Implement usability changes that result in increased customer spend for first time visitors”.
In order to do this, you need to truly understand your challenge and what you hope to achieve with a solution.
Aristotle first used these questions to emphasize the importance of context when making ethical decisions, but the value of context can be applied to nearly any situation, and cannot be underestimated. It may sound remedial to consider these basic writing prompts when working on your Request for Proposal, but they force a level of discipline that will lead to the clarity your agency partners need to deliver a strong proposal back to you.
If you can’t articulate an answer to one (or some) of these, that’s fine too. Just indicate why you can’t answer that particular question and what may need to happen in order to do so. Perhaps this is a known risk that will need to be considered, or maybe the effort to answer the question will be part of the project itself.
You should notice by now that “clarity” is the number one goal when writing an RFP, but pair that with vulnerability. The only way to get a great solution is to be upfront about the problem. Use language that communicates what you know and also what you don’t know, so your agency can focus their response where you need their creative expertise. If you’re unclear identifying where you truly need the help, you run the risk of getting proposals (or hiring an agency) that sell you things you don’t need.
Some organizations explicitly outline the structure they’d like proposals to follow, while others leave this open ended. There are things to consider for either approach and you should choose the one that gets you what you want.
Dictating the structure of the proposal will make it easier to compare agencies apples-to-apples.
Consider this if:
You need proposals for straightforward work and there’s not much creative problem solving going on
Objectively comparable things like budget and timing are primary decision factors
Getting a feel for each agency, how they work, or how they may work with you is not a top priority given the needs of your project
Leaving the structure open-ended for the agency to dictate will allow you to better assess the soft traits of each agency, but may make it more difficult to compare responses since you’ll be comparing apples and oranges.
Consider this if:
You want to see how the agency solves problems and communicates. Their proposal is the first artifact from a potential relationship with your organization.
You want a 100% authentic read on how an agency will approach not just your project, but the whole client relationship. What they put into the proposal is a good indicator of what they’ll put into the account.
You’re looking for a long term partner and chemistry will be important. You’ll be able to pick up vibes from the proposal – good or bad.
I can say, without hyperbole, that 100% of RFPs do not follow the timeline established in the RFP itself. Oftentimes, we actually receive the RFP weeks after “Send out RFP” is shown on the schedule.
Think it through and be reasonable, because many of the tasks in that timeline are things that you and your team will need to do. Too little time for a response will just lead agencies to rush a proposal out the door that isn’t thought out. Too little time for you to review responses will mess with your process and delay start dates.
This is obviously a general approach, but here are the minimums that we recommend:
1 week for the agencies to submit questions
1 week for you to pull together answers and share with all participants. This is an easy-to-underestimate phase and you may need more time depending on the complexity of the RFP, how many respondents you have, and how many of your team members will be involved in answering the question. Plan accordingly.
1-2 weeks for the agencies to put together responses (depending on size and complexity of the project). Plan for at least 3 weeks if you’re expecting pitch creative.
2-3 weeks for reviews, presentations, interviews, etc. This is very dependent on your process for shortlisting. If there are multiple rounds of shortlisting, and you’ll be meeting with each team, this could easily be longer.
2-4 weeks for procurement to do their thing. We very rarely see this included in the timeline. Often it goes from the project being awarded right to kickoff, but if it’s a new vendor, there is that annoying and painstaking step of paperwork. If no one is comfortable starting work before the paperwork is signed, plan for at least a few weeks for the lawyers to do their thing.
For those of you keeping track, that’s 7-11 weeks from sending out the RFP to kicking off the project.
Generative AI is a “Garbage In → Garbage Out” proposition. And with RFPs, if you send garbage RFPs out, you’ll get garbage responses back.
The time you save using AI to quickly put together a 10 page RFP will get spent (and maybe multiplied) on the back end trying to get what you need from the responses.
AI will often lean into generalities, create emphasis on the wrong things, omit (or hallucinate) important details, and say in 10 pages what could be said better in 5. All of those work against these best practices for writing an RFP. If you can find an efficient way to use AI in your process, great, but review any generative output to ensure it clearly articulates your need and doesn’t create confusion for your agency partners.
Most “How to Write an RFP” guides will encourage you to specify how you’ll evaluate responses – like x% for qualifications and x% for price – saying it helps the participants craft a more tailored response. But that’s a little like telling your partner exactly what you want for your anniversary. Isn’t what you really want is to see how well they understand you?
If you don’t include Evaluation Criteria, you get a clearer glimpse of how each agency positions themselves and what they value. Then, you pick the one that best aligns to what you are looking for.
I realize that most of the points above focus on being clear and specific so you get easily comparable responses, and this point does a 180 forcing your participants to guess what’s important to you. But the clarity I’m belaboring above is about the problem you’re looking to solve and the solution you’re looking to implement. It’s not about the proposal itself. That is an agency’s first deliverable to you. It’s the first glimpse you’ll get into how they work and what they can produce. If you’ve done your part in providing a clear RFP, the agencies shouldn’t actually be guessing what’s important to you, they should have everything they need to interpret your needs and deliver something you can fairly evaluate.
Since starting Five & Done in 2013, the team and I have reviewed what feels like hundreds of RFPs and some themes definitely emerge. Oftentimes, it’s the “written by committee” feeling, where different interests are all being represented at the cost of cohesion and clarity, that’s the most detrimental,
When writing your RFP, take a step back and imagine reading it without all the tribal knowledge, nuance, and subtext you already know. Then look at every word, sentence, and paragraph and ask yourself:
Is this clear?