RSSB digital engagement: content and social media strategy

Description

Summary of the work As part of RSSB's plans to improve membership engagement with online products andservices, develop: a) A content strategy to guide how we create, structure and publish content b) A social media strategy to promote new and existing content c) An optimisation strategy to improve key web pages and site navigation Expected Contract Length 3 - 4 months Latest start date 01/04/17 Budget Range Our budget for this work is £75,000 (maximum). Why the Work is Being Done RSSB's digital platforms and digital channels are crucial for engaging with our Members and the wider rail industry. However, recent reviews have shown that RSSB’s digital engagement can be improved in several areas. To address this issue, three priority streams of work have been identified. The first stream is to develop a content strategy to guide how RSSB creates, structures and publishes online content. The second stream is to develop a social media strategy to promote new and existing content. The third stream is to develop an optimisation strategy to improve several key pages and site navigation on www.rssb.co.uk. Problem to Be Solved Member feedback and statistics from web and social media analytics show that engagement with RSSB online products and services can be improved in several areas. This work seeks to develop strategies to improve engagement with RSSB digital platforms. Who Are the Users As an RSSB Member, I need to be able to find information that is relevant to me, I need to understand what tools I can use, I need to be aware of the activities that RSSB are undertaking and I need to understand how I can engage with RSSB so that I can use RSSB outputs and knowledge to support me in my role. Early Market Engagement Not applicable Work Already Done A previous item of work on Improving Membership Engagement with RSSB Products and Services was completed by Nomensa Ltd. This work sought advice on how the delivery and quality of RSSB online content can be refined and then promoted to increase member engagement. From this previous work, RSSB have now uncovered three priority areas for improvement: a content strategy, a social media strategy and an optimisation strategy. Existing Team The supplier will work with the RSSB digital team. The supplier will also liaise with content owners from the wider business to understand what content is available, what processes are in place and what governance relates to our content. The supplier may need to liaise with external RSSB stakeholders where there is a need to better understand user requirements. Current Phase Not applicable Skills & Experience • Significant experience in user-centred design applied to websites and online tools - PASS/FAIL • Expert understanding in psychology, human factors and applying these to online products and services - PASS/FAIL • Expert technical understanding of web content delivery, content management systems, single sourcing, metadata and workflows - PASS/FAIL • Expert understand of writing for the web, including tone of voice, reader engagement and content structuring - PASS/FAIL • Expert understanding of web and social analytics and strategies to improve web engagement - PASS/FAIL • Expert technical understanding of social networking, social media platforms and developing social media presence - PASS/FAIL • Experience of working with a Member-based organisations and the GB rail industry - PASS/FAIL • Availability fo resources to start work from 01 April 2017 - PASS/FAIL Nice to Haves • Knowledge and experience of enterprise content management approaches for designing content for reuse and publication across multiple channels and formats • Topic based authoring / structured authoring technologies and techniques Work Location Mixed offsite/remote and onsite work. Onsite workshops, review of findings and analysis at RSSB's offices, The Helicon, 1 South Place, Moorgate, London EC2M 2RB. Working Arrangments The supplier will interview key RSSB personnel to understand current processes and procedures. This could include individuals who create and manage content, IT personnel and communications managers. The supplier will run one or more workshops to identify areas of priority and to plan activities. The supplier must work collaboratively with RSSB so that the organisation buys into changes and new processes become quickly embedded in the organisation. Much of the interaction can take place via remote working or using online tools. Also, it is envisaged the supplier would provide some resource on site. Security Clearance Not applicable. All information should be kept confidential. Additional T&Cs The supplier must provide a fixed price for the work. Please provide a payment schedule which is based on delivery of work as per the requirements. No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 3 Proposal Criteria • Sound methodology proposed for developing the three work streams as identified in Why the work is being done – 15 points • Proposal clearly identifies how the strategies developed can measurably improve user engagement - 15 points • The proposal provides adequate allocation of appropriate resources against deliverables and includes a credible plan for delivering successful outcomes to time, quality and cost – 10 points • The proposal has identified risks and proposed to effective management and mitigation – 5 points • The work must be completed between 01 April and 31 July 2017 - 5 points Cultural Fit Criteria • Works using an agile methodology that uses iterative methods of delivery that can incorporate changes in priority - 5 points • Provides a sound strategy on how to engage and motivate RSSB staff so they will understand and engage with future changes - 5 points • Provides information on how the supplier's team will interact and collaborate with the RSSB digital team - 5 points • Supplier provides information on how the culture of their organisation will support us in achieving our goals – 5 points Payment Approach Fixed price Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 50% Cultural fit 20% Price 30% Questions from Suppliers 1. Can you confirm that this is the existing website - https://www.rssb.co.uk/? Are there sub-sites or other websites that should be considered as part of this work? Yes, this is the RSSB website. Yes, there are sub-sites or other websites. Although the main focus of the work is www.rssb.co.uk, this work may entail analysing and understanding the relationship between RSSB.co.uk and any of our other sites or services. Details of our other sites can be found on https://www.rssb.co.uk/rssb-websites-and-services. 2. What social media channels does RSSB currently operate? RSSB currently uses Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. Some channels are currently used more than others. 3. Has any prior user research been done with site users? Have personas or similar been created? If yes, how well-understood are the user needs of these different personas? Nomensa reviewed and updated the existing personas created by Webcredible in 2012. Whilst the personas are more reflective of the current personas, their primary use for this project will be a baseline for audience analysis for designing the topic based content architecture, and audience building within social media. Self-service personalised/pushed content via RSSB's website is a potential longer term goal, which has been identified within the digital strategy. 4. Can you say more about the composition of the RSSB's digital team? Is there a project manager? A content designer? Anyone with experience of user research? Social media or comms people? The digital team is newly formed and comprises of 7 people. A RSSB project manager will be allocated. The team has experience of wireframing, information design and socialmedia. The digital team also work closely with Comms team who are in the process of appointing a social media manager.Until recently, user research has been driven via formal consultation groups with industry representatives, and analytics from RSSB's main website. However it recognised that more work is required to implement more robust mechanisms for capturing user experience across a broad range of RSSB's digital services, which link to specific goals and campaigns. 5. The submission form, which is due by the 29th of March, only allows supplier to submit brief 'evidence' that they meet the essential and nice to have criteria, so I assume a full tender will be require from selected suppliers at some point. If this is the case, when will the suppliers be invited to submit these full tenders, given the work is supposed to start by the 1st of April? If not, how do you intent to score and select suppliers based only on the short evidence submissions? Please refer to details published under the headings 'Proposal criteria', 'Cultural Fit Criteria', 'Payment Approach', 'Assessment Methods - Written Proposal, Work History and Reference', and 'Evaluation Weighting'. Please submit your pricing proposal with responses to the NINE questions which make up the Technical questions and Cultural Fit questions. Please email your responses and pricing proposal (PDF format) with subject "RSSB digital engagement: content and social media strategy" to hazel.fernandes@rssb.co.uk by 29/03/2017. This will enable RSSB's evaluation team to evaluate all proposals at the same time. This ensures that RSSB can start work with the preferred supplier on 1 April 2017. 6. Does RSSB consider this work to be in or out of scope of IR35? RSSB considers this work to be out of scope of IR35. 7. Is this opportunity being made available elsewhere? One of our consultants has informed us that they are currently being interviewed for this role outside the Digital Outcomes & Specialist Framework Agreement! RSSB is not aware of any role being advertised. This is a stand alone workpackage and not associated with any role within RSSB. 8. Can you say more about why you have specified experience of working with the GB rail industry as essential? How much and what types of experience would you consider to be sufficient to meet this criteria? The purpose of this work is to improve rail industry engagement with our online products and services. Our target audience is the GB rail industry, which is built on a complex matrix of organisations and relationships. It is essential that we understand their needs, how they work and how we can best support them. We are seeking organisations with rail experience. This does not have to be GB experience.  Organisations must demonstrate experience of either completing similar projects or their personnel have first-hand rail industry knowledge. This could be addressed by partnering with an industry consultant. 9. I'm interested to find out why in the essential skills you have chosen "Experience of working with a Member-based organisations and the GB rail industry" and in the nice-to-have skills you have chosen "Knowledge and experience of enterprise content management approaches for designing content for reuse and publication across multiple channels and formats"? Given what the brief requires it would seem more appropriate to have these skills in the opposite skill categories. Otherwise you are ruling out suppliers who are capable of meeting the brief who just haven't worked for a member-based organisation before. See response to Questions 8 above. 10. With reference to the Essential Requirement - "Experience of working with a Member-based organisations and the GB rail industry - " I understand it specifically states GB Rail industry but would the project team consider being flexible if the supplier had previously worked with the rail industry in another country? See response to Questions 8 above. 11. In the essential skills and experience section, it states: 'Experience of working with a Member-based organisations and the GB rail industry' Can you please confirm what constitutes member based organisations? Do these have to be within the rail industry or just any member based organisations? Some examples would be helpful. Member-based organisations are typically organisations which engage with private companies, NGOs, and academia to represent the interests of it's members, for example responses to proposed legislation. Examples of member-based organisations within the UK rail sector include RSSB, Rail Delivery Group (RDG) and Railway Industry Association (RIA). We are happy to accept relevant experience of working with member-based organisations from any sector. 12. How do you currently measure customer satisfaction? Feedback/intelligence is obtained from surveys, consultations and information from our enquiry desk. 13. Do you currently use any Content management systems for https://www.rssb.co.uk/? and if there are any preferences? RSSB.co.uk is currently based on SharePoint 2013. There may be an opportunity to change this in the future. 14. What is RSSB's position on using Open source software? We have no specific criteria, but tools which support portable open formats and standards would be of interest, and would be defined through detailed requirements if new technology/tools was being procured by RSSB. 15. Does RSSB have a mobile-first / API-first strategic requirement? We are starting to move in to native mobile app development for specific products and services, but these are "added vaue" offerings in most cases, with the traditional access to the web/pdf content still being provided. 16. Could you elaborate on potential roles and responsibilities involved ? We envisage the supplier providing roles including UX designers, social media experts and project managers. These will progress the work streams identified in the proposal (see Why is the work being done?). 17. What are your perceived outcomes from this engagement? The three work streams will deliver a content strategy, allowing us to pilot and assess new ways of provisioning our content, a social media strategy allowing us to improve our social media engagement and an optimisation to improve several key pages on RSSB.co.uk. 18. How much of it is pre-discovery with light-touch evaluation or build business case for sufficient user-needs or roadmap development and provided details on funding process? The work is aimed at conducting a pilot and continuing to develop a digital strategy, not specifically building a business case. The work should include a roadmap development component to further build on the changes investigated in the pilot. 19. Is it also a service discovery exercise with user persona development, tech assessment scorecard, scenario design, alongwith user story prioritisation etc.? See question 3 regarding persona development. We do not yet have a backlog of items to prioritise, though this may start to emerge from the work being proposed. 20. How much of this exercise is building digital strategy and digital vision creation ? and how much is about actionable operation modelling and redesign? This is developing and piloting our preliminary digital strategy. 21. How do you currently perform social media sentiment analysis? and what kind of aggregation tools do you use? Whilst we have conducted some social media sentiment analysis internally and within the development of the digital strategy, it's not currently a cohesive approach centred around business KPIs and goals. Social media management and productivity tools such as Hootsuite are starting to help in this area, but more work is required. 22. Work History and References are listed under assessment methods. Can you please clarify what exactly you would like to see? For example, do you want signed reference letters from previous clients or contact information for referees? Similarly do you just want examples of relevant work the supplier has done before? For Work History, RSSB expects the supplier to show the skills and experience of a specific person. Work histories must be of the people who’ll be working on RSSB‘s project. Don't include any personal data, eg name, address or contact details. Maximum 500 words per work history.All work histories must follow this structure: Summary of key skills. 'Workplace name' from 'date 1' to 'date 2', activities and achievements at 'Workplace name'.For References, provide example of relevant work undertaken by the supplier and contact information of the Client and may submit written references from clients (if available). 23. With reference to your answer to question 5, please could you confirm what format you would like us to provide our pricing proposal in? For example, is there a template document you would like us to use to respond. Proposal Criteria - Weighting 50%Bullet point 1 - 15% Max 1000 wordsBullet point 2 - 15% Max 1000 wordsBullet point 3 - 10% Max 500 wordsBullet point 4 - 5% Max 500 wordsBullet point 5 - 5% Max 100 wordsWork History and References - See question 22 above.Cultural Criteria - Weighting 20%Bullet point 1 - 5% Max 350 wordsBullet point 2 - 5% Max 350 wordsBullet point 3 - 5% Max 350 wordsBullet point 4 - 5% Max 350 wordsPrice and Payment approach - 30% Max 100 words