How to Write an RFP - (2024)

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In this video we're going to show you how to create an RFP document using Proposal Kit. Most of the time people are using Proposal Kit to create the proposal and if that's in response to an RFP that's the document most people are creating as their proposal responding to someone else's RFP. But what if you're the one creating the RFP and that's the document you want to create.

You can also create RFPs using Proposal Kit. If you look on our website we do have an article How to Write a Request for Proposal RFP document and if you scroll down this article it'll give you some examples. You'll see some samples, we actually have four samples included in every single Proposal Pack of various types of RFPs that were created.

We'll illustrate a couple of those. The one issue to be concerned with is the licensing. You can create an RFP document as instructions for the RFP and you're leaving it to other people who are responding to write their own proposals.

The way our Proposal Kit licensing works is you can't create a document using Proposal Kit that you give to other companies as their proposal. Everybody using Proposal Kit's templates has to have their own license. So you can create your instruction document and then leave it to others to create their proposal or if you're going to be giving out our proposal templates for others you can license a copy for each person who's going to be submitting a proposal.

Now most people aren't going to do that but you can also suggest they get a Proposal Kit and use our system to respond to your RFP. We're going to illustrate the Request for Proposal RFP Sample here which is an example of a fire and safety system and we actually have a couple of those RFPs. We're going to illustrate this first RFP using our Safety #2 design theme.

Every time you're going to create a new document you just click this button #2 Document Projects, click Add New Project and we'll click the Pick Documents button. Over on the Quick Start list you can find layouts for RFPs and those four samples we showed you. You can also find those over here in the View Samples tab.

Either place you'll find the RFPs. If you click the View Samples tab you can find those RFPs here and you can open up those samples and look at them. This request for proposal is the one we're going to illustrate.

If you go over and pick the same Request for Proposal Sample from the Quick Start list a Quick Start list usually will have additional chapters added in addition to the chapters that were written into the original sample. That will give you more topics to usually think about. We're going to find it in the Quick Start list here and you can see actually all four Request for Proposal examples here.

We're just going to pick this first one and this has 24 pages in it. We'll import that list into our project and it'll tell us there's pre–written sample content for this RFP so we're going to import that as well. Now the odds of you actually being able to reuse someone else's RFP content are pretty slim but at least it gives you some additional writing ideas having some pages that are already pre–written.

Everybody writing an RFP is going to do it differently. You're going to have different chapters to pick from. This layout has 24 chapters but you've got thousands of chapters to pick from in the library.

You can come over to the Add Templates tab you can add additional chapters. Search by Name tab you can find chapters that way. Once you're done selecting the chapters for your RFP click OK and now you can click the Company Data fill in your company information here.

In Client Data since you're writing an RFP you're not going to be usually writing an RFP to a specific company because multiple companies are responding so Client Data really isn't going to be used in this case. Once we're done we'll click the OK, Save Project and now the Wizard will build us the Word document. All right now this document's been generated let's take a look at it.

If we scroll down we'll see now, usually the front cover letter isn't going to be used in RFP this got included using the Quick Start list but you can remove that or keep the introduction. You can see the front page is now instead of Proposal it says RFP and you can put your introduction statement here. These graphics this is our Safety #2 design theme that just happens to have a fire related logo.

We have hundreds and hundreds of design themes. You can brand this with your own logo your own design theme. As we scroll down you can see Project Background, Description so now you can see the actual details of the RFP.

You might include a Deadlines page, outline all the Milestones that need to be met, information about the application process the format of the RFP, what format the responders need to put their proposals into and so on. An RFP is simply just another Word document with a set of chapters and how you fill in those chapters determines what kind of document it is. Whether it's an RFP or the response to an RFP.

This will be your name and address information that gets merged in. You won't see our company information in the documents. We'll illustrate another RFP for a different kind of business and this next one will be a transportation related RFP.

We'll illustrate this with our Transportation #5 design theme. Note we have hundreds and hundreds of design themes. Whichever one or ones you purchased will be the design theme your proposals get created in.

Using our Expert Edition you can brand your documents with your own design theme as well. We'll just click Document Projects again, Add New Project and this time we'll use the Samples tab. If we go into the Samples tab we can scroll down the categories.

These categories will narrow down the hundreds of samples down to the ones specific to that type of document. We'll just go down and click the RFP and we've got those four samples, the same four samples you saw on the on the article on the website. We'll click the transportation sample.

Now you can open that as a PDF here or we can just import the content. Now our project's been loaded with the 17 chapters from this sample and it will pull in the sample content as well when we build the document. So now like before we've got our template selected, we've filled in our Company Data screen.

The Client Data screen we'll leave blank. When we save the project it will build the Word document. Now this document has been created let's take a look at it.

This RFP actually does use a Cover Letter and it pulled in the sample content and if you scroll down now we see our Transportation #5 design theme and our list of chapters that were selected for this RFP. Just like before the chapters are describing the information needed for others to fill out their own proposals in response to this RFP. You're talking about the format of the expected proposals to be submitted.

You're giving background information on the project, application information describing information about your company, how the responses will be evaluated and so on. Basically using a Proposal Kit you're essentially using Proposal Kit to create an RFP instruction document for others to then go and create their own proposals. You're not necessarily giving others a template to fill out to give back to you.

That is how you create an RFP document using Proposal Kit.