How to write a proper brief

Throughout my career, I’ve seen both ends of the scale. By both ends, I mean polar opposites - from one liners, to RFPs that make War and Peace look like an afternoon skim read.

Every organisation is different, and each project has different needs so there will never be a one-size-fits-all template for RFPs. But a well written brief leads to well written proposals: it will help agencies understand your story, evaluate your requirements accurately, and also assess their ‘fit’ to you organisationally. Here are our guidelines for pulling together an effective RFP.

The starting point should always be ‘context’. A concise, rounded summary of your organisation is great to lay the foundations. Round this off with the vision - this should be big and broad, encompassing the essence of what your company or organisation wants to be. This is a well known example:

Our vision is to be earth’s most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.

Amazon.

It’s important to keep it concise and focussed. Try to limit your summary to a few paragraphs - it needs to be short, yet accurate.

The second most important context is your audience. Who are they, how do they behave? If you’re not 100% sure, be open and say so. Good agencies will want to help you better understand your audience. It’s often beneficial to recap on previous successes and failures - where you are now, and how you got there.

Clients should be engaging agencies to solve problems, not execute predefined instructions. If you approach a project with an open mind about solutions, especially from a technical point of view, you’re enabling agencies to think creatively around the problem.

As a starting point, outline the organisational needs and then separately list audience needs. These distinctly different lists should not be confused with one another. For example:

• Organisational or business need: This is usually supporting the organisation's strategic objective.
• Audience need or human truth: Sometimes referred to as the ‘why’. Understanding the people, culture, context and other human aspects driving a behaviour.
  

These range from the sublime to the ridiculous. I’ve witnessed briefs with brash statements of growth, huge aspirations of sales and vast statistics of engagement. It isn’t necessarily wrong to include aspirations, but demonstrating the validity of these targets is critical. If they are just made up numbers, then say so. Most agencies will take this information onboard and help to shape the brief and KPIs to achieve a certain degree of these objectives. The key task here is to summarise what success looks like; it’ll give the respondee a clear methodology to prioritise and optimise the response.

What limitations do you have to work around? It could be a platform or technology; it could be a legal restriction or a moral grey area. Try to establish the parameters that your prospective suppliers must operate within.

We’ve all had the brief that arrives on a Friday asking for responses at 9am on Monday (oh, and the launch needs to be in two weeks). These aren’t timings, these are demands. What the respondent needs to know is the context of any time pressures, not the time you’ve allowed for the task. Be clear about what’s driving your timescale. There may be dependencies (internal/external) driving these target dates. If so, make sure these are clarified. Short timings often reflect the manner in which an organisation operates, timings can be very telling about whether a client and agency are compatible.

Ah yes, the golden question. Would you buy a house without a budget in mind? Probably not. I’ve had many discussions about this over the years with both agency and client side colleagues. The usual comment is ‘well if I give you a budget figure you’ll price the project to meet that’. No: if we understand your budget and your ambitions then we can propose a solution which is realistic and achievable. An unspecified budget is a waste of time for both sides and it certainly won’t result in the best responses.

In an ideal world, a procurement project should have three to five respondents, all within 5-10% variance in costs. This approach will leave the quality and content of the response as the deciding factor. Having widely disparate costings is just distracting. Personally, I think a budget range is the most appropriate approach to specifying a brief. It will demonstrate an understanding of what it will likely take to deliver a solution.

Should suppliers submit their proposals in the format they prefer, or will you send out a proforma for them to complete? There’s no single right answer because there’s no such thing as an identikit project. Bearing in mind your goal is to have a shortlist of options from which to evaluate the best respondent, creating a structure that helps you compare responses will save you time and effort later on. This can be as simple as a clear set of headings you expect suppliers to use, or a list of key information you’re expecting them to supply.

If the project is still somewhat undefined, try expanding the process to be more collaborative in the early stages. Encourage respondents to question and challenge the brief in their PQQ (pre-qualification questionnaires). Most, if not all agencies will be happy to meet before submitting a proposal. Use this opportunity to challenge the original brief alongside their PQQ responses. They may raise valid points or uncover new thinking. The effect will likely be a sharper brief and it helps you to establish chemistry and get a feel for how the agency works.

In summary, a comprehensive brief should include the following:

1. Tell your story
   
2. Describe the problem or challenge
   
3. Outline the objectives
   
4. Identify the limitations
   
5. Highlight timing pressures
   
6. Outline the budget range
   
7. Provide response guidance
   
8. Invite collaboration
   

The most common issue with briefs is that they cover a couple of the aspects above and leave the rest blank. This is where the problems start, as it often means the brief isn’t clear in the author's mind. The most successful projects start from clear briefs.

This list isn’t exhaustive, there’ll be nuances and specific information needed for any brief, but hopefully this will cover the basics in creating a robust and comprehensible brief as the first stage of a really successful process.