If you do business with the federal government or if you want to get into government contracting, you probably know about FedBizOpps or the Federal Business Opportunities website. FedBizOpps is where most, but not all, government agencies post procurement notices for goods and services valued at over $25,000.
At the website, you can look up procurement notices by specific agencies or you can search for them by key words or other criteria. If you find a procurement notice that interests you, you can sign up to receive e-mail notification when, for instance, a full solicitation is released or when an amendment is issued for that particular product or service. When I'm working on a proposal for a client, I always look it up on FedBizOpps and sign up for it so that I'm notified when an amendment comes out.
You can also sign up to be notified of all solicitations or synopses issued by a particular agency. For example, since I am interested in USAID contracts, I get an e-mail nearly every day that lists all new USAID synopses and solicitations that have been posted by that agency.
To sign up for the FedBizOppos notification service, go to the website and click on Vendor Notification Services on the right-hand side, under "Related Links." You'll then be taken to a page where you can select from the following options:
- Register to receive all notices by solicitation number.
- Register to receive all notices from selected agencies and product service classifications.
- Register to receive all procurement notifices.
- Register to receive a report of all vendor notification registrations.
One of the problems with this notification service is that there is no option to receive notifications by key words. So, if I am interested only in USAID contracts that relate to HIV/AIDS, I can't tell FedBizOpps to just send me notices that have something to do with that topic. Instead, I receive all notices about USAID contracts, whether or not they pertain to HIV/AIDS.
One way to get around this problem is to sign up with a private bid notification service. That will be the topic of my next post.
Just updating that the new fbo site has advanced search agent functions which allow users to schedule nightly or weekly (or variations) searches that match all chosen criteria. In the new FBO you can use all advanced search fields that were available in the old FBO as criteria in your saved searches, which include keywords!
It seems that all previous the Vendor Notification Service profiles have been deleted. To receive notification from the new system, you must create an account, which requires registration with CCR prior to use.
My company was the first to provide FBO (ne CBD) e-mail subscriptions in 1994, and I hope you will include http://www.fbodaily.com in your next article. Thanks!