Many government RFPs and RFAs tell you how your proposal will be evaluated. These evaluation criteria are often found in Section M, and may specify how you will be "graded" on each particular proposal section or subsection. Sometimes the criteria have points attached to them (e.g., Technical Approach-50 points, Key Personnel-30 points, Corporate Capabilities-20 points); other times the RFP/RFA will tell you that the criteria are listed in decending order of importantce.
While we all try to do as good a job as possible on all sections of our proposals, the evaluation criteria and their associated scoring systems can tell you some very important things:
- Where to put your emphasis: if your technical approach will be worth 50 points and your corporate capabilities will be worth 20 points, you should plan on spending much more of your time preparing the technical approach than on preparing your coporate capabilities. You can have great capabilities, but if you do poorly on sections that are valued higher, the capabilities may not help you overcome the lower scores you receive on other, more important sections.
- How to assign your proposal staff: Similarly, you may need to assign more personnel to work on the higher-scoring sections than on those that will be scored lower.
- How to alllocate your pages. If the RFP/RFA does not specify the exact number of pages for each individual section, you can use the evaluation criteria as a guide. If your proposal will be a total of 50 pages, for example, then at least 25 of those pages should be devoted to your technical approach (50 pages x 50 points). This is a very broad measure, however, and you will need to strike the right balance between the number of pages and number of points depending on how much material will need to go in each section. But it is a starting place.
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