This RFE is now closed.
Organization Background
CSH is a national 501c3 nonprofit organization and certified Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI). Founded in 1991, we work to increase the supply of supportive housing for people with complex barriers to housing. These barriers include homelessness, extreme poverty, disability, mental illness, substance use disorder, race, history of incarceration, and other barriers.
We work with communities to move away from crisis response, optimize their public resources, and ensure everyone has a place to call home. We accomplish this work by advocating for effective policies and funding, investing in communities through loans and grants, and strengthening the supportive housing field with training, technical assistance, and consulting.
CSH is primarily a B2B nonprofit that interfaces with other nonprofit and governmental organizations. We do not provide housing or services directly to individuals experiencing homelessness.
Project Overview
CSH seeks a website that positions us as the go-to resource and leading voice in the supportive housing field. The website redesign should allow us to clearly articulate all of our products and services, and allow visitors to easily navigate the site to find CSH-published resources and CSH programs relavent to their location and sector. We seek a refreshed design that is built to easily scale with us, as we produce more resources, media, and content.
The website redesign should focus on improving navigitability of the site, increasing visibility of our resources, and making it simple for visitors to reach out if they want to partner with us.
Target audiences for the website include staff at homelessness and housing agencies, service providers, supportive housing providers, staff from corporate and private foundations, government staff and elected officials, and supportive housing developers. Other audiences include partners in the justice, child welfare, healthcare, disabilities, research and evaluation, and aging services fields.
Project Goals
1. Modernize the website design to improve visual appeal and better support CSH’s brand.
2. Increase the views/downloads of our resources.
3. Structure the website so that a visitor can easily understand who we are, what we do, and how to work with us.
4. Demonstrate our impact to partners and funders.
5. Improve our ability to track activities and follow up with visitors (lead generation).
Requirements
The website’s CMS and related technology must be stable, secure and scalable with these requirements:
Integrations: Supports integration with third-party software and systems (e.g. Mailchimp, HubSpot, NetSuite CRM, Salesforce CRM, Every Action). The website should be fully linked with Google Analytics 4.
Accessibility: Adheres to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 Level AA. Fully optimized for mobile and all screen sizes.
Ongoing Content Management:
1. State-of-the-art themes and templates to significantly improve the visual appeal, functionality, and page speed of the website, while allowing staff to easily create and edit new page content with no coding knowledge.
2. The website redesign should include several page templates that can be easily repurposed for future pages. (Limit building pages from scratch in the future.)
3. Flexible for customization to meet the organization’s unique communication needs.
4. Integrates UI and UX to ensure the site is intuitive, user-friendly, and suitable for our content management needs.
Training and Post-Launch Support: Post-launch support in the form of written documentation and/or video clips to support ongoing content management. Please advise on ongoing support options.
Security: Integrates advanced security features. Vendor should fully train staff to support security patches and updates.
CMS and Page Builder: We currently use WordPress and Fresh Builder. We are using the Ark theme. We want to implement a page builder that is more user-friendly and intuitive. We are also open to a different CMS if recommended.
Resources Search and Tagging: The website should support the ability to amplify resources and varied-media content that CSH publishes, including thought leadership, policy briefs, videos, and the CSH podcast. Website should include a built-in, robust search tool that allows visitors to search for content using tags such as location, subject matter, and sector.
Technical Requirements:
1. Optimized for SEO and includes SEO plugins/features.
2. Supports the ability to track engagement of resources and to gate select content.
3. Can support substantial uploads of existing CSH media (primarily in PDF or Word formats).
Schedule
The target launch date is 12/15/2023.
Budget Constraints
CSH has budgeted up to $100,000 for this project to include:
- Planning and design
- Project management
- Coding and development
- Brand consulting and graphic design
- Training and post-launch support
- Content writing support
*A portion of the budget should go towards graphic design and creating graphics for the new website
Evaluation Metrics
We will evaluate proposers based on the following criteria:
1. Examples of similar work
2. Proposed approach and process
3. Design ability
4. Experience and technical expertise
5. References
6. Ability to provide ongoing support
7. Cost effectiveness
8. Experience working with nonprofits and/or similar organizations
9. Experience with implementing ADA compliance
Submission Requirements
Proposal Submission Deadline: 11:59PM ET on August 23, 2023
Please submit your proposal in PDF format to communications@csh.org. While evaluating all proposals, we may schedule interviews with prospective vendors. We expect to select our vendor by September 8, 2023.
The vendor can be located anywhere in the United States, and the services may be provided virtually.
You are welcome to use whatever proposal format your agency prefers, but at a minimum, we would like to see the following in your proposal:
1. Samples of similar work
2. How your approach meets our requirements
3. Summary of your process and project management approach
4. Demonstrated experience with meeting ADA compliance (WCAG 2.1 AA) standards
5. At least three references from past clients
6. Proposed timeline
7. Budget breakdown and budget assumptions
8. Any subcontractors you will use
9. Monthly hosting costs and costs for any additional software
10. Options for post-launch training and ongoing support
11. Indicate if you are minority and/or women-owned business enterprise (MWBE)
Contact Information
Please direct questions and your proposal to CSH’s Communications team:
Jessica Tien, Communications and Marketing Manager
Email: communications@csh.org
Additional Functionality Needs
Navigation and Search:
- Improved navigation that emphasizes our multi-sector approach
- Improve the resource search and tagging system
- Vendor will collaborate with CSH to create a resource tagging and categorization scheme
- Create a module that allows us to pull resources onto team and sector pages
- For example, all “health” resources should be automatically pulled onto the Health page, with minimal manual updating needed.
- The module must be able to pull resources with multiple tags. For example, the module will need to pull resources tagged with NJ, NY, and PA onto the Metro team page.
- “Further reading” module that brings people to other related pages and/or resources
Contact Forms:
- Improve Contact Us form functionality
- Include custom fields such as state, sector, type of organization, etc.
- Lead generation forms that link to Mailchimp and/or Salesforce lists and notify relevant teams of responses
Staff Directory:
- Ability to feature staff headshots (and short bio), and organize staff by region, sector, or department (CSH has approximately 170 staff). Allow website visitors to search for staff by region, sector, or department and initiate contact without providing staff email or phone number on the website.
Fund Development:
- Menu of sponsorship opportunities
- Donate page that includes embedded Network for Good form
Additional Requirements:
- Podcast page that includes embedded podcast episodes
- Centers of Excellence hub
- Build out an RDDI calculator
Events:
- Enhance events page
- Make it easier to update with less manual input
- Create the ability to pull events onto team pages (eg., the Metro team page)
- Enhance CSH Summit pages (for future use)
