The goal of the RFP review process is to identify the roughly 2-4 investment advisory firms with the people, process, experience, focus, and fees that offer a match for your organization from the list of advisors who responded to your RFP.
Focus on the Best Proposals
As part of a preliminary review, it is worthwhile to survey the submitted proposals and make sure they are thoroughly completed. If any respondents missed your deadline or left answers blank, you may want to set those aside and focus on the on-time and thorough submissions. To objectively and efficiently identify the top candidates, it is best to keep your questions concise and related specifically to the interests and needs of your organization. An RFP with too many questions to read and appropriately evaluate will create a daunting task for the oversight group. Keeping the list of questions and pages of the RFP responses to a manageable length will be crucial to a successful RFP review process.
Create an Evaluation Scorecard
There will likely be a wide variety in the responses you receive in terms of length, detail, and overall tone. This lack of uniformity may be best addressed by your group with a scoring system to judge each respondent using the same criteria.
A scorecard can be a useful tool to collect and organize the assessments of the individuals who are charged with the RFP review process. It drives a more systematic evaluation and allows reviewers’ scores to be 1) looked at side by side to identify areas of contrast and 2) aggregated in order to achieve average scores. An efficient summary of the ratings of responses encourages accurate comparisons and serves to guide the investment advisor interview process and ultimate selection.
Get Started with eCIO‘s RFP Evaluation Scorecard
eCIO's RFP Evaluation Scorecard complements our RFP Template for Nonprofit Organizations but can be easily modified to align with your RFP. Since each organization is unique and prioritizes different objectives, the weight assigned to each factor may vary.
The scorecard is not intended to provide the final quantitative answer as to the advisor you should hire, but as a tool, it will help make the RFP review process more efficient and serve as a valuable input into your group’s decision-making process.
(Download a PDF version of eCIO's Scorecard below)
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