CCRB RFI CCRB001 - E-Mail Marketing and Social Media Management and Support Services_12 10 24.pdf

Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board

Request for Information # CCRB001

Statement of Work for

E-mail Marketing and Social Media Management and Support Services

MAS 513210

Electronic Commerce and Subscription Services

Posting Date: 12/10/2024

Response Closing Date: 12/20/2024

Disclaimer

THIS IS A REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI) ONLY. No solicitation exists; therefore, do not request a copy of the solicitation. It is the potential offeror’s responsibility to monitor the release of any solicitation. The purpose of this synopsis is to gain knowledge of interest, capabilities, and qualifications of various companies. It is not to be construed as a commitment by the Government. The information provided in this RFI is subject to change and is not binding on the Government. A contract will not be awarded as a result of this RFI. Since this is a RFI announcement, no evaluation letters and/or results will be issued to the respondents. No reimbursement will be made for any costs associated with providing information in response to this synopsis or any follow up information requests. Failure to respond will not in any way prevent a potential offeror from participation in future solicitations.

All information provided will be given consideration and may influence the development of future proposal requests. All submissions become Government property and will not be returned.

1. Purpose This Statement of Work (SOW) describes what the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board (the Board) expects to achieve with regard to this Marketing Automation Solution and Support Services procurement and will use GSA MAS to reach potential vendors under NAICS code 513210, GSA MAS 513210, PSC Code: DA10 - IT and Telecom - Business Application/Application Development Software as A Service. The Government has determined use of the GSA task order to satisfy this requirement is in the best interest of the Government, economic, and other factors considered, and this task order is not being used to procure personal services prohibited by the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Part 37.104 titled “Personal services contract”.

The Board requires an enterprise-wide Marketing Automation Solution to allow several offices within the Board to better manage their email marketing and social media management needs.

The primary objective of this acquisition is to procure a solution that allows the Board to better manage its stakeholder and customer communication by automating e-mail marketing and social media management tasks. Specifically, the Board wants this solution to collect subscriber data and schedule and send triggered notifications through emails and social media posts, including a console or consoles through which to manage updates. The solution must also be cloud-based, provide responsive and 508-compliant templates, and allow for measurement.

2. Scope This SOW addresses work associated with the following Integrated Marketing Automation activities:

1. Business Objectives: Provide the Board with robust, integrated capabilities to effectively plan, execute, monitor, and measure promotional and marketing activities.

These efforts will focus on email marketing and social media messaging, ensuring the Board can achieve its strategic communication goals.

2. Technical Objectives: Deliver essential services to the Board through a modern, cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that features an intuitive, user-friendly interface and incorporates current best practices in marketing automation. This solution will empower the Board to efficiently manage and optimize its marketing initiatives while staying aligned with industry standards.

3. Administrative Objectives: Provide comprehensive transition training and support to enable the Board staff to effectively understand, adopt, and migrate existing content and subscribers to the proposed solution. This includes delivering assistance for creating templates, workflows, dashboards, and reports, alongside offering self-service learning tools and ongoing business hours technical support.

3. Period and Place of Performance

The base Period of Performance (POP) will be one base period with a POP from date of award through twelve (12) months with two (2) consecutive twelve (12) month option periods. Prior to exercising each option period, the Government shall make a determination that an exercise of an option is still in the Government’s best interest under the current market conditions and subject to availability of funds. In addition, the Government will also be reviewing the technology requirements against current objectives to determine if the existing technology being implemented continues to fully meet the Government’s needs and objectives.

Tentative POP dates:

Base Year: January 31, 2025 to January 30, 2026 Option Year 1: January 31, 2026 to January 30, 2027 Option Year 2: January 31, 2027 to January 30, 2028 [Tentative barring an extension of the Board’s tenure]

Place of Performance:

Services shall be provided remotely.

Services shall be received primarily at this physical location:

Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board 1800 F Street, N.W.

Washington, DC 20405

4. Background

Currently, the Board aims to gain roughly 1,000 contacts to send automated emails to, including government employees, industry partners, and members of the general public. The Board sends roughly 12 to 20 automated emails each year to up to about 1,000 contacts per email in the first year (for a total of about 6,000 to 20,000 individual emails received, most likely on the lower end of that estimate). We expect this number to grow slightly over the next three (3) years. We have a need for a solution that can provide, at its core, marketing automation to manage email and social media campaigns, including the ability to permission users, schedule and manage bulk and targeted messaging, and derive analytical metrics to guide future campaign development. Ultimately, the Board requires a solution that allows for better management of stakeholder and customer communication through automating marketing tasks.

5. Current Environment

The primary objective of this acquisition is to procure a solution that allows the Board to better manage its stakeholder and customer communication by integrating and automating marketing tasks. Information on the Board’s current environment follows:

● The Board currently has a total of 3 social media accounts across the platforms Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

● The Board currently requires FedRAMP for all cloud-based solutions. Offerors shall provide a link to their FedRAMP Marketplace site showing their FedRAMP Authorized status. Ultimately, the Board will be requiring any offeror to possess a FedRAMP Moderate Authority to Operate (ATO), as the solution will need to both collect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from subscribers and store it. Vendors without that current level of authorization would need to work closely with the FedRAMP PMO (fedramp.gov) immediately upon award to begin work to receive an Authority to Operate (ATO) within the prescribed period as denoted in the award. In the interim (also described in the award) the offeror must achieve, working with the Board directly, a Moderate Impact SaaS (MI SaaS) ATO for the Board use only.

This level of authorization would allow the government (the Board only) to use the vendor’s service until FedRAMP Moderate ATO is awarded that then could be leveraged by any Agency within the Government.

● The Board currently has a contract with the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) Technology Transformation Services (TTS) Cloud.gov team for the following website: coldcaserecords.gov.

6. Objectives

The overall objective is to procure a solution that allows the Board to better manage its stakeholder and customer communication by automating e-mail marketing and social media management tasks. This includes a solution to address the Board's current requirements as described in Section and in the Price Template, Marketing Automation Solution as well as any future support for new and existing “to be determined” websites, which would be supported based on the offeror’s standard rates, prorated as appropriate. To achieve this, any solution must meet the following business, technical, security, management, and administrative objectives as noted below but not limited to:

6.1. Business Objectives

Provide the Board the capabilities to plan, execute, monitor, and measure promotional and marketing activities, primarily email marketing and social media messages. This includes the following:

6.1.1. Email marketing automation requirements:

● Building and Personalizing Emails: Create, design, and tag emails; add attachments;

manage templates; personalize dynamically based on subscriber data; ability to put surveys directly in email.

● Sending Outbound Emails: Create targeted lists, schedule, and manage bulk email sending, including through sending burst or staggered emails and through receiving real-time suggestions to improve email performance.

● Manage Email Deliverability: Ensure inbox delivery. Includes opt-in management, bounce handling, unsubscribe processing, suppression lists, email preview, spam checking, link validation, and delivery monitoring.

● Automated Email Responses: Set up automated emails based on events, online activities.

● High-Volume Sending: Ability to send up to 1,000 emails annually; ability to send to up to 200,000 subscribers; ability to send 1,000 emails at once; ability to send thousands of unique, personalized emails per second.

● Subscriber management: Ability for subscribers to manage their email subscriptions (e.g., self-subscribe, unsubscribe, find other or similar available subscriptions within a category, etc.); Ability for subscribers to opt for immediate delivery, daily digest, or weekly digest of topic subscriptions

● Nested Topics: Ability to implement a hierarchical structure for subscription management (i.e., nest topic subscriptions within other topics)

● Landing Pages and Forms: Build customized, 508-compliant landing pages

● A/B Testing: Test alternative versions of emails, landing pages, and forms. Learn what works, maximize response rates, and increase conversation.

● Mobile optimized: support responsive, mobile-optimized emails, online forms, widgets, and landing pages

● Automated updates: Send notifications when segments of pages are updated, email reminders if user has an incomplete task (i.e., survey)

● Program Management: Manage campaigns across multiple channels, including email, online, and social media. Create and optimize program assets such as landing pages, emails, campaigns, and lists. Track program results to assess ROI. Ability to publish to email, or social media updates simultaneously.

● Calendaring: Maintain a marketing calendar across multiple groups. Manage the calendar for the entire enterprise.

● Basic Reporting: Access pre-built and custom reports and dashboards to measure leads by source/campaign/month, email performance, landing page performance, and web and social activity. Create report subscriptions that can automatically send updates to your team and executives.

● Web Analytics: Ability to track click through rates via links

● SEO / Keyword Analytics: Monitor and track how you rank for relevant keywords on major search engines and compare your overall performance to competitors.

● Customization: System provides sufficient customization to meet business requirements

● Workflow Capability: Automates a process that requires a series of steps that typically require intervention by several different users. Administrators can write rules to determine who and when a user needs to complete a step. Also includes notification of users when they need to take action.

● User, Role, and Access Management: Grant access to select data, features, objects, etc.

based on the users, user role, groups, etc.

● Internationalization: Provide support for Spanish-language subscribers.

● Sandbox / Test Environments: Allows administrators to easily develop and test changes.

After changes are made, admins can easily migrate the changes into the "live" or "production" environment.

● Performance and Reliability: Software is consistently available (uptime) and allows users to complete tasks quickly because they are not waiting for the software to respond to an action they took.

● Output Document Generation: Allows administrators to create templates that enable users to quickly generate dynamic documents in various formats based on the data stored in the application. Templates must be flexible enough to allow users to add photos, buttons, headlines, different fonts/sizes, pulled quotes, captions, links, vary column sizes, etc.

● Data Import & Export Tools: Ability to input, modify and extract data from the application in bulk through a structured file.

6.1.2. Social media management requirements:

● Social Management: Access an interface in which to create, preview, edit, and schedule content for social accounts (LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook); receive real-time guidance on best times to post messages; access an editorial calendar to see all scheduled posts; filter based on account; create workflows to approve posts based on role or levels of access.

● Tracking topics that include the tagging of the Board's accounts.

● Social Sharing: Add intelligent social share buttons to your campaigns and content. Track who is sharing your content and driving conversions.

● Social Campaigns: Schedule automated posts to one or more social accounts; tag posts as part of larger campaign efforts to quickly determine data analytics (without manually analyzing posts); and compare performance against similar accounts; Receive real-time information on trending topics and key stakeholders or audiences who could benefit from information.

● Social Measurement: Track metrics via a robust data dashboard, (clicks, shares, comments, replies, likes, retweets, favorites, follower growth and engagement) to evaluate which posts are performing well; view hashtag trends, including insight into influencers who use the hashtag, location, and sentiment.

6.2. Technical Objectives

Providing required business objectives to the Board through a cloud-based, software as a service (SaaS) solution with an easy-to-use interface that reflects current best practices in marketing automation. This includes the following:

6.2.1. Technical objectives:

● Provision of a cloud-based solution

● Subscription-based, not infrastructure-based

● Ability to manage the visibility of data within an account (i.e., through roles and permissions)

● Ability to import contact lists

● Ability to direct add contacts

● Automated removal of bad/non-existent email addresses

● Automatic de-duplication of email lists to avoid subscribers receiving the same message multiple times

6.2.2. Security objectives:

The contractor shall implement the controls contained within the FedRAMP Cloud Computing Security Requirements Baseline and FedRAMP Continuous Monitoring Requirements for impact systems (as defined in FIPS PUB 199). These documents define requirements for compliance to meet minimum Federal information security and privacy requirements for impact systems. The FedRAMP baseline controls are based on NIST Special Publication 800-53, Revision 4, “Security and Privacy Controls for Federal Information Systems and Organizations” (as amended), and also includes a set of additional controls for use within systems providing cloud services to the federal government. The contractor shall generally, substantially, and in good faith follow FedRAMP guidelines and Security guidance. In situations where there are no procedural guides, the contractor shall use generally accepted industry best practices for IT security. The Board may choose to cancel the contract and terminate any outstanding orders if the contractor has its FedRAMP authorization (Joint Authorization Board [JAB] Provisional or Agency) revoked, and the deficiencies are greater than agency risk tolerance thresholds.

● Given that the solution will need to both collect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from subscribers and store it, the government will prioritize in its selection process those vendors with existing FedRAMP authorizations. The following is how the government will prioritize its selection process:

● Vendors that possess a FedRAMP Moderate Authority to Operate (ATO) as defined in

FIPS PUB 199.

● Vendors that possess a FedRAMP Tailored ATO as defined in FIPS PUB 199.

● Vendors that possess a FedRAMP "In Process" authorization, as indicated on the FedRAMP webpage: https://marketplace.fedramp.gov/#/products?sort=productName

● Vendors that possess a FedRAMP "Ready" authorization, as indicated on the FedRAMP webpage: https://marketplace.fedramp.gov/#/products?sort=productName

● If a vendor without authorization is selected, the vendor would need to work closely with the FedRAMP PMO immediately upon award to begin work to receive an ATO within the prescribed period as denoted in the award. In the interim (also described in the award) the offeror must achieve, working with the Board directly, a Moderate Impact SaaS (MiSaaS) ATO for the Board use only. This level of authorization would allow the Board to use the vendor's service until FedRAMP Moderate ATO is awarded that then could be leveraged by any Agency within the Government. More information on FedRAMP requirements can be found at https://fedramp.gov/.

● There is no requirement for the solution to be hosted on a government environment.

6.3. Administrative Objectives

Providing transition training and support to assist the Board's staff in understanding and migrating existing content and subscribers to the proposed solution, including support for creating templates, workflows, dashboards, reports, and providing self-service learning tools and ongoing business hours technical support. This includes the following:

6.3.1. Management and administrative objectives:

● Provide initial access training and permissions for up to 20 administrators with capability to train additional administrators. Support and training should include assistance importing and cleansing contact lists and training on core functions and features of the current tool.

The Board expects onboarding, transition and training activities to take up to 30 days or longer. Onboarding, transition and training should occur no later than two weeks after the award of the succeeding task or call order.

● Support and training should include coordination with the prior vendor in order to appropriately migrate contact lists, topics, subscribers, and all other necessary platform foundational elements for a seamless transition from prior platform to awarded platform, if needed and deemed necessary.

● Provide professional services available for installation/development

● Ability to migrate -- or assistance with migrating -- existing topics/lists into the chosen platform

● Provide an elastic licensing model (expand/contract cost based on usage) for up to 5 sub domains

● Provide ability to pull reports on success and activity metrics, including subscriber open rate and click rate, subscription changes, subscriber most recent activity, subscribers not sent to, unengaged subscribers list, etc.

● Provide information on delivery and bounces https://marketplace.fedramp.gov/#/products?sort=productName https://marketplace.fedramp.gov/#/products?sort=productName https://fedramp.gov/

● Provide heat map reporting for emails

● Ability to separate out what accounts administrators can see, i.e.: a specific division can have the ability to see all accounts on the platform or just their division’s accounts.

● Organizational structure that allows users to have different levels of access in the system.

For example, editor, contributor, etc.

● A team of technical support liaisons (or consultants) who can interface between the Board and the license provider (if the offeror is a license reseller) to provide support. Examples of support provided may include Email template design, data import or export support, workflow configuration

● An editorial calendar that can display campaign data as well as an ability to tag and track activities as part of a campaign. This includes an ability to download/export the calendar.

● Ability to quickly toggle to display/hide activities by filtering on type or campaign.

● Support for assigning tasks to team members and tracking the status of tasks associated with marketing campaigns.

● Support for entering custom personas and relating activities to personas.

7. Response Information:

Interested large and small businesses are required to provide an electronic copy in Microsoft Word or Portable Document Format (PDF) of their response to the Points of Contacts listed below. Responses should address relevant experience, business size, NAICS code and capability statement. Responses must also indicate business capability to perform the proposed services identified above. Capability Statements are limited to 10 pages. All responses should be at a Times Roman, 12-point font minimum font size single spaced, one sided, letter size, with one (1) inch margins, in “.docx”, or “.pdf” file formats. Respondents are not to submit brochures and marketing materials. Any such materials will be discarded.

The Respondent is requested to submit a response that includes the following:

● Business name.

● Point of Contact (POC) name, email, phone number, and web address

● Business size classification (Large, Small, SDVOSB, WOSB, etc.)

● Possible NAICS codes associated with this action

● Identify if you are on GSA Schedule and/or other contracting vehicles.

● Statement to demonstrate your firm’s methodology and capability for requirements discussed in this document. Respondents need only provide responses to the requirements for which they have a methodology and capability

● Please provide a Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) covering all mandatory and optional CLINs (Contract Line- Item Numbers) for the provision of the solution and maintenance support utilizing Attachment A (Price Template) as a guide.

Send written responses to Ms. Stephannie Oriabure and Ms. Kristin Thompson at the email addresses listed below. No collect calls or telephone inquiries will be accepted.

Points of Contacts:

Stephannie Oriabure, Chief of Staff stephannie.oriabure@coldcaserecords.gov

Kristin Thompson, Administrative Officer kristin.thompson@coldcaserecords.gov

Response Structure:

No Classified information shall be included anywhere in your responses.

All proprietary information must be clearly marked in accordance with the instructions set forth below in “Marking Requirements.” Any information submitted in response to the RFI may be disclosed to GSA and other Government personnel. All information marked as proprietary information will be safeguarded by GSA to prevent unauthorized disclosures to non-government personnel and entities in accordance with applicable laws and regulations. The GSA reserves the right to challenge proprietary information markings.

Notwithstanding any proprietary information marking, GSA shall be able to include any information provided by interested sources, in a subsequent Request for Quote (RFQ), should one be issued.

Marking Requirements: The header and footer of each page containing interested source proprietary information shall be marked with the legend “PROPRIETARY INFORMATION.” Further, the particular paragraph(s) section(s), etc. containing the actual proprietary information shall be clearly high-lighted or otherwise marked by the Respondent.

Response Due Date: Responses are due no later than 12/20/2024 at 2:00 PM EST. Submit your responses via email only in “.docx”, or “.pdf” file formats to Ms. Stephannie Oriabure and Ms. Kristin Thompson with the email subject header “RFI No. CCRB001 RESPONSE - E-mail Marketing and Social Media Management and Support Services – (your company name”. Include the RFI No CCRB001, company name, and point(s) of contact information of the appropriate representative of your company on the cover page. The Government is not obligated to review responses to the RFI received after the mailto:stephannie.oriabure@coldcaserecords.gov mailto:kristin.thompson@coldcaserecords.gov deadline specified above. Please be advised that all submissions become Government property and will not be returned. Only electronic submissions in “.docx”, or “.pdf” file formats will be accepted.

Do not include the following in your response:

● Proposals or offers

● Requests to be considered for award or to be notified of a future solicitation

● Requests to be added to a mailing or distribution list

● Questions or comments not related to this RFI

● Classified information

PUBLIC RECORDS AND REQUESTS FOR CONFIDENTIALITY:

Any document containing confidential information must be watermarked to indicate its confidential nature. Additionally, each page with confidential information must be clearly marked as such. The confidential information must be clearly identifiable to the reader wherever it appears.