Media Outreach Database RFI cns.pk.jm.pdf

SOURCES SOUGHT AND CAPABILITY STATEMENTS

THIS IS A REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI) ONLY. This RFI is issued solely for information and planning purposes; it does not constitute a Request for Proposal (RFP)/Request for Quote (RFQ) or a promise to issue an RFP or RFQ. Furthermore, those who respond to this RFI should not anticipate feedback with regards to its submission; other than acknowledgment of receipt – IF a request for an acknowledgement is requested by the submitter. This RFI does not commit the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to contract for any supply or services. The FTC is not at this time seeking proposals or quotes. Responders are advised that the FTC will not pay any cost incurred in response to this RFI.

All costs associated with responding to this RFI will be solely at the responding party’s expense. Not responding to this RFI does not preclude participation in any future RFP or RFQ. If a solicitation is released, it will be via the Government wide Port of Entry (GPE) at (https://beta.sam.gov/), (https://www.ebuy.gsa.gov/ebuy/) or (https://www.sewp.nasa.gov). It is the responsibility of potential offerors to monitor the websites for any information that may pertain to this RFI. The information provided in this RFI is subject to change and is not binding on the FTC. All submissions become the property of the FTC and will not be returned.

1.0 BACKGROUND

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an independent federal government law enforcement and regulatory agency with the authority to promote and protect consumers’ welfare through its jurisdiction over both consumer protection and competition issues. FTC employs approximately 1,700 federal employees and contractors, with an estimated 100 additional temporary staff between May and September. Most of the staff are Washington, DC based, located in the Headquarters building at 600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW and in a satellite facility at 400 7th Street SW. FTC staff are also located throughout the country in eight regional offices: New York, New York; Atlanta, Georgia; Cleveland, Ohio; Chicago, Illinois; Dallas, Texas; Seattle, Washington; Los Angeles, California; and San Francisco, California.

The FTC’s Office of Public Affairs (OPA) is responsible for informing the public about the FTC’s diverse law enforcement actions and policy work. The office is the agency’s main point of contact with the news media. One of OPA’s primary objectives is to ensure that American consumers have a high awareness and understanding of the FTC’s work.

To perform its media outreach function, OPA relies on media outreach services to find and contact members of the media, bloggers and influencers and to distribute via email news releases and other critical information to organizations and individuals in a timely fashion. A small number of releases are also distributed to the major newswires annually via the service. The staff also relies on the service to find media coverage and social media postings related to the FTC.

The FTC has a robust public affairs operation, often distributing multiple news releases daily to lists of media contacts, with lists customized and directed at reporters, bloggers and influencers who cover specific subjects or issue areas, as well as reporters in particular geographic areas. Having access to a rich, up-to-date, media contact database and a fully functioned email distribution service that enables the agency to send releases to the media quickly and efficiently is essential to OPA’s operations.

Scenarios: To perform its media outreach function, OPA uses media outreach services to:

find and contact members of the media, bloggers and influencers;

distribute via email news releases and other critical information to organizations and individuals in a timely fashion;

measure, analyze, and create reports detailing media coverage;

gather, compile, and sort clips relevant to the FTC on a daily basis and format them for user-friendly presentation and internal distribution; and distribute releases through a newswire service as needed.

2.0 RFI PURPOSE (SPECIFICATIONS)

FTC is re-evaluating its current media outreach, database and monitoring service and considering alternatives. The media outreach system requirements would include a web-based, software-as-a-service media contact database and news release email distribution capability that enables FTC’s public affairs staff to access and manipulate a comprehensive database of U.S. and international media organizations (print, broadcast, digital etc.) and their staff, as well as bloggers and influencers.

Additional requirements include extensive media monitoring tools, including online, broadcast and print outlet monitoring, as well as capture of social media mentions.

Requirements:

Must provide a searchable national and international media database of more than 500,000 media individuals, media organizations (print, broadcast, etc.), bloggers and influencers.

Must include the capability for adding contacts to the database, and creating dynamic distribution lists to email news releases to targeted individuals and organizations as well as distribute to major newswires.

The database must enable FTC staff to search and capture coverage in English and Spanish related to the agency or topics of interest, as well as to identify FTC-related postings on social media platforms.

Service must include training and a user guide for FTC staff, as well as ongoing customer support.

Service must be available 24/7/365 via web browser from any Internet-connected computer (mobile device access if possible).

Access must be for a minimum of three to five concurrent users, and a minimum of seven/maximum of unlimited non-concurrent users, to be determined by licensing and pricing model.

Media contact database must include media staff at multiple levels of the media organization, not just top editors or a single contact for that organization.

Service must provide the capability for user to import large existing media lists, including from other services, into the new service on an automated basis, and for those lists to be dynamically updated as though they were created within the service itself

Media contact database content must be reviewed and updated on a regular schedule by contractor.

Service must provide the ability to search and/or filter media contact database results by multiple facets, including at a minimum, organization, location (state, city, etc.), job title, industry, area of coverage, type of media, keyword.

Service must provide FTC users or the contractor the capability to build multiple distribution lists from media contact database.

Service must provide users the capability to send to multiple distribution lists concurrently.

Service must provide users the capability to view/use/share distribution lists across the account, as opposed to accessible only to the user who created it.

Service must provide users the capability to include non-text media such as images and links to video in news releases for distribution.

Service must provide users the capability to send an unlimited number of emails to an unlimited number of contacts.

Service must provide users the capability to provide email distribution metrics such as emails delivered, bounces, opens and click throughs, both for individual distributions and account-wide over a particular date range.

Service must provide detailed news coverage analytics, including at minimum ad value equivalence (or a comparable measure in dollars), the ability to measure analytics based on particular time ranges (eg. weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually), the ability to evaluate coverage on a geographic basis.

Service must include the capability to integrate with Google Analytics and other analytics tools for e-mail distribution link tracking.

Service must provide users the capability to disseminate 10 news releases through a PR agency newswire nationally during each 12 month period of performance

Service must provide users the capability to search for media coverage by topic and organization over a specific timeframe.

Service must provide users the capability to gather, compile, and sort online print media clips relevant to the FTC on a daily basis and format them for user-friendly presentation for internal distribution.

Service must provide users the capability to search, sort download, retrieve and save video clips for broadcast video coverage by topic, program, channel, keyword, name of individual. It must include the capability to compile and package video clips with other clips for internal distribution.

Service must provide user access via the web browsers on the standard FTC desktop and laptop computers. The current browsers are:

o Google Chrome version 84.0.4147.89 (official build, 64-bit) o Frontmotion Firefox Nightly 57.0.4 (32 bit)

3.0 SUBMISSION DIRECTIONS

Interested parties are requested to respond to this RFI with a Capability Statement (CS) which addresses the areas listed above and contains the following information:

Company name, address, Point of Contact name, phone number and e-mail

NAICS Code

Cage Code

Dun and Bradstreet Number

Product/Service Code

Point of Contact

Business Size (large, small, small disadvantage, 8(a), etc.)

IF items can be purchased from existing contract vehicle such as GSA Schedule, NASA SEWP, etc.

Responders are encouraged to avoid use of excessive marketing lexicon, submission of fancy brochures and other unnecessary sales literature, and product puffery.

All responses or questions should be submitted by 10:00 AM EST on 6 Oct 2020 to Dawn Cavallo (dcavallo@ftc.gov) and Matthew Woolstenhulme (mwoolstenhulme@ftc.gov).