Request for Proposals
Issued May 18, 2015
DUE (First Round) July 15, 2015
This RFP is issued on May 18, 2015 to all interested bidders.
Completed RFPs are due to the Maine Adult Education Association by Noon on July 15, 2015.
Proposals should be sent by mail or email to the following:
For questions, please contact Shirley Wright at swright345@gmail.com
or 207-564-3630.
Questions may be submitted to Shirley Wright using the information above until June 15, 2015. All questions and their answers will be posted on the website at association.maineadulted.org by June
30, 2015.
Proposals will be opened after July 15, 2015 and will be reviewed and discussed by the full MAEA
Board. The top 3 bidders (MAEA reserves the right to select more or less than three bidders) will be chosen by September 1, 2015 and asked to demonstrate their design at the MAEA Board Meeting in mid-September 2015. A contract will be awarded by October 15, 2015 and the website will need to be live by January 1, 2016.
MAEA reserves the right to ask additional questions of any bidders prior to awarding to a bid and will award the bid to the entity that best fits our needs, whether or not it is the lowest bidder.
Background
The Maine Adult Education Association (MAEA) is a non-profit organization that was founded in 1956.
The mission of the organization is to promote and support Adult Education programs in the State of
Maine by providing a unified class registration portal, legislative support, an executive director, an annual conference, other learning and professional development, advocacy with local, state and federal agencies and more. MAEA also has several partners in other agencies and organizations. MAEA is committed to adult learning systems across Maine and beyond. Currently, there are 80 Adult Education programs in the state, all of whom are members of the Maine Adult Education Association. Program size varies from very small to very large across the state. MAEA works to streamline services available to adult education programs and is the entity that negotiates and maintains the adult education online portal for course registration and payment.
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Project Overview
MAEA is currently requesting proposals for the design and maintenance, support, and registration feature of the adult education portal. Currently, MAEA contracts with a web consulting business that designed the portal and has maintained it since 2009. Due to rising costs, our agency is seeking proposals in an effort to provide the best, most cost effective web portal to adult education programs across the state.
Currently, programs are trained to upload their program information to their individual program site, within the larger website. Programs are given the parameters for uploads and must stay within those guidelines. The main Home page is a page that is searchable across all programs in the state, from whatever is entered by local programs. So, the home page is a potential student’s starting point and then he or she is directed to a program page when finding a class of choice. If a potential student wants to register for a course, he or she may do that though the portal checkout system that is run by the contracted company. Some adult education programs do not use that checkout site and are able to move students off the portal and onto their own registration site. The current portal is located at www.maineadulted.org
The portal also supports pages for Maine Adult Education Association, which is hosted separately and is set up using Word Press. The portal links to the State of Maine’s Professional Development page, where educators in the state can register for professional development offerings online and then after completion of each event, their training is tracked and recorded on a transcript. This feature is managed by the state team.
Project Goals and Objectives
The rising costs of maintenance of the portal have prompted this RFP. Currently, the portal is user friendly and often maintenance-free. MAEA very much wants to keep this portal up and functioning because it is the “glue” that holds adult education programs together as a statewide system. The portal has also gained 10 to 15% more registrations across the state each year. The customer – adult students
– can get online and with just one or two clicks, find course offerings in the area. Programs are easily able to add information to the portal, after initial training.
The long-term goal of MAEA is to have an online registration system that is easy to use – for both the program and the student- that is pleasing to look at, and is fully supported by the entity that designs it.
This portal must be cost effective because program funding is always an issue. New features will be added to the portal as needed, over time, as technology evolves. One major issue that MAEA would like to add to the portal is a sync to MaineStars, the database used by the state to collect program and student information. This has been a work in progress but has not been completed at the time of this
RFP.
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Technical Parameters
Currently, there are several interrelated functions that MAEA would want to continue. For convenience, the services are grouped into four categories: the public website for adult education students, course management and registration, a website for adult education professionals, and training and support.
MAEA currently has websites for the Maine Adult Education Association and each of the participating member programs. The primary MAEA portal website, located at www.maineadulted.org
provides an aggregated newsfeed, geographic program searching and statewide course searching. It also serves as a landing page for the more than seventy individual adult education program websites. Each of the participating member program websites is accessible via their own unique URL. Member programs must choose one of four unique color schemes and use an online content management system to update and maintain their own websites. Changes and updates to the member program websites automatically propagate to the primary portal website.
A summary of current features includes:

Hosting of approximately 70 websites for programs across the state.

Content management tools for all websites with the ability to create pages for open-ended content, post news and events information (integration to post news to Facebook and Twitter automatically and ability to schedule news for automatic publishing at a future date.)

Post FAQ’s that are categorized and searchable by website visitors, upload unlimited images and documents, receive and manage contact form submissions.

Unlimited admin users with options for different permission levels

Location-based, searchable statewide directory of programs to help website visitors to find the program nearest them

Ability for programs to update their contact information for listing in the statewide directory

Portal website automatically aggregates news from all programs in the network so that visitors can easily find the latest happenings in the adult ed community

Mobile optimized responsive site design for all smartphones and tablets.

Built-in automatic security updates

Unlimited phone and email support
Course Management and Registration – Current Portal Features
The participating programs of the Maine Adult Education Association promote and register students for their courses using a course marketing and registration system. This system provides statewide online course searching, online registration, course and student management, credit card processing and email marketing. This system continually improves in response to feedback from the field. These continual updates, improvements, and security releases are provided free to MAEA members. The system currently integrates a starting point with the State of Maine data system, MaineSTARS, to provide oneclick course publishing and syncing of available open seats. However, other systems still need to be linked.
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Registration, Management, and Marketing Features:

Unlimited administrative users

Ability to add, update, or remove catalogs, courses, instructors, Locations, Students,
Registrations, Categories and Subcategories.

Course management features the following:
 Basic course info – course, title, price, online class, WYSIWYG descriptions, start/end dates and times, days of the week, length in weeks, featured
 Support for multiple categories (including the ability for program-specific categories and selection of Portal-specific categories)
 Select and add custom photos to advertise each class
 Built-in copyright-free photo search
 Min/max enrollment to prevent over-enrollment and indicate when as class has met its minimum enrollment
 View and manage a class waitlist
 Ability to indicate on a per-class basis whether enrollment should discontinue when the class begins or continue throughout the class
 Ability to cancel a class - automatically cancel/refund all registrations and send automated emails to all registered students letting them know the class has been cancelled.
 Ability to hide a class from the catalog
 Ability to close registration for a class manually ahead of the start date
 Ability to view a roster of those registered for a class
 Ability to export a class roster to Excel

Registration management functionality
 One-click refunds return payment directly to the student’s credit card with no fees
 Detailed registration history documenting when the registration was placed, paid for by the student, cancelled or refunded, and when the funds were deposited to the program’s account.
 Back-end registration capabilities (Programs can register students for classes without entering or knowing the password for their account, full multi-registrant capabilities for back-end registration allowing multiple people to be registered for the same class at once, ability to enter registration paid by cash or check and mark them as paid at a later date when payment arrives, ability to override seat limits for classes when registering a student.)

Student management functionality
 Ability to manage student information including name, email, phone, and address
 Ability to clear stored credit card information
 Ability to see the registration history for a given student
 Ability to view a circle of friends and family for a student

Automated emails
 Receipt email sent to students upon successful registration by admin
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 Cancellation/refund notifications to students when their registrations have been cancelled
 Emails sent to programs for new registrations and when deposits are made to their bank accounts

Build –in email marketing tools
 Ability to send marketing emails to all students at a given program
 Ability to email a class roster
 Ability to import catalogs from Excel
 Complete Excel export for classes, students, registrations, locations, instructors, categories and payouts

Promo Codes – Ability to create unique promo codes to offer discounts to select groups.
Student – Facing Functionality
(This is what the students encounter when using the portal.)

Class searching and browsing

Statewide portal allows visitors to search all classes offered throughout the State by location so that visitors can find the classes nearest them

Statewide portal allows visitors to browse classes across all programs by a common set of categories

Integrated class listings on program sites such that classes from other programs in the network are available and registerable from partner program sites.

Filtering of such sites by subcategory and whether or not the class is taken online

Sorting of classes by distance away, start date, price, keyword relevancy

Stem-based word searching. (Example – searches for photography return course results with the words photographic, photos, photograph, etc.

Easy to use online registration with PCI compliant credit card payment processing.

Multi-student registration allowing for multiple people to be registered for a single class at once including the collection of each individual’s name, phone, email, and mailing address.

Seamless checkout which stays within the program’s website.

Integrated google maps with links to directions for each class location.

Rotating display of featured classes on the homepage, prioritizing classes occurring sooner over those occurring later.

Automatic waiting lists are activated when classes fill.

Student login area where they can update their account information.

Mobil-optimized course searching, browsing, and registration

Shared student accounts such that students can maintain the same account information across all MAEA programs
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Integration with External Systems
(This describes how the portal integrates with MaineStars, the state mandated data collection system.)

One-click importing of catalog data from MaineStars to the Portal, as an option

Two-way real time seat syncing. Registrations entered in either system sync the number of available open spaces so classes are not over enrolled.
MAEA Association Website
The Maine Adult Education Association also maintains a website dedicated to disseminating information to the field of adult education statewide (http://association.maineadulted.org) . This website is built on
WordPress for easy content updates and has a unique, mobile-friendly design. Currently, hosting as well as unlimited support and training for MAEA staff to update and manage this site is provided. This system is continually updated regarding WordPress software to keep it secure and always running the most current version.
The association website also hosts an online form for annual conference registration. The registrations are stored in a database and are importable into the State’s professional development system for
Continuing Education Hours (CEH) credit tracking.
Online Training and Support
The current vendor provides support and training to MAEA and its membership throughout the year to enable them to make the most of their technologies. An overview of the support provided is below:

24/7/365 unlimited phone and email support directly to MAEA and their programs.

Two training sessions at the annual conference covering portal basics as well as advanced marketing techniques.

Two training sessions at the MAEA marketing conference.

Regular check-in phone calls to review portal progress, statistics and discuss upcoming changes.

Maintenance and continual updating of an online FAQ and tutorials for common tasks and questions.
MAEA Contract Period
The term of this desired contract will be three years, however given the needs of MAEA and the pricing, a shorter or longer contract may be offered. Given the needs of MAEA, this contract may be broken into two elements – the initial build and then ongoing support.
Functionality
The contracted entity agrees to maintain the Portal in a functional state which includes fixing reported programmatic errors and maintaining code. Additional features may be added from time to time to if they are deemed necessary by MAEA and the contractor and are seen as needed by all users of this portal.
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Vendor Contract Terms
Any vendors submitting a proposal for this website must specifically define any and all disclaimers, copyright rules, trademark rules, and laws. It is also asked that copyright and ownership of all hardware, software, and data - stored used in the design of this product - has clearly defined ownership in any intended contract.
Fees
Any proposal submitted must clearly define all start-up and ongoing costs for building or transferring the portal to a new site, program costs and MAEA costs, surcharges for registration for a three-year period.
MAEA would also like to know when bills are due and what the desired frequency of payment will be.
Termination
Bidders must include a right to terminate any contract and the costs that are associated.
This RFP is issued on May 18, 2015 to all interested bidders.
Completed RFPs are due to the Maine Adult Education Association by Noon on July 15, 2015.
Proposals should be sent by mail or email to the following:
For questions, please contact Shirley Wright at 207-564-3630.
Questions may be submitted to Shirley Wright using the information above until June 15, 2015. All questions and their answers will be posted on the website at association.maineadulted.org by June
30, 2015.
Proposals will be opened after July 15, 2015 and will be reviewed and discussed by the full MAEA
Board. The top 3 bidders (MAEA reserves the right to select more or less than three bidders) will be chosen by September 1, 2015 and asked to demonstrate their design at the MAEA Board Meeting in mid-September 2015. A contract will be awarded by October 15, 2015 and the website will need to be live by January 1, 2016.
MAEA reserves the right to ask additional questions of any bidders prior to awarding to a bid and will award the bid to the entity that best fits our needs, whether or not it is the lowest bidder.
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:
Proposals must include both a narrative description of the services offered with timelines and a complete budget.
Excellent proposals will include the following:
1.
Three References with Web Links to Current Sites
2.
Website Design and Description of Features
3.
Functionality
4.
Integration with MAEA Website
5.
Timeline for Implementation
6.
Technical Parameters
7.
Website Maintenance
8.
Training Opportunities for MAEA and Individual Sites and MAEA
9.
Ongoing Technical Support for MAEA and Individual Sites
10.
Contract Term and Termination Rules
11.
Complete Budget for Years One, Two and Three (detail start-up and then maintenance costs for each year.)
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