Design request forms stand as crucial tools for creative ventures, providing a structured bridge for the exchange of ideas and needs between professionals and their clients or colleagues.
Their primary use is with in-house design teams, offering seamless communication among departments or teams seeking design solutions.
But their versatility extends beyond corporate confines, as a freelance graphic designer would also adopt them as an indispensable instrument to collect information, streamlining collaborations with clients.
Within the in-house design sphere, a design request form functions as a vital connector, enabling non-design stakeholders to express their visions and requirements effectively.
A design request form guarantees that projects commence with a comprehensive grasp of objectives, branding guidelines, and desired outcomes, enhancing the efficiency and efficacy of the design process.
For freelancers, these forms serve as a framework where clients can construct their design aspirations.
So, we’ll be exploring how to build a simple request form, what questions should be used, why they should be used, and the benefits of these key questions.
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Glad you asked! Undoubtedly, one of the most crucial questions.
Building rapport with your client is paramount. Knowing their name fosters accountability and a human connection.
It facilitates tailored feedback and a place where design teams can manage requests, enhancing the design process when building the design request form.
In a collaborative setting with multiple stakeholders, knowing names prevents confusion and ensures accurate responses.
Requesting an address on a design request form is vital for several reasons.
Firstly, it gives you some contact details for the stakeholder or client, which you’ll need to keep them updated on your progress.
Secondly, it creates a digital record for tracking progress and interactions.
Lastly, it enables sending notifications and updates, enhancing client engagement, and transparency in collaboration, ultimately leading to successful design outcomes.
Including a project title field in a design request form is crucial for clarity and organization. It offers design teams a focused understanding of the project’s purpose, aligning their efforts with the client or stakeholder’s vision.
This clear title streamlines cataloging and prioritizing tasks, serving as a reference point to reduce miscommunication. Essentially, a project title enhances productivity, collaboration, and efficiency.
A design request form must emphasize the importance of a project brief.
This foundational document encapsulates the client’s vision, enabling design teams to create visually appealing designs that align with expectations.
A well-structured brief serves as a reference point, reducing misunderstandings and streamlining workflow. This enables effective communication and constructive feedback while promoting a strong client-designer partnership for a seamless design process.
Inquiring about the project’s business goals on a design request form is invaluable for designers.
It guides the creation of visuals aligned not only with aesthetics but also with brand and company success. This question prompts clients to specify outcomes like brand visibility, conversions, engagement, or revenue growth, keeping on top of communication and ensuring designs meet business needs.
This information empowers graphic designers to make informed creative decisions and prioritize tasks that drive client goals effectively and improve the proofing process.
Asking for examples in a design request form invites clients to share creative inspirations and preferences to enhance the project.
A design request form provides valuable visual references, sparks creativity, and fosters seamless communication. This will inspire design teams to create work that matches the clients’ unique style, keeping up with trends and competitors.
Requesting deliverables and design specifics in a design request form ensures clarity and alignment.
Clients can specify their needs, from a logo to unique elements, guiding designers effectively. Delving into details like color palette, size, and images refines the vision.
Transparency reduces surprises and revisions, creating a smoother, informed, and client-satisfying design process.
Building a design request form can be a needlessly time consuming task. So, to save yourself valuable time, here are a few free tools that can help you generate your design request forms.
Typeform’s form builder is a top-tier (and free) solution for crafting a design request form.
With its user-friendly interface and sleek design options, it makes design request forms a breeze. You can customize your form to reflect your brand too, reflecting a strong brand identity for clients.
Typeform’s conditional logic feature allows you to create dynamic forms, tailoring questions based on previous responses, streamlining the design request process.
You can also tailor your questions according to the brief, gathering as much project information as possible such as: specific color schemes, style preferences, deadlines, and even inspiration. And voila, you have a free template.
So, if you’re looking for a stylish, efficient, and cost-effective way to build a graphic design request form, Typeform is a great option.
Its user-friendly drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to build a simple form that caters to both designers and stakeholders. It also offers an extensive array of completely customizable templates, saving designers time with quick and hassle-free form creation.
Jotform is a perfect choice for building a design request form for numerous reasons.
Jotform’s robust integrations with various design and project management tools, like Adobe Creative Cloud, streamline the design workflow. Not to mention its tight security features, where stakeholders and designers can rest easy knowing sensitive design requests and data are protected.
Lastly, its analytics and reporting tools facilitate in-depth data analysis, enhancing the decision making process.
Whether you’re talking to your team, customers, or other stakeholders, the aim is to grasp as much of what they are thinking about your design as possible, and this can be done with a carefully curated design request form.
But how can you make your design feedback process equally effective? That’s where design review software comes in.
You can set up a reliable and repeatable design review process and invite stakeholders to add feedback right on top of your designs. This makes the process faster for your reviewers, and keeps every comment in context for you!
Design request forms are essential tools that facilitate effective communication and collaboration between design professionals, clients, and colleagues.
A design request form plays a crucial role in both in-house design teams and freelance work, ensuring that design projects begin with a clear understanding of objectives and client expectations, ultimately enhancing the efficiency of the design process.
Imagine you’re shopping around for a new martech platform for your ecommerce website. You’ve narrowed down your options to Vendor A and Vendor B.
Vendor A can accomplish your top business priority as well as several other lower priorities, but only at a shallow depth. Vendor B can accomplish your top business priority easily, efficiently, and at a far greater depth—but they can’t accomplish 1-2 of your lower priorities.
Which vendor earns your business?
This kind of stumper is exactly the kind of question a request for proposal (RFP) is designed to answer.
According to Statista, there were nearly 10K martech solutions available worldwide at the beginning of —up from 8K in and less than 4K in . Which means if you’re currently in the market for a new ecommerce CRM, ERP, or marketing automation platform, evaluating your options can be incredibly overwhelming, time-consuming, and expensive.
With an RFP, you can narrow down the playing field to only the vendors and service providers whose solutions align with your particular business needs—and standardize the evaluation process so that the selection you make is the most objective selection possible.
Once selected, request a sandbox in which to test your required functionality. It’ll help you overcome providers that may have the right features, but are so challenging day-to-day that you’ll end up getting nothing done—solving a critical gap of traditional RFPs: achievability.
RFP360 defines an RFP as “a formal, questionnaire-style document issued to prospective vendors from an organization that intends to buy a product or service.”
The RFP document:
In ecommerce marketing, an RFP is a useful tool for standardizing your marketing platform evaluation criteria against a handful of potential vendors. Whether your online store is on Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, or is a fully custom build, if you’re using an RFP to better compare and understand your marketing options, you’re responsible for evaluating:
The beauty of an RFP is that it forces you to clearly articulate exactly what business need you’re trying to address—in clear, actionable language with measurable criteria—so that different vendors can more accurately identify whether their product or service is capable of meeting, or hopefully exceeding, your expectations.
Essentially, you write an RFP in order to provide all the information necessary to attract the potential partner that’s most capable of solving your business problem. But an RFP isn’t appropriate for every situation.
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When selecting a new platform or software vendor, says Jon Palmer, senior product marketing manager at Klaviyo, “RFPs that aren’t well focused on business outcomes are generally not the most efficient use of time or energy.”
Meanwhile, “RFPs you build from scratch can create added unnecessary overhead—largely because they are not good at capturing the various intangibles that are incredibly important in making these decisions,” Palmer explains.
Whether those intangibles are the platform’s ease of use, the vendor’s experience working with companies like yours, or what Palmer calls their “pace of innovation and future growth trajectory,” a typical martech RFP tends to be heavily feature-focused—“which leads to a lot of yes or no responses that lose the nuance of how those features are executed day-to-day,” he explains.
Done wrong, then, an RFP might leave you combing through submissions from vendors that are completely wrong for the job.
But done right, an RFP not only helps you set clear business goals internally—it also helps you communicate them efficiently and accurately to several vendors that have something valuable to offer, so that you can make the most objective determination possible regarding which one you want to partner with.
With that in mind, here are 3 key reasons ecommerce brands use RFPs to evaluate their options for and SMS marketing platforms:
One of the top benefits of the RFP process is the time, money, and resources you save by setting clear parameters and expectations from the top—and holding your internal team members accountable to them.
A well-written RFP can “organize your team and peers around the process and help you with various internal scheduling and stakeholders when meeting with vendors,” Palmer explains.
Seeking assistance and ecommerce solutions beyond the walls of your business has its risks, particularly when it comes to explaining exactly what you need done—and how.
A good RFP helps close gaps in understanding between what your business needs and what a vendor can accomplish, and also allows you to reduce new vendor risk by vetting their practices before agreeing to work with them.
In addition to fostering clear communication with potential technology partners, an RFP “will show that the decision you’ve made is the best one for your business’s overall priorities and help provide these details to vendors in a clear and concise way when you’re going through the assessment,” Palmer explains.
Part of the magic of the RFP process is how it opens your business up to a world of possibilities you may not have been aware of before. It’s a smart way to increase healthy competition, gain a variety of perspectives on the best way to solve your problem, and link up with dream vendors that might otherwise be flying under your radar.
Ironically, that heightened competition is also exactly what makes an RFP document even more necessary.
During the RFP process, the vendors that are vying for your attention are aiming to impress. They’re prepared to give you their shiniest sales pitch.
By asking a standardized set of questions of every vendor, you not only streamline the process of comparison into something more organized and unbiased. You also keep the spotlight on the problems your business is looking to solve—not whatever each vendor thinks is most important, based on their own offering’s biggest selling points.
As Kat Boogaard puts it at Wrike, “the RFP is more than just an ‘ask.’ It should also provide enough details about the project so that the aspiring bidders can provide an accurate estimate of what it would take to finish it. The more accurate the RFP is, the more likely it is to solicit bids that line up with real-world results.”
OK, you’re convinced—an RFP is an easy tool for standardizing evaluation criteria against a handful of marketing platform vendors. But how do you actually put one together?
In order to make sure the product a vendor is offering aligns with your business goals, your RFP should generally consist of two parts:
Here’s a peek at what should appear in each of those sections.
Your first task when writing an RFP is to communicate your business’s story, needs around this particular project or purchase, and what you’re looking for in your next marketing platform. These sections are usually best communicated in a Word doc, Google doc, or PDF.
Palmer outlines several crucial components of the body of an RFP:
This section should include:
This section should include:
This section should include:
In this section, answer questions like:
This section should outline the key hurdles you expect to face during the process of adopting new ecommerce platform marketing technology. For example:
Being honest and transparent about what might go wrong, here, will ensure your vendors enter their proposals with eyes wide open.
In this section, answer questions like:
Be specific, here—it will not only help vendors align their proposals with your needs, but will also make the selection process easier for you and your in-house team.
This section should include:
It can be a “good test,” Palmer says, to build a section into your RFP that explicitly asks each vendor to share recommendations and additional use cases “that could impact their business, how they would implement them alongside the ones already outlined, and why,” he says.
You might ask, “Are there any key topics we left off entirely, and what would those be? Why should we deem them important to our assessment?” Palmer points out. “Then, you can decide if these are relevant or not and provide that feedback along the way.”
Even with the most buttoned-up RFP in the world, selecting a new marketing platform is still a daunting process—and a lot of it comes down to asking the right questions. But with so many moving parts to consider, it’s hard to know where to start.
“At the end of the day, when you’re choosing a technology vendor for a marketing platform, this is a fairly mature space,” Palmer points out. “There are a lot of baseline things that any vendor must be able to execute on.”
To help you get things moving in the right direction, consider these sample questions from a few suggested categories, as well as an example of an requirements section.
Once you’ve finalized your RFP and established the questions you want your vendors to answer, Palmer outlines a typical marketing platform RFP process as follows:
The first step, which ideally begins 8-9 months before you need to make your final decision, involves setting up 2-3 meetings with 5-10 vendors to “test assumptions and iron out what is available in the market,” Palmer says.
In this stage, more is more. There’s no such thing as TMI in the RFP world. Prioritize your questions and requirements from must-haves to nice-to-haves, and be honest about where you have wiggle room. (This will also make it easier to score vendors once proposals start coming in.)
The goal during this preliminary stage is to “vet vendors for inclusion in the RFP,” Palmer says. “You don’t want to waste time with vendors that don’t resemble a fit. It’s not worth the effort.”
Be careful, Palmer cautions—this step “is actually more work than it seems, and is a huge part of initial due diligence. If you do this part right, you can make the RFP process a lot more efficient and less confusing for everyone involved.”
Palmer says 4-5 is a good number of vendors to start with. Inform them that you’re including them in the process and ask them to participate. Be prepared to field questions about the process with key decision makers, both internally and on the vendor side.
Clear communication is key to getting this part right, Palmer emphasizes. Remember: You’re choosing a partner, not just a vendor to execute a transaction with. “Test this potential partnership throughout the process, especially with the late-stage vendors that look like they could be a fit,” Palmer advises.
Compared to the technical questions you’re asking in your actual RFP, the questions you’re asking during this stage constitute more of a vibe check. Palmer suggests asking questions like:
This final stage comes after the submission of proposals. If you have a comprehensive evaluation plan in place prior to the RFP deadline, this step will be much easier. Generally, it involves:
In addition to assessing each proposal based on your pre-established scoring system and reviewing vendor references, Palmer recommends scheduling follow-up presentations and demos with your top choices to “walk through different use cases and functional execution with key stakeholders.”
Some providers, like Klaviyo, will even offer you a sandbox version of the platform, where you can add in your own mock data and test out functionality on your own—giving your team a hands-on opportunity to test the product before buying.
Here are some use cases to inspire you:
And don’t cut ties with the losing vendors until the bitter end. Even after you’ve narrowed it down to the winning vendor, it’s wise to perform a “technical deep dive on integration and proposed architecture to understand the timeline and level of effort for both go live and ongoing support,” Palmer suggests. “There may need to be more than one technical due diligence session.”
Remember the “would you rather” from the beginning of this article? Vendor A can accomplish your top priority as well as several other lower priorities, but only at a shallow depth. Vendor B can accomplish your top priority easily, efficiently, and at a far greater depth, but they can’t accomplish 1-2 of your lower priorities.
According to Palmer—and, hopefully, you, now that you’ve learned what you’ve learned about the RFP process—the choice is clear. “Sure, every vendor says they can do XYZ,” Palmer points out. “But in order of importance, Vendor B will end up making you more successful.”
The reason for that is simple: A master of all is a master of none. Vendor A might technically check all your boxes, but Vendor B has a better handle on what it’ll take to solve your specific business’s biggest problems.
An RFP is, by nature, a formalized approach to a complex, nuanced problem. So “don’t get caught up in the feature list checkboxes,” Palmer advises. Focus, instead, on “business impact tied to the success of the team and your revenues.”
On a similar note: “Try to bet on not getting stuck with a stagnant vendor that will leave you behind in a year or two,” Palmer adds. “Then you’ll have to do the whole thing over again.”
Using an RFP template offers several advantages. It helps ensure consistency and completeness in your RFPs, streamlines workflow, saves time by providing a framework to follow, and ensures that essential information is included. Effective RFP templates also assist in aligning the RFP structure with industry best practices and allow for easier comparison of proposals received.
Yes, RFP templates are great for all types of project management. They can be adapted for different types of projects or industries. While the core structure and sections may remain consistent, you should customize the content and requirements based on the scope of the project or industry standards.
Yes, there can be legal considerations when using an RFP template. It’s important to ensure that the template aligns with your organization’s legal and procurement policies. If necessary, consult with legal or procurement experts to review and modify the template to comply with applicable laws, regulations, and internal requirements. This is especially important with free templates.
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