We are inviting proposals to develop a more interactive FI website. Please see the advertisement for the tender, including contact details if you wish to find out more, below:

Title: Development of a website about fatherhood with interactive and community features, integrated into a larger site.

Description: The Fatherhood Institute invites proposals to build a new interactive community area and integrate this and other new elements into an existing website, initially aimed at a professional audience who manage or work in children’s, family and health services, with scope to adapt for other users later. Plus data capture, email management and creation of a CRM database to enable us to support users.

Details: For the existing site, we have built news feed functionality and several user surveys and want to look at ways of incorporating this content.

For the interactive area, our aim is to create an online community where professional users who want to support father-child relationships can share their experiences, post links, videos and documents, discuss issues, and contact other users. This will include many elements:
• Copy and resources from the existing site at http://www.fatherhoodinstitute.org/index.php?id=0&catID=41 and new copy and resources for users (document templates, PDFs, links, photos).
• Registration process and ‘Champion’ sign-up requiring online forms, calculation of survey results, collation of user-generated content, automated emails, automated changes to user status.
• Different user status categories allowing differing actions and access to content. Ability for us to send both manual and automated emails to individual users and defined sets.
• User profiles including user status, reputation based on posting history, user-specified preferences for RSS feeds and email alerts.
• Community pages allowing users to post links, copy, videos, documents.
• Forum allowing discussions among users, seeded discussions, and live chat sessions.
• Ability to tag each piece of content by topic, date etc and to allow user comments and ratings for it.
• Pages for individual users with user information taken from the database, private and public content. Ability for users to message other users, or send emails.
• Group pages with group information taken from the database, member details, and private and public content. An individual with specific status can start a group and invite others to join (cf. Facebook).
• Data capture and management to generate reports on site usage and user behaviour.
• Creation of a customer relationship management (CRM) database to import information from the site and from our existing database.
• Ability to search for users as individuals or groups by local authority, agency and type.

All these elements will need to be modular and transferable so that we can develop other areas of the website for different kinds of user and reuse the functionality. The site should conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0

Costs and timeline: We have done initial technical research and evaluation, and will be doing research and analysis of user needs. Our budget for the remaining work is £25-30,000.

You will be able to build the site within a tight time frame and have experience of building non-commercial websites for a specialised, professional audience and in building the kind of functionality we’ve outlined.

Deadline for receipt of proposals: 10am on Friday 18 December 2009
Interviews: Tuesday 22 December in London
Decision: Thursday 24 December
Build to be completed: 31 March 2010

For a copy of the detailed Request for proposal, email Beck Laxton.