When a department decides to leave its registration software, the exit terms in the original contract decide what that costs. Exit terms are easy to overlook in an RFP, so this post looks at what public recreation software RFPs actually ask for, and where contract exit rights could go.
Corte Madera, California publishes its evaluation criteria and weights: project team 20 percent, project understanding and approach 30 percent, scope 25 percent, project management 15 percent, and references 10 percent, for a total of 100 percent. Price is not a scored criterion in that list, and neither are contract terms or data return. (That is one agency; check your own rubric.)
In this RFP the scored criteria cover the vendor's team and its approach to the project, and the written contract is to be negotiated at a later date, using the Town's sample services agreement as a starting point. Exit terms are often negotiated after the award, so consider scoring them up front. If you are still drafting your RFP, our RFP requirements matrix shows where to add it.
An RFP can demand a lot when it chooses to. Rock Island, Illinois requires PCI Level 1 compliance and no stored credit card numbers, and says the system should be designed for high availability with 99.95 percent uptime. It also calls for permission-based access by role, and encryption of all data at rest and in transit. The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board says that if the contractor stores, processes or transmits cardholder data, it will be annually certified as a PCI compliant service provider, and it addresses written breach notice for contractor systems containing cardholder data. For how PCI responsibility splits between you and a vendor, see who owns PCI compliance.
Exit terms are no harder to write than these. They are just less often written.
Rock Island asks bidders to price their proposal in a table with separate lines for an annual subscription fee, implementation, configuration and training, and data migration. There, migration is a priced line on the way in. Consider asking for the same on the way out. For the rest of a quote, see reading a quote past the subscription line.
These are suggestions to raise with your attorney and purchasing office, not legal advice.
Every clause above can be a line in your evaluation rubric instead of a footnote for legal. Give contract and exit terms a weight of your choosing and make bidders answer in the proposal, on the record, before there is a winner. You can also test vendors on it in the demo with our demo scorecard, and plan the move itself with the data migration go-live plan. If you are already weighing a switch, the switching guide covers what to check.
At minimum: a named export format with households, registrations, payments and waivers still linked, a delivery deadline measured in days after termination, and a fixed price for the export agreed before signature. Those are drafting suggestions, not legal advice, so have your attorney review the final language.
Yes. Nothing stops you from asking every bidder to price the export in their proposal. One example: Rock Island's price table lists data migration as its own line.
Add contract and exit terms as a weighted evaluation criterion, the same way you weight cost or references. The weight is your call. Corte Madera's RFP, for example, weights five criteria that total 100 percent, and you can add a sixth.
Yes. Rock Island's RFP requires PCI Level 1 compliance and no stored card numbers, and Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board's RFP expects annual PCI service provider certification where the vendor handles cardholder data.
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