Five proposals come back. Every vendor checked every box in your requirements table. The committee scores them, the totals land within a few points of each other, and the contract goes to whoever wrote the cleanest narrative. Two years later your front desk is still keying refunds by hand and reconciling deposits in a spreadsheet.
That is not a vendor failure. That is what a feature-list RFP buys: a compliant vendor and the wrong system.
Nobody agrees what to score, and the published rubrics prove it
Four agencies bought the same category of product and weighted it four different ways. Joplin, Missouri put 30 percent of the score on cost. Redmond, Washington put 15 percent on cost and 30 percent on capability. Corte Madera, California scored team, understanding, scope, project management, and references, with no cost criterion at all. The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board published nine criteria and no weights.
Cost weight ranges from 30 percent to zero. There is no industry norm to inherit. Whatever you write becomes the standard for your award, so write it on purpose.
Ask for outcomes you can witness
"Supports online registration" is unscoreable. Every vendor says yes. Rewrite each requirement as a result with a number attached, then make the demo prove it:
- A parent registers two children in one household for three programs, pays once, and your finance system receives one deposit that ties back to three registrations.
- A refund issued at the counter posts to the same revenue account the registration hit, without a journal entry.
- A waiver signed at 11pm on a phone is retrievable by name two years later. Texas, for one, requires liability waivers to be kept three years past the end of the activity, longer if there was an accident. Retention rules vary by state, so use yours.
- A rental request that conflicts with a league practice is blocked at the moment of booking, not discovered by a caller.
Score those. A vendor either does them live or does not.
Copying another agency's spec can disqualify your award
The most common template source for a recreation software RFP is another agency's recreation software RFP. That is exactly how one vendor's feature list spreads across a state, and it carries legal exposure.
If any federal money touches the buy, including LWCF, CDBG, or ARPA dollars, 2 CFR 200.319 requires full and open competition and names restrictive practices, including brand-name specification without an "or equal" allowance. HUD's procurement handbook puts it more plainly. Do not write a manufacturer's specifications into your own, and its worked example is a spec listing dimensions only one manufacturer makes. No brand name appears, and it is still unduly restrictive.
Read your inherited requirements with that lens. A line describing a menu structure or a screen flow is usually one vendor's product, not your need.
Weight the criteria before you see a single proposal
Set weights, publish them, and run a scoring trial against a fake proposal first. If two evaluators score the same paragraph 40 points apart, the criterion is not written yet.
Three references, currently live, with install date and version, contactable without your permission. Itemize pricing into annual subscription, one-time implementation, and one-time data migration, and ask for five years of it. Then hold the committee to the sheet.
If you want the cost side of that sheet built before you draft, RecreationHQ runs a free cost recovery audit that puts your current fees, transaction costs, and registration volume in one place.
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