New Writing North call to tender: Website
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1. Who we are:
New Writing North is the development agency for creative writing and reading in the North of England and an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation. We work in partnership with regional and national partners to produce a range of literary and performance activities including flagship projects such as the Northern Writers’ Awards, Cuckoo Young Writers, the Gordon Burn Prize and Durham Book Festival. We specialise in developing and investing in writers of all ages and act as a dynamic broker between writers, producers, publishers and broadcasters across the creative industries. As well as our main company website, newwritingnorth.com we have websites for a number of other projects. The most recently updated are for Durham Book Festival and the Cuckoo Young Writers.
2. The Brief
newwritingnorth.com acts as a portal to all of the work of the company and links to our other project websites. It is the place where writers and funders and supporters find out about our work, our engagement projects and the site the writers entering work for projects use.
Content needs:
• To create an engaging and attractive gateway to our projects and family of sites
• To have clearer, more engaging information for writers and partners
• To create a platform for blogging by our writers and partners, as well as news and events from the literary world in a rolling format
• To increase traffic to our work and to increase the amount of time users spend on the site and our family of sites
• To focus our social media, showing posts from all of our accounts—Facebook, Twitter, SoundCloud, YouTube, Vimeo—in one view
• To have an efficient archiving system for out of date pages.
Technical needs:
• To support the implementation of a new CRM system which will support writers and NWN to manage their data and the submission of work.
• To track usage via Google Analytics to help us better understand our audience interactions
• Mobile friendly and meeting and excelling all disability and access requirements.
• Ideally, we would like to build the site using WordPress.
Creative design:
We want the new website to be clean, easy to read, visually interesting, with videos, pictures and short text and a clean banner for easy navigation.
Corporate branding:
The site will need to work with our visual brand guidelines, which are being put out to tender concurrently with this brief. We welcome applications from organisations and/or partnerships that would like to apply for both commissions.
Navigation:
Our proposed navigation is set out below, but we are open to alternative ideas.
All sections (except ‘Home’) would feature a ‘host page’, with a tiled view of images with mouseover descriptions acting as links to sub pages. Sub pages are to feature static text with the option to add ‘Latest news’ module to pull content from ‘Features’ that relates to specific sub-page:
• HOME—A tiled view, with images acting as links to 3 temporary features (content pulled from ‘Features’); 3 featured projects and 3 featured writers’ resources.
• ABOUT US—Feature sub-pages such as ‘Who we are’, ‘What we do’ etc.
• PROJECTS—Our projects, which feed content of featured projects on the home page.
• WRITERS’ RESOURCES—‘How to’ guides and case studies, feeding content for 3 featured writers’ resources on home page.
• FEATURES—A hub for news, events and blogs with a rolling feed from all, also linking to a social media page, featuring all our accounts’ posts in the same vein as voyager.io
• DONATE—Static page with simple, engaging links to our campaigns allowing for future plans to integrate with CRM
• PUBLICATIONS—A shop for our publications, linking to PayPal, allowing for possible future integration with CRM.
• SUBMIT—A hub for people to submit to competitions, apply for jobs, sign up for newsletters. Again, this should be kept simple, allowing for future integration with CRM.
• BOARD – a private area of the site for board members to access papers and information.
Managing our content:
• A ‘Features hub’ with news, events and blog posts with an automatic archive.
• A module allowing each post to have a category to automatically populate content on other pages. We would like to be able to embed this module on our other websites too, allowing for posting from one source for a number of pages.
Hosting:
We welcome proposals that include proposals for hosting arrangements.
Newsletter
We currently produce a bi-weekly newsletter using Campaign Monitor, so we would like to have a flexible newsletter template designed in conjunction with the new site. We are interested in proposals that would allow us to automatically populate the newsletter with content from the site.
3. Timeline and Delivery
Commission awarded: 1 March 2016 Designs confirmed: 1 April 2016 Site launches: 1 June 2016.
4. PROJECT MANAGEMENT
4.1 Meetings and communication
Consultants will be expected to outline how they will manage the design and implementation of the project and the delivery to New Writing North.
Project Management Group
Claire Malcolm, Chief Executive Rhys Bethell, Digital and Data Manager Laura Fraine, Marketing and Communications Manager
5. Procurement
Submitting a proposal:
The consultant should supply the following information:
1. Portfolio of relevant work.
2. Fixed price quotation for carrying out this work plus day rates for any additional work requested by the client.
3. Information on the availability of the consultant (s) to undertake this work between March and May 2016.
4. CV for the proposed consultant (s) who will personally deliver the project that should Include details of their specific experience and expertise of the type required to deliver this project
5. Proposal and methodology (including timetable) for carrying out the work
6. (Max 3 x A4 pages), to include: Anticipated programme of work that identifies key stages and deliverables
7. Contact details for 2 references from the last 2 years of relevant work experience.
Submission scoring
Applications for this work will be scored on the following criteria:
Quality of design ideas Examples / experience provided of similar types of work undertaken Quality of the proposal and methodology Value for money
Deadline for submissions: 12 noon, Friday 19 February 2016
Proposals should be emailed to Laura Fraine [email protected]. Any queries in advance of submission can also be made to this contact by email or by phone on 0191 204 8850.
You may download a copy of the above brief as a PDF here. To view other briefs that New Writing North have put out to tender, please go to our News section.