Scheduling and conducting a charrette for the first time can feel overwhelming if you’re not sure where to start. It can also be daunting to write a Request for Proposal (RFP) to solicit proposals for a charrette process.

While the National Charrette Institute provides both training on how to schedule and conduct a charrette, and a RFP Template to help, we can tailor a RFP Co-Writing Workshop for your community to provide a level of support and degree of involvement that will allow you to collaborate with confidence and ease.

One of the main benefits of this type of workshop is that projects that are conceived of and organized collaboratively  enable them to run more smoothly — saving time and money.

The NCI RFP Co-Writing Workshop creates a focused team approach to project management that will guide the project through the inevitable hurdles that it faces on the way to approvals and implementation. Here’s how it works: The project sponsor and partners, such as governing agencies, come together for an intensive start-up meeting.

In this 1.5-2-day meeting, the group completes a series of assessment and organization exercises to plan the project, beginning with high-level guiding principles and ending with a detailed project process roadmap.

The resulting roadmap, or draft charrette plan, identifies how the project will be conducted, including who will be involved and how, a list of base data work and a description of the charrette process and products.

This information can then be used to create a scope of work and estimated budget to guide management of the project, or used to develop a RFP for an upcoming charrette-based project.

The NCI’s support in developing your RFP through this effective method builds cross-agency and partner buy-in and cooperation, ensures that your RFP is informed by the essential viewpoints and – critically – ensures that the budget is aligned with the scope. By developing RFPs that solicit qualified proposals that are easy to compare apples to apples, the proposal review process is eased.

Examples of the RFP Co-Writing Workshop in motion can be found at: RFP Template and NCI Charrette Projects.

If you are interested in the RFP Co-Writing Workshop for your next project, contact Holly Madill at nci@msu.edu.

Call for Charrette Success Stories

If you have conducted a successful charrette in your community, congratulations! The institute would love to hear about it and welcome articles from your experience. Please send an email to Holly Madill with the details.