Next generation Voices of Youth website

Clarifications Q&A December 7, 2017: - We are facing trouble in clicking the "Express Interest" Button. Upon clicking the button, it says to check with "Links" and "Documents" section. However, even after visiting them, we are unable to Express Interest in this bid on the ungm portal. We hope that even if we fail to express interest there, we can officially submit our proposal and relevant documents over the mentioned email id: rfps-doc@unicef.org - Please note that it is not required to express interest through UNGM. Please refer to the previous clarification notes. - We have received the extension for this submission and am hoping to retract what I have submitted to better fit the requirements. How do I go about doing this? - Please notify the receiving party about retracting the submission and please submit your proposal as per Instruction to the Bidders. - Could you please assist to send me the request for proposal for services form. This link too does not work: - Please access the bid documents on the document section on UNGM website.

Clarifications Q&A December, 3, 2017: - Will this platform need to meet GDPR standards? Will there be differences in functionality or user experience for users in GDPR countries versus non-GDPR countries? - UNICEF considers the GDPR to represent best practice in data protection and therefore this platform should be designed and developed consistent with GDPR standards. UNICEF’s recognition of the GDPR as best practice does not constitute an express or implied waiver of its privileges and immunities under international or national law. Our intention is that the same functionality and user experience will be applied for all countries. However, bidders are requested to clarify if this approach is likely to have a significant impact on pricing or other aspects of the design and build of the platform.

Clarifications Q&A December 1, 2017: - The RFP mentions for the proposal to not exceed 20 pages. Are the staff resumes/details, project references, case studies, and company certificates also accounted for in these 20 pages or can those additional documents be annexed. - Additional documents can be annexed but vendors should avoid sending documentation that is not requested. - Also, I seem to be unable to “express interest” using the button on the UNGM.org site. I’m not sure if this is related to the link under the “link” tab, however I also receive an error when I try to open the link. Please advise about this. We are eager to submit a response and if expressing interest is mandatory, I want to make sure we do this. - Please note that there is no need to express interest. Vendors shall submit their proposals as per Instruction to the Bidders in the tender document.

Clarifications Q&A November 30, 2017 GENERAL INFORMATION & PROCESS - What is the composition of the team at Voices of Youth that would be working with and managing the relationship with the chosen vendor for this project? The Youth Engagement Specialist in the Division of Communication will be the main point of contact with the chosen vendor and will be responsible for obtaining feedback and inputs from others. The Voices of Youth team is composed of between 4 and 6 individuals who have various responsibilities related to the site and other complementary initiatives. - What is the allocated budget for this project?? In the event that you are not able to share budget information with vendors, can you tell us if you will be evaluating vendor proposals against an established budget? Or are you are looking for pricing in vendor responses to the RFP to help establish what an appropriate budget should be? This is an open tender. UNICEF is looking for the best offer for the most technically suitable bid. Please refer to Section on evaluation of proposal in the TOR of the tender. -Is there a target launch date for the website? Vendors are asked to submit a proposed realistic deadline for the launch of the site. - When would UNICEF like to kick off the project? UNICEF is ready to kick this project off as soon as possible. - Is there an incumbent vendor that provides website design and/or development services for the current VOY website who will be bidding on this RFP? Not Applicable - The RFP mentions a Round 2 presentation of a creative idea, but the RFP provides a clear set of desired features. Are you looking for vendors to ideate new features for the site to pitch or is this presentation simply a recap of the proposal for discussion? The purpose of the presentation round will be to gain further insight/clarification into the content of the proposal from the vendor. - Are you interested in recommendations by the selected vendor for new functionality that may not be specifically requested in the TOR but would match the strategy? Would the contract model accommodate flexibility to incorporate features that have not yet been identified or scoped? Yes, if vendors would like to suggest new functionalities not included in the TOR but which could help deliver on the objectives of the site, they should do so. Vendors should reflect these in the price proposal clearly and indicate whether they are necessary or optional. - Whether companies from Outside USA can apply for this? (like, from India or Canada) – Yes. - Whether vendors need to come to NY for meetings? – Not mandatory. - If vendor/s can perform the tasks (related to RFP) outside USA? (like, from India or Canada) - Yes - if vendors can submit the proposals via email? - Please refer to Instruction to the Bidders and Special Terms and Provisions in the Bid Document. CURRENT SITE MODERATION, MANAGEMENT, AND PERFORMANCE - How many Admin users are there currently, and how many do you expect there be for the new site? Currently there are 6 admins; however, if we launch subsites or additional languages these will require at least one, but preferably two admins each. We can anticipate an increase to 15-20 admins over the next two years. - What locations/countries generate the most traffic for Voices of Youth? Please refer to Annex F for this information. - Do you have any audience research documented (i.e. user personas - admin, youth and general visitor)? If so, can you share this information? Please refer to Annex F for this information. - Discuss the moderation policy for the site, specifically commenting on a post and forums. All blog submissions are reviewed by the Voices of Youth team before they are published. Comments are automatically published; however certain phrases/words and inclusions of links are automatically flagged and a VOY moderator needs to approve/delete them. - Other than the content approval process that is described in the RFP, what systems or practices are in place at UNICEF for content moderation, policing the site, and reporting abuse? Annex F explains most of the content approval process. Since no content goes immediately live policing the site is fairly simple. Any instances where we are unsure of how to address an issue, we discuss it as a team or escalate the query. Currently, the only way to report abuse is via the info@voicesofyouth.org email address. - Have you ever had any problems with website abuse such as publicly visible spam content or inappropriate posts? If so, what measures did you take to address those issues? Yes, we have experienced this, although rarely publicly. Occasionally we receive spam submissions – some are easy to identify and are deleted from the submission queue and user accounts are blocked. More frequently we receive sponsored content, which can be harder to identify and which we do not accept. We rarely receive highly inappropriate content submissions that appear to be from genuine youth users – if these posts are egregious/trolling we delete them; however, if there is an opportunity to educate and engage a writer we explain to them why their post may be interpreted as hurtful or offensive. For the comment section we have certain words and phrases flagged which automatically hold comments for review. Occasionally, a comment may slip through that is spammy or inappropriate which is why we check the comments multiple times a day. Occasionally we also have to deal with plagarized submissions for which we do not have any automatic system but rather we rely on our experience as community moderators. - Does UNICEF have defined website KPIs or metrics for evaluating the overall health or effectiveness of the site? What website metrics might you want to measure before and after the relaunch of the VOY website to measure project success? UNICEF measures the following metrics for the page: unique traffic, time spent on page, bounce rate, location of visitors; engagement with content (measured by comments). Information about current traffic is available in Annex F. - In the key challenges section, the RFP states that “there are only a few opportunities for engagement”. Can you share a few examples of the types of engagement opportunities that you have envisioned for your next generation website experience? Perhaps based on engaging experiences you’ve found on other websites? We feel that a revamped discussion section could promote engagement by those who are not interested in writing long blogs. We'd also like to drive more discussion on individual posts (as opposed to simply pursuing more post submissions) and we feel that a better homepage design will allow us to draw more attention to the strongest content. We also feel that giving users more options to react to content – by using emojis or stickers – will help drive engagement. BRANDING & DESIGN - Does Voices of Youth have it’s own set of brand guidelines, or are you looking to only use the UNICEF brand guidelines to direct visual design? As per the TOR, we seek a visual design that allows for a colorful and youthful user experience, that follows the guiding design principles of UNICEF digital products (utilizing systems such as Material Design for guidance) but does not necessarily adhere to strict UNICEF brand guidelines. Voices of Youth does not currently have a unique brand guide. - Please describe what design documentation you will be able to provide to the vendor in terms of brand usage and brand style guidelines for VOY/UNICEF/UN There are no recent Voices of Youth brand guidelines; new UNICEF brand guidelines are available and will be shared. Please note as per the RFP, the VOY site is not expected to be fully in line with the UNICEF brand as it needs to attract a different audience and establish itself as a space/community for young people. - Regarding responsive states for mobile, tablet and desktop, is the requirement design comps for all three formats, or simply that the delivered front end code account for all three? Typically, our process involves review of design comps for mobile and desktop, and to work through the tablet states in development – would that approach meet your team’s expectations? Please provide design comps for tablet responsive states for, at least, the home page and one landing or list type page, and one article type page. In our experience, tablet states inherit properties from both desktop and mobile, and often provides a unique challenge in some situations (e.g. navigation). - Regarding atomic design principles, should we refer to this? http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/atomic-web-design/ Yes, this is a great resource. The core purpose for this approach for us being that individual elements may need to be repurposed or reused in the future, in different scenarios or templates, and should be designed with this in mind. - How did UNICEF arrive at the requirement for an Atomic Design methodology for this project? Are there any current challenges that you plan to address by establishing a component-based design system? The core purpose for this approach for us being that individual elements may need to be repurposed or reused in the future, in different scenarios or templates, and should be designed with this in mind. For our content producers, this also helps identify form fields in the CMS with how they render on the front end. This approach also allows us to focus feedback on specific areas that may not effect an overall layout. For example, if we need to focus attention on a CTA or a button, but the overall layout is okay, then it allows us to move forward overall. - Will this be the first time that you go through an Atomic Design process with a vendor? We have taken this approach for the UNICEF.org digital transformation project. FEATURES - Some of the features included in the TOR are labeled “If possible”. Can you suggest how you want potential partners to prioritize among these features to advance a competitive bid? Vendors should be guided by the core objectives of the site and these features should be indicated clearly in the price proposal. Please do not send any pricing indications in the technical proposal. - The most “mobile friendly” moderation experience would be a custom-built CMS admin interface instead of the admin experience built into the CMS. Is a custom CMS interface in scope to meet this “mobile friendly” administrative CMS requirement? Vendors are welcomes to include mobile-friendly custom-built admin CMS as an add-on in their proposal. If included, vendors should add a separate line in their pricing proposal. Please do not send any pricing indications in the technical proposal. It should be noted that admins typically carry out most of their tasks on PCs as this makes it easier to review longer pieces of text. - Should the site have location or language detection to present the site in a certain language for a user on default? This would be a nice to have feature. - Can you provide examples of content that would come from other UNICEF properties? Would technical and strategy coordination be necessary with other UNICEF programs to make those integrations possible? Examples of content from other UNICEF properties could be an article or competition they have published which we would like to draw attention to from our Voices of Youth homepage. There will be no automatic integration, any inclusion of such content would be on a case-by-case basis. - We assume text based content but what other forms of content will be on a blog post? Video? Embedding of social media? What does the site need to accommodate? As per the TOR, Content contributors should be able to submit a blog post with multimedia in a simple and intuitive way. Bloggers want the option to embed multiple media files (photo, video, tweets, gifs etc.) in their posts - similar to Medium and Wordpress. - With the rise of video used by everybody, can you discuss whether video could be a way for users to share and engage? Users should be able to embed their own, or any relevant videos, to their blog posts. In our experience thus far, since the platform is not video-oriented we have not seen impressive engagement with blogs that include video embeds. Additionally, videos developed by young people are not of the same quality as professional content and may not receive huge engagement from audiences unfamiliar with the creator. From a quality control perspective video presents many more challenges than text. However, we do recognize the importance of video and the interest from young people and we currently have tools to help young people make their own videos in our Tools & Resources section. - Are videos required to be hosted locally within the system, or can they be hosted on Youtube or any 3rd party application? Videos should be host on third party applications. Most commonly users embed videos from YouTube, occasionally from Vimeo, so these two sites need to be available as a minimum. FEATURES: COMMENTING & DISCUSSION - Although we understand you would prefer an integrated commenting solution for the next version of the site, are there features of Disqus that have been particularly successful that we should aim to reproduce? What is Disqus good at? Aside from the requirement that users create a separate Disqus account, are there other aspects that do not work well? Good aspects of Disqus: filtering system for spam/certain words/phrases; ability to blacklist or whitelist certain users. Other aspects of Disqus that do not work well: some users already have a Disqus profile which they inadvertently use even if their Voices of Youth profile is designed to protect their identity; Disqus analytics are limited. - Are you interested in building a discussion system into Drupal natively? Or using an existing discussion forum product? The preference is for a native discussion system. - For discussion and commenting we assume there will be a form of user authentication. What system would you like to use? Drupal? 3rd party? A user who is already logged into their VOY account should be automatically able to comment. For users without a Voices of Youth account, there should be a Drupal authentication system. FEATURES: GAMIFICATION - Are there examples of gamification that you admire that would apply to your concept of how it would be used in the Voices of Youth site? We do not have any particular examples; however, the concept could be applied by awarding users points for various activities on the site – reading articles, commenting, creating articles. - Have you already evaluated any third-party services or web applications which provide social and gamification functionality (like, follow, share, points/badges, etc)? No we have not. Vendors should provide a recommendation. - Does UNICEF have any preferences towards building custom gamification features into Drupal vs integrating with a third-party product? No, there are no current preferences and the vendor should motivate the best solution which meets the needs and objectives of the site. - Do you have incentives or motivators for the gamification element of the site? We offer our most active community members various unique opportunities that we do not give to all community members, for examples asking them to write submissions that will be published on other larger websites, or to provide content for special projects. We're also exploring the opportunity to engage some of the most active community members as moderators of comment threads/discussions. FEATURES: SUB-SITES - What is the envisioned relationship between the main site and the potential local sites? For example, should a post published on a local site automatically be included on the main site? Only the best, most interesting content from the subsites will be considered for surfacing/including on the main global site. There should be no automatic inclusion as content is likely to be in different languages, and content for global audiences may require additional editing in some cases. - The RFP describes the four required languages as Ar/En/Fr/SP. The “LOCAL SUB-SITES” functionality describes a requirement for up to two languages and lists Khmer as an example for Cambodia. Please clarify if there are any differences in requirements between the main site and the local sub-sites in terms of multilingual content management and user language options. On any given sub-site the user should be able to use the site, including the content management side, in either of the two languages of the site. All translations will be provided by UNICEF. Please note that currently, there are no specific sub-sites planned. TECHNOLOGY & HOSTING - Could you please specify the Acquia account level? We presume it is their “enterprise” level, as only the “enterprise” level supports the ability to customize to the Solr faceted search feature. UNICEF has Elite subscription type, which is the highest level of subscription. - Does the hosting architecture include a CDN? No; UNICEF uses Akamai CDN for www.unicef.org , but no CDN for other Acquia hosted domains - Could you please elaborate on the included components of your Acquia service package that could potentially be employed in the site? For example, does your package include Site Factory, Lift or Journey? UNICEF is currently using Acquia Cloud Enterprise (ACE) for MVP sites, which will be soon moved to Acquia Cloud Site Factory (ACSF) env. Meaning, once migrated, based of the knowledge we have today, we no longer plan to continue with ACE. If VOY site is completely different, and will require a separate codebase, then the option would to have (additional funds) required Acquia subscription type based on VOY website requirements. - To confirm, the login (both users and admins) for Voices of Youth does not need to share authentication with any other UNICEF website, and both admins and users will be asked to create new accounts when the site launches? Correct. - Do you have a specific technical solution in mind for sending outbound transactional email from the system? Vendors should suggest a specific technical solution with a brief motivation explain why. - We recommend integrating a “transactional email” service for sending out emails, with possibility to perform “marketing automation” to further engage the users via emails. Does Voice of Youth have an account on MailChimp/Mandrill? If not, how many users are you anticipating to have until 1 year of launch – so we can quote it? Voices of Youth does not currently have any such an account. Currently we have apx. 4,500 active users who are regularly logging in. However, since many users submit multiple blogs posts, we often need to communicate with users more than once. - Will the taxonomy be provided in all languages? Yes, in all the current website languages: English, French, Spanish and Arabic. - Discuss any technological security requirements. As per the TOR, please refer to the annexes for the UNICEF Web Security Policy and Security Recommendations Checklist. - Confirm that a content delivery network is in place to handle site loading and optimization of the platform. UNICEF uses Akamai CDN for www.unicef.org , however there is no CDN for other Acquia hosted domains. - How much discovery do you expect the vendor to do? Discovery should be guided by the needs of the project. However, the scope of the project does not allow for an extensive Discovery process and the Voices of Youth team has already consulted numerous stakeholders in the development of the TOR. - Could you detail what aspects of the site will be only accessible through login, if any and what aspects are for the public? When a user logs in they are able to see their draft content, submit a new post, see messages/feedback from the administrators, see statistics on the performance of their posts. Published posts, comments, reactions, and a user's badges (or other forms of gamification) are visible to the public. - Regarding Google Tag Manager support, would you like vendors responding to the RFP to include any strategy or technical consulting associated with Tag Management configuration? (e.g. the configuration triggers, variables, and/or or data layer properties for custom tracking) Vendors are welcomes to include Google Tag Manager Support services as an add-on in their proposal. If included, vendors should add a separate line in their pricing proposal. Please do not send any pricing indications in the technical proposal. MIGRATION - We understand that the migration is out of scope. Can you elaborate (for project management understanding) on whether you’ll have ‘fresh content/user submissions” to launch the new site with? Or will you migrate the old user’s submission to the new site? As we near site completion we will request some of our active users to hold off on publishing their new content on the current site and keep for the new site. We also plan to migrate some of the best performing content from the old site to the new site. - An important part of SEO, is the retention of old indexed links. Do you require us to handle the redirection of old links to new ones? Or are you going to handle this as part of the migration internally or through third-party? This most likely will be a joint effort, we might need the vendor’s expertise yet execution might be done internally. Further exploration will be required.