You’ll probably live with your next learning platform for years. The RFP is where you decide what it has to do. Most LMS RFP templates ask about courses, users, hosting, and price, and they’re right to. Fewer ask whether the platform can show that people have the skills their roles need, which organizations increasingly expect. 

Our LMS RFP template covers both, and this guide walks through every section so the proposals you get back are ones you can actually compare.

TL;DR

• An LMS RFP (request for proposal) is the document that asks shortlisted suppliers how their platform would meet your requirements, timelines and budget.
• Send your RFP for an LMS to between two and five suppliers and give them about four weeks to respond.
• Add skills and capability requirements to the RFP, or you’ll compare suppliers on course delivery and completions only.
• Weight each evaluation criterion by how much it matters to your organisation, rather than scoring every criterion equally.
• Some skills and development platforms run alongside the LMS and HRIS you already have, so skills reporting doesn’t always mean replacing your LMS.

The only LMS RFP template you’ll ever need

As an LMS supplier, there are certain things we need to know, some things we want to know, and many things that just aren’t relevant during the qualifying stage. The RFP is the penultimate step of your LMS buying process, after the business case for an LMS, so it’s not the place for knowledge gaps or misunderstandings to crop up.  A good RFP assumes the potential supplier knows nothing about you, asks a lot of questions about them, and benefits from the careful eye of one document editor.

We’ve seen good and bad RFPs, the crystal clear and the clear as mud, those that contradict themselves and the ones drowning in information overload—meaning we’re not just boasting when we say ours is the only LMS RFP Template you’re ever going to need. With the knowledge and experience of having completed (and won, if you’ll allow the humble brag) many RFPs, this template will invoke thoughtful and illuminating responses from potential suppliers.

Why a good RFP matters

Aside from needlessly complicating an otherwise straightforward process, a bad RFP dilutes brand value for suppliers, sparks administrative delays on your end, and saps money and time from both ends. When the impacts could extend to both you and your potential supplier, are these considerations you have given thought to?

Copying any old RFP template (or worse, blindly fashioning a structure yourself) means you often skip over why you need an RFP in the first place. Without a why, goal or objective, your questions have little meaning and the responses you get even have less, since you have no criteria against which to weigh them. Such an unclear RFP leads to differing supplier interpretations, which in turn gives you varying and potentially incompatible proposals.

With an exhaustive RFP, you’re not searching for LMS suppliers on an ad hoc basis. This would be akin to having an overgrown garden and panic-buying the first lawn mower you see, without comparing prices, brands, reviews, and product specifications. When you’ve got thousands of dollars, hundreds of potential users, future succession planning and a number of dependent projects on the line, a good RFP template is the difference between success and failure.

What’s in an LMS RFP?

LMS RFPs are primarily divided into two sections: About you and about the supplier. The details are unique to you, but the key points you want to hit won’t be all that dissimilar to other organisations seeking an LMS.

About you

Give a little context about your organisation, your business drivers, and the logistics for LMS implementation. Don’t waffle on about your life story, but do detail your current situation, primary challenges and what your goals are. You’ll want to cover:

• Organisation structure
• Purpose of RFP
• Project goals, for eLearning and business objectives
• Criteria for success
• Input data, such as number of active users
• Technical requirements, including scalability, data migration and security
• Critical deadlines
• Expected deployment schedule.

About the supplier

The supplier’s response shouldn’t read like a waffling love letter, but rather a direct and concise reply to all the items and key points you addressed. It’ll need to include:

• Executive summary, including the key points of their solution
• Supplier history, organisation structure, location, team, clients, experience and point of difference
• References and/or case studies
• Pricing.

Their solution

Suppliers need to be able to give you a personalised but succinct plan that addresses the gaps, issues or goals you have outlined. Ensure you ask them to detail the type of support you’ll receive, included and additional costs, and how they will (or won’t) meet your timeframes (and if not, why this is so and why their system will still benefit you).

Skills and capability requirements

Older LMS RFP templates ask suppliers to prove they can deliver courses and report completions, but not whether people have the skills the business needs. Suppliers don’t propose what you haven’t asked for, so our template adds these requirements in its “Skills and Capability” and “Development Planning” sections:

• Role standards: a framework of the skills each role needs at set proficiency levels, which you can adapt or import (such as SFIA or the APS Integrated Leadership System).
• Assessment: self-assessment and manager assessment against the same standard, side by side.
• Evidence: examples of real work against each capability, confirmed by a manager.
• Development plans: plans people build from their own gaps, with on-the-job work, mentoring and coaching as well as courses.
• Linked learning: courses tied to the capabilities they build, with recommendations based on each person’s gaps.
• Skills reporting: gaps and progress over time by person, team, role and capability, as well as completions.
• Integration: works alongside your HRIS and current LMS. \

Ask each supplier to demonstrate these rather than describe them. A “does not meet” answer is useful too, because it tells you early whether you need a different shortlist.

LMS RFP Template

The right LMS RFP shows suppliers and stakeholders you are serious, organized, and you have a dedicated budget. It also ensures you identify a licensing model, pricing and technical specifications that are right for your goals.

Take our LMS RFP Template. There’s little upfront work you have to do to make a good impression; we’ve done that for you. Using our guide, you can create a crystal-clear proposal.

The template has seven tabs, covering:

• User guide
• Company overview
• Conditions of tendering
• Supplier information
• LMS features
• Technical specification
• Pricing guide

And if I don’t use this template?

The primary purpose of an RFP is to communicate your requirements for a project to suppliers who you believe can possibly provide the right solution. This template is designed to establish a clear joint understanding of these requirements, as they will become the baseline for your LMS project. Perhaps most importantly, it also becomes the baseline for an eventual contract and a crucial historical document, should issues arise.

If you find yourself going down the audit trail without a point of reference, you may be caught out with schedule delays and fees related to additional features or contractual changes. You are the boss in this project, not the supplier—we’ve heard horror stories from clients transitioning from other suppliers who walked all over them and dictated their needs to them.

Communicating with LMS suppliers

At this stage of the LMS selection or qualifying process, you should be courting no less than two but no more than five suppliers. (Yes, it’s really that serious.) Any more, and you’re wading through unnecessary paperwork and diminishing your ability to distinguish between solutions; any less, and you’re probably not going to see enough of a difference to compare.

If you want considered responses, you’re looking at a lead time of about four weeks. Remember, as much as you might be looking to get up and running now, a supplier is still working with other clients and conducting their normal business activities. Identify a one- or two-week window in that time when you’ll be available to answer questions to clarify scope or intentions, so neither party is overwhelmed by questions from the other.

As we previously mentioned, assume suppliers know nothing about you when communicating with them. There are things they do know and could glean from their own research, but the safest route is to tell them, in your words, about your needs, your processes and the ideals your organisation stands by. Make clear every little detail, from what type of fonts you want used in documents to specific guidelines surrounding language. We’ve found this is particularly important for government agencies, whether that’s for readability, familiarity or branding reasons.

Why this is important

You’re not writing English literature. You don’t want important information left open to interpretation, because this could lead to an unproductive blame game instead of actual problem-solving. Just as you might expect suppliers to hold your hand throughout implementation, you need to give them all the facts in your RFP to ensure your end solution addresses your gaps or goals.

Low supplier satisfaction will negatively effect your bottom line and potential future relationship. If they find you frustrating, contradictory, or a nuisance, your work may fall to the bottom of their priority list, leaving you with nagging system issues. If you don’t clearly outline your requirements, you might be facing a project relationship full of expensive revisions and delayed timelines.

Evaluating & scoring proposals

The work’s not done once you’ve sent out your RFPs. When suppliers have sent their responses back, it’s time to vet and compare. Your criteria for evaluation and scoring should match the criteria in your RFP. We recommend focusing on these key points when judging the merits of solutions.

Features and functionality

The can’t-live-withouts vs the nice-to-haves, and what the supplier can include as a standard in your contract and what is going to cost you extra.

Price

What’s average across the industry, what’s in your budget, and what your minimum and maximum spend is a deceptively influential factor in the features and support you’ll have access to.

Implementation time

We’ve found many organisations often deem speed of deployment or having the time to learn about a system one of the most decisive considerations in their final choice.

Support

Can the supplier offer you the level of technical support you need, and in the way (i.e. phone, email, ticket system) that works for you?

Skills and capability fit

Check each response against the skills and capability requirements in your RFP, and ask suppliers to demonstrate them with a real role from your organization. You want to see if a platform defines what the role needs, how people are assessed, and how (if at all) development progress is reported—and not just with a completions report.

Legacy

The choice between ‘proven’ solutions and taking a chance on a young company usually comes down to your stakeholders’ values and your preliminary research of the market.

We’ve learned scoring systems, while good for prioritising criteria, lack subjectivity. A linear scoring scale treats all criteria as equally important, when there will no doubt be items in an RFP your organisation values more highly than others. In this case, you should assign a percentage of the total weighted scores to each criterion, based on how important your stakeholders and decision-makers deem it to your organisation, to gain a quantifiable measurement for evaluation.

This is commonly between one and five or one and ten. We recommend creating a scoring matrix before administering your RFPs, so as to include all stakeholders in determining crucial criteria. We’ve found this extremely important for the public sector, where transparency is essential in all workflows, as it sidesteps any concerns of bias between departments with differing priorities.

You may also elect to divide RFPs into sections for key stakeholders to score (for example, you may have a stakeholder from your IT team determine the value of features outlined in a response, while an operations leader oversees implementation discussions). Creating scorecards in a simple table format is the easiest way to carry out this task: divide it into three columns. The first will list criteria/requirements, the second is for the scoring team to input their scores or grades of the response, and the third will indicate the weight of the criterion.

Why this is important

Having consistent criteria across RFPs and scoring matters because the former is the basis for suppliers’ solutions. If you aren’t even judging them based on what you asked them to address, your original RFP is moot.

If you stick to a linear scoring system, too, you might find yourself in a situation where the highest scorer wins in every criterion but price, where they are uncomfortably far out of your budget. In this example, without adjusting to a weighted percentage system, you might feel obliged to go with the second, less suited choice, because price was your most important criterion—and down the line, this could negatively impact employee engagement, system usage and your ROI.

Key takeaways

The LMS RFP is likely already in your L&D arsenal, but even if you think you’ve got it down pat, we recommend taking a second look over it. Have your training needs changed? How about the technology you use? Do you have a new workforce, L&D or business strategy? If your RFP doesn’t reflect your current and future state, then you’ll get misinformed responses from vendors at best, or locked into an ill-fit system at worst.

A good RFP should clearly state what tools, features, functionality, pricing, security requirements and timeframes are necessary to act on learning strategy. If that seems a little overwhelming, an RFP template can help you get the ball rolling in the right direction.

If you’d like to know whether your people have the skills their roles need, Capabilities gives every role a clear standard and shows where each person stands against it. It keeps the work behind each assessment on record, too. Development Plans then gives each person a plan they own for closing their gaps, and Acorn runs alongside your existing LMS and HRIS. See the full package here.

Frequently asked questions

What is an LMS RFP?

An LMS RFP is a request for proposal: a formal document that sets out your organization’s goals and requirements for a learning management system. Shortlisted suppliers respond with their solution, pricing, and timelines. A learning management system RFP works best when every supplier answers the same questions, so you can compare like with like. Its answers also become the basis for your contract.

What’s the difference between an RFI and an RFP for an LMS?

An RFI (request for information) is an early, open question to the market that helps you shortlist. An LMS RFP comes after it and asks a small number of shortlisted suppliers for a detailed proposal against your specific requirements, timelines, and budget. Use an RFI when you’re still working out what’s possible, and an RFP when you know what you need.

Should I include my budget in an LMS RFP?

Yes, include a budget range in your LMS RFP if you can. Suppliers can then propose a solution you can afford, and you’ll get fewer proposals you have to rule out on price alone. If you can’t share a number, ask every supplier to break down their pricing the same way so you can still compare them.

Who should be involved in writing a learning management system RFP?

A learning management system RFP works best with one editor and input from everyone who’ll use or run it. That usually means HR and L&D, IT for security and integration, procurement for the terms, and the budget owner. Bring them in before you write, so the requirements and the weighting reflect what each of them needs.

Do I need to replace my LMS to track skills?

Not always. Some skills and development platforms, like Acorn, run alongside the LMS and HRIS you already have, so you can add skills tracking without replacing anything. If you’re writing an RFP for LMS software mainly to get skills reporting, ask suppliers to price both options side by side.