Request For Information

Summary

The International Mountain Biking Association, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, is seeking a solution partner. This Request for Information seeks Letters of Interest, of about five pages or less, from solution providers, agencies/consultancies, and/or individuals to share their experience, expertise, and qualifications that make them ideal candidates to propose a solution or solution stack for IMBA’s community engagement, CRM, membership, fundraising, and engagement programs.

Raise HECK has conducted a technical and needs assessment for IMBA based on the current state of their technology and future goals. The project description and budget range in this RFI reflect the results of the assessment. Raise HECK is managing this RFI and subsequent RFP for IMBA.

Through this Request for Information (RFI) process, we will select a group of vendors for a follow-up Request for Proposal (RFP), which will include asking you for much more in-depth project plans and budgets. In this initial phase, we're only requesting that you provide a few pages of introduction and case studies so we can familiarize ourselves with the options for potential partners. We are specifically aiming to make it quicker for vendors to respond so that we’re able to get replies from potential partners who wouldn’t otherwise be able to take the time to write a detailed proposal.
 

Timeline

• RFI Issued: June 16, 2025
• Responses Due: July 7, 2025
• Finalists Selected, Contacted, and RFP requested: July 18, 2025
• Receive Proposals, and schedule and present demos: August - early September (detailed timing will be included in the RFP)
• Partner Selected & Contacted: September 19, 2025
• Project Kick-off: 10/1/2025 (Approximate)
• Completion Date: Q2 2026 (Approximate)

Project Description and Budget Range

Introduction: 

Through this project,we intend to identify a core partner to power IMBA’s CRM, community engagement tracking, membership, fundraising, and digital communications programs for both the national organization and IMBA’s 200+ local member organizations (with a goal to grow to 600+ in the next 3 years). IMBA seeks to further its vision of leading a movement of communities building and activating natural surface trail systems, with technology as a key piece of scaling this work.

Background: 

For this RFI, we will briefly describe IMBA’s work in key areas and what technology powers each function.

• Development (Fundraising): major donor and prospecting, grants, stewardship.
  • CiviCRM/Drupal and spreadsheets
• Marketing & Communications: digital fundraising, email marketing, events.
  • CiviCRM/Drupal
• Community Programs organized into three units:
  • IMBA Local: enablement of local member organizations (mostly mountain bike clubs, but open to all trail-oriented outdoor recreation organizations) who become members of IMBA Local with the benefit of membership management and fulfillment, training, software tool resourcing, volunteer management, grants, advocacy, and support.
    • CiviCRM/Drupal, Golden Volunteer, GrantStation, EveryAction (via a partner organization)
  • Trail Solutions a revenue-generating department that plans and designs, builds, and creates signage for trails either for hire by local entities or in partnership (sometimes for hire, sometimes via grants to partially or fully fund). Also implements other services outside of planning, design and construction available to any organization, such as Trail Care School. Has a business development function to identify, pursue, and close business.
    • Spreadsheets and Monday.com
  • Community Progress Shop a cross-departmental team that takes local communities’ self-designations, identifies areas where they need to gain capacity, and helps them achieve those moves toward the eventual goal of becoming a Model Trail Community. For the purposes of these projects, Communities can be considered as organizational records in a CRM. IMBA wants to automatically log, record, and track activities and relationships with communities. 
    Examples of activities and relationships: Did a community receive a grant? Did a Trail Solutions project happen? Is there a local organization(s)? What tier is the organization (internal tiering defined by IMBA)? Did the community complete a self-assessment (e.g. a survey) and what was their score? Who are the key individual relationships: Who is the land manager? Who is the trail champion? Who is the primary municipal contact? Who is the primary contact at IMBA?
    • Spreadsheets and Monday.com
• Challenges: Several factors are limiting IMBA’s ability to scale its work in order to more effectively engage communities to help them level up their trail ecosystems, support local organizations, and obtain a full picture of IMBA’s work in communities from vision to action to trail completion.
  • Technical debt: customization to open source CRM and lack of integrations require manual work. National staff act as technical support for local organizations, individual members and local organizations members.
  • Inability to scale: Customizations and maintenance of solutions are limiting the staff’s ability to act proactively and implement strategic initiatives.
  • No unified view of all of IMBA’s work: no central place where an IMBA staff member can go to see a complete picture of IMBA’s work and touchpoints in communities. Assembling and updating that picture takes conversation and tracking down information from multiple sources each time.
  • Simplify for local organizations: currently not high promoters of technology. Using systems at most basic levels.
  • Offload tech support: IMBA has become de facto tech support for local organizations, which limits time available to train local organizations in other areas

Goals: 

The key goals of this project are, in approximate order of priority, to:

1. Manage workflow & capture interactions for community engagement across IMBA in support of the Community Progress Shop concept ;visualize stages of communities from intake to action to trail completion to eventual end goal of being designated as a ‘Trail Town’ or designated as “Black Diamond Org” or other badges and or designations.
2. Simplify framework for local member organizations to manage and process their members, email marketing to members, lapsed members, and subscribers, manage volunteers and donors, seek grants, and enable local organizations to leverage additional technology independently. Mitigate overhead of serving as technical support for local member organizations, and use IMBA staff time on training to help local organizations professionalize and advocate effectively. We currently obtain names as a part of the agreement for the CRM use so we do want to find a way to develop a template that is set up based on the IMBA model while still obtaining access to local names/data.
3. Provide sufficiently robust digital marketing, development tools, grant tracking, and membership management for IMBA National.
4. Save employees time while managing costs.
5. Easy integration with future tools, e.g. tiered content via learning management system, possibly with paywalled resources.

Audiences:

We have a number of audiences, including:

1. Organizations
   1. Local member organizations, e.g. mountain biking clubs
   2. Grantees
   3. Regulatory agencies
   4. Institutional funders (grant-making entities, corporate donors)
2. Individuals
   1. Individual members of IMBA
   2. Donors and prospects of IMBA
   3. Members of local member organizations
   4. Local stakeholders and community leaders
   5. Decision makers about land and trail access
      1. Legislators (municipal, county, state, federal)
      2. Executives (municipal, county, state, federal)
      3. Land managers (local, state, federal)
      4. Private landowners

Budget:

We envision the budget for this project to be between $75,000-150,000 per year inclusive of both software and ongoing support/maintenance, with a one-time implementation budget of $100,000-200,000. If you think you can successfully complete this project for less, or that the project requires a higher budget, please be explicit as per the question in the What to Submit section below.

Key Project Requirements

Platform Preference. We prefer an all in one platform. If we need to include point solutions, we prefer to include only those that are truly necessary and are easily integrated at the data level with other systems. We will opt for “good enough” from an all in one platform vs. a “best of breed” separate solution. Both proprietary solutions and open source will be considered.

Community Tracking. The ability to track all previously mentioned relationships and activities with a community in a CRM is the highest priority for IMBA. We want to eliminate the double entry we are currently doing to put community-related activities into Monday.com. By having a single CRM to centralize our work, we also want to broaden adoption across the IMBA staff by having a single place to record data, since not all programs currently use our existing CRM. This tracking should include the ability to monitor and measure communities moving through the trail development process in order to report on progress and outcomes.

Back Office CRM Option. If a viable solution exists that would require us to use a back-office CRM with a large suite of point solutions, the integrations for those point solutions will need to lean more towards plug-and-play rather than requiring close technical oversight. Zapier-compatible solutions are okay, custom API programming is not. 

Data Sharing. Data sharing between local organizations and IMBA is a requirement. Thus, a solution for affiliates where the data sharing and roll-up to IMBA is automatic is preferred. Technical support for local organizations should be provided by the software solution directly or by a service bureau partner. If a solution exists where each local organization (200+) would be using a separate database/CRM/digital solution, the data sharing with IMBA would need to be automated and turnkey. 
 

Ease of Use. Ease of use is important for local organizations. Also important for IMBA national is a solution that is sufficiently robust to manage the national organization’s digital engagement program, fundraising, grant tracking, and CRM needs. It’s important to find the right balance between robust and easy to use. While we do not believe the two are mutually exclusive, in practice they have not always gone hand in hand. 

Onboarding and Technical Support. Our goal is to grow our local member organizations from 200+ to 600 in the next three years. In order to scale, we require our solution partner to have a repeatable and scalable onboarding process for new local member organizations. We also require our solution partner or a service bureau to provide technical support options for our local member organizations directly. 

Drupal Website: IMBA’s website is powered by Drupal and is not planned to be replaced. 

Who We Hope to Work With

We welcome Letters of Interest from any software company, consultancy or agency, or individual consultant who is qualified to lead the project described above. To help vendors understand our priorities, we share some of our expectations and preferences as to who we would like to work with below.

• We expect to work with someone who has significant experience in the nonprofit sector with federated or multi-affiliate organizations.
• Experience working with mountain biking clubs, outdoor recreation groups, or trail organizations is desirable but not required.
• We expect to work with a vendor that has significant experience with federated membership models, including data sharing.
• We eagerly welcome LOIs from vendors who have significant BIPOC/ women/ LGBT representation in their leadership team. We expect to work with a vendor who is located in North America.
• We would prefer to work with a single company or firm who can provide all of the services included in this RFI, however; We are open to LOIs from vendors who can provide only part of the services covered as long as they can provide at least 80% of our desired solution.
• We are open to LOIs from entities with many employees, small companies, and individual consultants.

What to Submit

As mentioned above, we are specifically requesting a streamlined Letter of Interest, less than about five pages. Based on these LOIs, we will select a group for much more detailed follow up on the process and budget for our project. We are expecting these LOIs to be much less detailed than a typical proposal.

Please provide the following information:

1. Summary of your background for the project. In a few paragraphs, how can your specific solution, skills, and experience lead you to a successful solution for this project?
2. Three case studies that are particularly relevant to our project. Please provide three case studies of projects, which include a sense of the process that you used to complete the work, and make it clear which parts you (as opposed to a different vendor) were responsible for. Please include at least one case study about enabling a multi-affiliate organization with a membership program.
3. Answer this question: What do you think will be the most challenging aspect of this project?
4. Standard processes. Please provide an overview of one or two of your standard processes that might be particularly useful on this project, with a brief overview of how they might apply
5. Details
   • Website.A link to your website
   • Team bios. A link or separate attachment to view short bios of your leadership team
   • Location. Where in the country/ world is your team primarily based?
   • The percentage of your projects that are within the price range of our project. As mentioned above, we envision the budget for this project to be between $75,000-$150,000/year for software and maintenance, with $100,000-200,000 one-time for implementation.
     • If you feel that range is appropriate to our needs, what approximate percentage of the work you do is on projects of that price range?
     • If you feel that is not the appropriate price range, what would you recommend as a more right-sized price range? Briefly, why is that a more appropriate budget? And then, what approximate percentage of the work you do is on projects of that price range?
   • The percentage of your projects that have centered on enabling multi-affiliate organizations with membership programs.
   • Whether your solution could meet IMBA’s desired timeline to be operational for IMBA by Q2, 2026.

Submission Details

Please send Letters of Interest to Sally Heaven and Charlotte Kresse, Raise HECK, at [email protected] and [email protected] by Monday, July 7, 2025. Questions will be answered via email if they are sent prior to Wednesday, July 2, 2025. No phone calls, please.